Harlan Ellison, Dangerous Visions (anthology, 1967)

Like any fan of print sf, I am familiar with the long saga of the never-printed third Dangerous Visions anthology from Harlan Ellison. It was finally released last year, alongside new editions of the first two volumes. Though I've read some of the stories from Dangerous Visions in other collections (a couple were reprinted in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, for example), I'd never actually read them, so I asked for (and received) the whole set for my birthday this year.

Dangerous Visions
edited by Harlan Ellison

Originally published: 1967
Acquired: July 2025
Read: October 2025

I will say that the book gets off to a rough start, because it has four forewords and three introductions. A full seven things to read, totally forty pages, before you even get to a story! Well, no, because then each story has its own introduction from Ellison, so you have another four pages to go before you get to the first story. Geeze. I get that each new edition presumably needed new stuff to justify its existence, but it's just too much to slog through, and a bit too self-congratulatory on the whole. Seven introductions or forewords, really!?

Like any anthology, you are going to find good stories here and bad ones. Though there are some very good ones, I didn't find the hit rate here as high I would have liked—or would have expected, given the reputation of the book. Many are gratuitous in some way, pushing "boundaries" I suppose, but not saying anything interesting. I thought the duo about the Jack the Ripper, Robert Bloch's "A Toy for Juliette" and Ellison's own "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World," were particularly uninteresting for example. Perhaps the most disappointing was "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" by Theodore Sturgeon, which has a great title, and starts very strongly with some fun meta genre stuff, but fifty pages later is inexplicably still going on.

Still, there was some good stuff. Stories I particularly enjoyed included "The Day after the Day the Martians Came" by Frederick Pohl, a very well-written and grounded story about how the discovery of aliens might affect our society; "The Doll-House" by James Cross, a surprisingly successful cautionary tale about getting greedy with prophecy; and "Sex and/or Mr. Morrison" by Carol Emshwiller, a very weird but captivating story. Also of note, though I didn't love the story itself, is Larry Niven's "The Jigsaw Man," a cautionary tale about how far people will go for immortality.

One of the very best was, not surprisingly, by Philip K. Dick; I've been reading my way through his collected short stories, but I haven't got to "Faith of Our Fathers" yet, and it's a particularly potent distillation of some of his most common themes: the need for conformity and the inescapable feeling that it's all bullshit underneath. My other favorite was one of the rereads, "Aye, and Gomorrah..." by Samuel R. Delany, which is sort of a queer rewrite of Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain." A great story about sexual desires and the self-loathing that can come with them.

Hugos Side-Step: The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Four

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
by Philip K. Dick

Collection published: 2000
Contents originally published: 1955-64
Acquired: August 2025
Read: September 2025

You can see Dick's emerging interest in the figure of the media celebrity who controls the thoughts of the populace, a figure who would be a key character in some of his later novels, particularly Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974); here, they pop up in "The Mold of Yancy" (based on Eisenhower, according to Dick's note), "If There Were No Benny Cemoli," "Novelty Act" (where the First Lady controls America, and the President is selected on the basis of who she'd most like to be married to), and the linked pair of "Stand-By" and "What'll We Do with Ragland Park?", where a literal clown with a news broadcast runs for President and only loses thanks to dirty tricks by his opponents. Dick was not exactly right about which media figures would dominate in the future (I don't think newsreaders or variety show hosts carry the cachet now they did in the 1950s and '60s!), but right about our culture's increasing parasocial interest in hollow celebrities. Give me a Philip K. Dick story about TikTok, please.

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

Five Subsequent Very Good Short Stories I've Read Recently

The fourth in an intermittent series.

"The Commuter" by Philip K. Dick

"We don't have any service to Macon Heights." 

Over the last few years, I've been working my way through the short stories of Philip K. Dick. Many of them are justly praised, but this is probably my favorite of the three volumes I've read so far; originally published in 1953, the story is collected in volume two of the Gollancz Collected Short Stories. Above I've linked to it on a not-at-all dubious site.

Like Dick's best stories, it takes place in the real world with a sense of unreality creeping up on you. In this case, a guy who sells tickets to railway commuters has someone ask for a ticket to a suburb that doesn't exist... or does it? It's a simple story, I suppose, but effectively done, Dick doing what really only he could do.

