The Father-Thing: The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume 3
by Philip K. Dick
The third volume of The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick collects shorts he wrote in 1953 and 1954, which were published from 1953 to 1959; my edition is called The Father-Thing but it has also been published under the titles Second Variety (also used as the title of the second volume, confusingly) and Upon the Dull Earth. I had been collecting the 1999 Gollancz editions of this series, but I wasn't able to find one of volume 3 for a reasonable price, so I settled for a 1990 Grafton edition instead—now my collection won't match!
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Collection published: 1990 Contents originally published: 1953-59 Acquired: August 2024 Read: September 2024 |
I found this less interesting than I remember the first two volumes being. There are a lot of stories here about that bugaboo of 1950s science fiction, the "evolutionary throw-forward," the super-advanced human "evolving" in our midst. It's a theme that's largely vanished from contemporary sf, and I think it's pretty much evolutionary nonsense—at the very least, even if it could be plausible, that work is rarely done. To his credit, Dick often attempts to undermine this idea, as he lays out in his notes on "The Golden Man," and this one I did enjoy; like Wells's The Time Machine, it understands that evolution is not a teleology, that to be "more evolved" doesn't mean "more advanced" but only "more capable of reproducing within a particular niche." But so many of the other stories go with this theme in various ways, and I quickly came to find it tedious.
I have previously opined that the thing I find most interesting about Dick as a writer is the way he captures the alienation of modern life; unfortunately, there's not a lot of that in these tales of throw-forwards, time travel, and galactic war. My favorite stories were "The Hanging Stranger," "The Eyes Have It," "Sales Pitch," and "Foster, You're Dead." "The Hanging Stranger" really captures that classic Dick feeling of alienation, particularly in its early stages, when the main character realizes there's a dead body hanging in the town square... and no one thinks it's weird but him. What happened? Why? How did everyone around him suddenly become a terrible person? I wish this part had been drawn out more but it's still an effective story.
Both "Sales Pitch" and "Foster, You're Dead" hit the idea of consumerism gone horribly wrong that you get from a lot of Dick's best stuff. The surreal robot in "Sales Pitch" that goes around destroying the protagonists' home as a demonstration (and they still purchase one!) is great; I also really liked the premise of "Foster," where salesmen go around selling nuclear bomb shelters, and buying one is seen as a sign of great patriotism. If you can't afford to buy one and the war comes... well, too bad! Great satire on the military-industrial complex.
"The Eyes Have It" is a simple tale, but a good one—probably technically not sf at all, but commenting on the way that sf takes metaphorical language and literalizes it. It would be fun to teach, I think.
Overall, though, I'm hoping the next volume (which coincides with the part of Dick's career where his novel writing took off) contains more of what I like about his work.
I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus
other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
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