As part of my project to read old Hugo winners and related books, I've also been reading the complete Philip K. Dick short stories; this year that brings me to the fourth of its five volumes, which covers stories published from 1955 to 1964. (The stories are collected in order of composition, though, so it actually overlaps with volume three.) None of these stories were ever Hugo finalists, though notably, one of the stories collected here takes place at a Worldcon! This volume was originally published under the title of The Days of Perky Pat, but when the Steven Spielberg film adaptation came out, it was retitled Minority Report.
Previous volumes of this series covered just two to three years of publication time; this one covers a whole decade, indicating a drop-off in how many short stories Dick wrote due to, I believe, his novel-writing career taking off. Perhaps thanks to that, this volume has the highest hit rate of any of these I've read before. I'll just give an overview of some of my favorites and other thoughts here.
The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Four: Minority Report |
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Collection published: 2000 Contents originally published: 1955-64 Acquired: August 2025 Read: September 2025 |
To be honest, I didn't like the actual story of "Stand-By" very much, but I was tickled by its central conceit: in a future where a computer is the impartial President of the United States, as a concession to the unions over the fact that a human job had been taken by a machine, there'd be a stand-by president, a human being whose job is to sit around just in case the computer fails.
As the title of my edition indicates, the book contains "The Minority Report," a masterpiece of time travel fiction, and the only short story by Philip K. Dick I'd read before embarking on this project back in 2022. It's very cleverly plotted, and the mechanics of how precognition works and what the "minority report" actually is and what the main character chooses to do in the end are all much much more interesting and thought-provoking than in the mediocre Steven Spielberg film. It was interesting to learn that "The Minority Report" was just one of several stories about the mechanics of precognition; it's also the basis of "Recall Mechanism," where a psychiatrist who thinks he's uncovering a patient's suppressed past trauma ends up realizing it's their suppressed future trauma.
I wanted to like "What the Dead Men Say," whose opening premise is about a world where the dead can persist in a half-life; people can visit facilities to wake them and ask for their advice. This would make a great tie-in to my ongoing teaching about "technologies of immortality"... except that the story is barely about that idea! (Dick also used this idea in his 1969 novel Ubik, but again the story isn't really about it.) It's a decent story, but it has a rushed ending.
I didn't particularly get much out of "The Days of Perky Pat," but Dick's reflection on it in his notes was fascinating; the story comes out of his aversion to Barbies. Why are kids playing with adult dolls? Surely adults should be!
I really enjoyed "Oh, to Be a Blobel!", Dick's weird satire on how war changes people and societies—complete with an AI therapist. An Earth soldier infiltrated the enemy Blobels, and so had metamorphose into one, a blobby, protean life-form... and now that the war is over, he can't control and keeps doing it, as do many other vets, ruining his chance of reintegrating into society. The psychiatrist hooks him up with a Blobel who can't control her transformations into a human, and the story explores the ups and downs of their odd relationship, as well as his growing self-loathing over what he's become. Great sf take on the consequences of war.
My favorite story, though, was "Waterspider." In this story's future time, they believe that twentieth-century sf writers were precogs who could genuinely see the future; Dick himself is hailed for his prediction of World War III in "Second Variety." The future people need a precog, so on the basis of a story they read, they travel back in time to abduct Poul Anderson! I often hate "meta," self-indulgent stuff like this (David Gerrold wrote a very bad pastiche of Dick along these lines in "Jellyfish," which I will forever hold against him), but this story is genuinely hilarious and has a very clever time-travel twist; I loved it. Lots of good time travel stuff; I couldn't believe how brazen Dick was with Anderson as a character! "Orpheus with Clay Feet" is similar, if not quite as good, but still very fun—and gets quite weirdly meta by the end. These stories point toward Dick's increasing interest in the barrier between fiction and reality we see in novels like The Man in the High Castle (1962) and VALIS (1981).
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: Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