"Born with the Dead" by Robert Silverberg

She turns to him and their eyes meet and he touches her and they make love in the fashion of the deads.

I read this as a potential story for my class on life extension in science fiction. It's about a future society where people who die get a second life—but they want nothing to do with those who they knew in their first life. The protagonist is a man who can't move on when the woman he loves dies and is reborn. Originally published in 1974, but unfortunately, there seems to be no online copy of it that I can fine, legal or even illegal. I read it by borrowing The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Four from the library, but you can see on ISFDB that it's been anthologized a lot, including in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Four, which I do own, so I don't know why I didn't just read it there. I ended up not assigning it in my class; it's very good, but at seventy pages a bit too long compared to the amount the social issues we were interested in actually turned up.

Anyway, I really liked it. Silverberg is a writer I've read very little of but almost always enjoy when I do. This story is very creepy in its depiction of the ethos of the new dead, and it does that doubling thing I love so much in science fiction: it's both about a weird new society and it's about the world that we live in, the protagonist's inability to move on from his dead wife being a literalized metaphor for when we can't move on from a dead relationship... but man, it is a creepy and disturbing story on top of all that. Good stuff.

"Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole" by Isabel J. Kim

This sentiment made the Omelans kind of upset. They pointed out that Omelas was a better place to live than most other places because at least you knew the load-bearing suffering child suffered for a reason, as opposed to all the other kids who were suffering for no reason. Out there, kids had their arms ripped off while they were working in chicken processing plants, kids were left in baby boxes, and kids lived in perfect quiet misery with one parent who was an alcoholic and another parent who beat them. In Omelas, there were only good parents and no child suffered except the single one who did. How dare you say shit about our fair city and our single child, when you won’t even help your own.

You've probably read Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," the justly famous thought experiment. Courtesy of Clarkesworld, this is a gonzo over-the-top reaction to it, about people trying to solve the problem by just killing the kid. There have been a number of Omelas responses and riffs over the years, but this one surely has the most jokes. I nominated it for the 2025 Hugo Awards; based on the buzz, I'd wager it has a good chance of being on the ballot.

"Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU" by Carmen Maria Machado

“Sophomore Jinx”: The second time the basketball team covered up a murder, the coach decided that he’d finally had enough.

I discovered this story when I was on my hermit-crab story kick last year; it was recommended to me on Reddit. The story is written in the form of a Law & Order SVU episode guide. It's very effective; I've never seen SVU and so at first the descriptions all came across as perfectly plausible summaries of episodes. But as you go on, they get increasingly weird and increasing creepy. Between the lines, a bizarre story of doubles and duplicates, of violence and crime, emerges. It will take you a while to read, and I don't recommend trying to plow though all twelve seasons in one sitting, but it's worth spending some time with it.

"If We Make It through This Alive" by A. T. Greenblatt

And as terrifying as the Mississippi River was, Fern knows it’s the West that kills the most teams.

This story was originally published in Slate, as part of its "Future Tense Fiction" series; I of course read it in a Best Science Fiction of the Year volume from Neil Clarke (number 8, which I'm still working my way through). It's set in the future, after some kind of climate apocalypse. Infrastructure has largely collapsed and nature is taking back America's transportation networks. The three protagonists are a team of racers, competing to make the dangerous trip from East Coast to West and hopefully win themselves new lives in the process. Beautifully told, in terms of characters, prose, world, and theme. As is often the case, I found myself wishing I'd read it at the time it came out; I probably would have ranked it over anything on the year's Hugo Award for Best Short Story ballot (other than "Rabbit Test").

Hugos Side-Step: The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume 3

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!

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

Hugos Side-Step: The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Two

The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Two: Second Variety
by Philip K. Dick

The second volume of Philip K. Dick's complete short stories has been variously published under the titles Second Variety, We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (not actually included in the 1999 Gollancz edition I have, and confusingly also the title of volume five in the Gollancz editions), and Adjustment Team, and contains stories originally published from 1953 to '55 (the collections overlap in publication date a little bit because they are collected in sequence of composition). I'm reading it as part of my project of reading old Hugo winners and related books; it's a "related book" on the grounds that The Man in the High Castle won the 1963 Hugo and I liked it enough that I've kept going with Dick's stuff since.

Collection published: 1999
Contents originally published: 1953-55
Acquired and read: November 2023

I didn't find this quite as strong as the first volume. There are a lot of fantasy stories in this one, which are less to my taste, and a few too many stories where some spooky happens at the end and then the story stops, also a few too many stories about people exploring space. Which is usually my favorite subgenre of sf, but not one that plays to Dick's strengths. Some are undermined by seventy years of subsequent science fiction: "Second Variety" could be great, but if you've read later stuff, or even just another stuff by Dick, you'll see the twist coming. A similar complaint can be lodged at some of the time travel stuff here. Some of the stories have good concepts but don't totally convince on the worldbuilding, like one about a father in a world where robots do the childrearing... only he's somehow never heard of this dramatic change in social norms, or another about robots that are discriminating against humans, but ends up making everything too easy for a human to push against it.

That said, when Dick hits, he scores. There's some good satire of military imperialism in "Some Kind of Life," where every year some new excuse is thought of for good Terrans to go off to war—for the benefit of the Earth economy, of course. "The World She Wanted" is a weird story about someone convinced she can arrange the world the way she wants... and maybe she really can! "Breakfast at Twilight" is a neat glimpse of an ordinary suburban family suddenly plunged into a world at war. "Human Is" is a little bit predictable but effective all the same, about a man who may have been replaced by an alien. Dick loves this theme, of course; "Human Is" focuses on a wife uncertain about her husband but there's another where the replaced person themself is uncertain. On slightly similar lines, there's "Small Town" about a guy who obsessively builds a model of the town he lives in in his house's basement, taking out his dissatisfaction with his real life on the model...

My favorite here, though, was "The Commuter," where the main character begins slipping into another world, a world where a commuter town was built in the suburbs that never existed in his own. Like Dick's best stories, it captures the unease and uncertainty of modern life.

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: ...And Call Me Conrad by Roger Zelazny

Hugos Side-Step: The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume One

The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume One: Beyond Lies the Wub
by Philip K. Dick

So when I enjoy a book by a winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, I tend to seek out other work by the same writer; that led to me supplementing the winner for 1963, The Man in the High Castle, with twelve other novels by Philip K. Dick. My feeling was at that point that I had probably read all of Dick's worthy novels... but I remained curious about his short fiction, of which I had read very little. Conveniently, all of his stories are available in five cheap mass-market paperbacks from Gollancz, so I decided to add them on as occasional supplements to my Hugo journey, timing things so that I would read the collection with "Faith of the Fathers," which was a finalist for Best Novelette in 1967, alongside the 1967 winner for Best Novel. So that means I started last year with the first volume of The Collected Short Stories, which contains Dick's short fiction originally published from 1952 to 1954, sorted in order of original composition. The Gollancz edition titles this volume Beyond Lies the Wub, but (mostly) the same set of stories have been released by other publishers under the titles The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford, Paycheck, and The King of the Elves. (It's not at all confusing.)

Collection published: 1999
Contents originally published: 1952-54
Acquired: October 2022
Read: November 2022

There's a lot in here: twenty-five stories across almost four hundred pages in not very large print. If you've read Philip K. Dick before, you have some idea of what to expect, but this material isn't consistently like the weirdness of his 1960s novels. It's not atypical 1950s science fiction: weird ideas explored, but too often the weird idea itself seems to be the point, and the story doesn't have much of interest to say. The very first story, "Stability," is a good example of this. On the other hand, I think the stories—once you get past the first few, which are perhaps a little on the bumpy side—are always fairly well told, in Dick's typical sharp but matter-of-fact prose style that pulls you in. "The Crystal Crypt" is one of these: it's a kind of Campbellian/Asimovian puzzle story, but it's a good one. Or, say, "The Preserving Machine": a weird idea explained, then undermined at the last moment. Some might make you roll your eyes a bit, like the twist endings of "The Builder" or "Prize Ship," but you know, Dick can still make it work. I did have good fun with "The Indefatigable Frog," where a group of scientists test Zeno's paradox by shrinking themselves smaller and smaller as they try to cross through a tube.

There's a lot more people zipping around interstellar space on starships than you would expect from Dick's most famous novels, which tend to be his Earthbound (or at least solar systembound) ones. "Mr. Spaceship," about living spaceships trying to find an end to war, is like this. "The Infinities," about hyper-evolving humans is a cheeseball example of an idea that doesn't really make any scientific sense. But at its best, the interstellar backdrop is just a backstory, largely irrelevant, for whatever weird story Dick wants to tell in the foreground, such as in "Colony," about people going paranoid as their objects are seemingly plotting against them.

Though there are occasional glimpses of it, we don't get much of what Dick's best novels reveal as his strength: people dealing with the bullshit and the weirdness of seemingly ordinary life. But there are fragments of this theme in stories like "The Little Movement" (about living toys) and "The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford" (about living shoes). I liked "Nanny," about mechanical nannies who fight each other, and the only choice you have as a parent is just to buy a bigger and stronger mechanical nanny than the other families, so that yours can win any fights! I also liked "The King of the Elves" a lot, about an ordinary guy who becomes just what the title promises.

There's a lot of time travel here, often dealing with predestination paradoxes or some other kind of twist, the kind of stuff that these days you perhaps can't move without running into, especially post–Steven Moffat's Doctor Who, but in those days must have been much more original. "Meddler," where people go into the future to find out why humanity is doomed and thus doom humanity, is a good example of this, and so is "The Skull," about a man who travels back in time to kill a dissident but discovers something unexpected about him, but the best of them is surely "Paycheck," where a man quits his job, loses his memory, and then receives the exact seven items he needs to carry out a plan he doesn't remember devising; all of the items seem like worthless junk, but each one proves handy at the exact right moment.

There are a number of stories about apocalypses, on both Earth and elsewhere: "The Great C," "The Gun," and so on. The one that stuck out to me the most, though, was "The Defenders," about people living in underground bunkers because the surface of the Earth has been rendered uninhabitable... only there's a bit of a twist that will be familiar to anyone who's ever seen the 1967-68 Doctor Who serial The Enemy of the World! Dick expanded "The Defenders" into the novel The Penultimate Truth in 1964, and I have to imagine David Whittaker had read it. Hopefully whoever does the Doctor Who Magazine "Fact of Fiction" for Enemy of the World doesn't miss this.

Dick at his best is both dark and humorous; I enjoyed "Beyond Lies the Wub," about a space crew who brings an animal on board to eat... only to discover that it's sapient, and even more besides.

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 Wanderer by Fritz Leiber

Hugos Side-Step: The VALIS Trilogy by Philip K. Dick

VALIS and Later Novels by Philip K. Dick: A Maze of Death / VALIS / The Divine Invasion / The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
edited by Jonathan Lethem

So every time I vote in the Hugo Awards, I read the oldest Hugo-winning novel I haven't already read. If I like it, I tend to pick up other stuff in the same series or by the same author. Hence, my reading of The Man in the High Castle (winner for 1963) has caused me to spend the year working my way through every single Philip K. Dick novel that was republished by the Library of America. So after eight months and thirteen novels, these three stories finally draw my Dick journey to a close.

Collection published: 2009
Novels originally published: 1981-82
Acquired: August 2014
Read: August 2022

The so-called "VALIS trilogy" is more of a duology plus a third book with thematic links to the first two. VALIS (1981) and The Divine Invasion (1981) are both science fiction novels where people have encounters with pink laser beams that impart to them the existence of God, and where the existence of the movie-within-a-book, VALIS, is discussed. On the other hand, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982) is a non-sf novel about an Episcopal bishop trying to find proof of the existence of God. But in terms of how the novels work, I think VALIS and Transmigration are closer together, and Divine Invasion is the outlier.

VALIS and Transmigration are both about the search for God and the search for meaning. VALIS begins with a story about the science fiction author Horselover Fat, but the first-person narrator quickly admits that Fat is him, it's just that these events are too painful to recount directly. But as you keep reading, it seems that the narrator must be a separate person from Fat because they have conversations, and then you realize that the first person narrator is Dick himself! But eventually all this is explained (well, as much as anything is explained in a Dick novel), and I really enjoyed the play with narration. I also just really enjoyed the story in general: Fat is someone with marriage issues, with drug issues, but most of all, with meaningfulness issues. He's chasing after meaning, and maybe he finds it in VALIS... but then there are aspects of VALIS that turn out to be disappointing. Like the best Dick novels, it balances trippiness with ordinariness, and it's definitely in the top tier of his work.

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is very similar to VALIS in many ways: it's about our desperate search for religious truth and our disappointment when we think we've found it. It is also, like VALIS, told in the first person—maybe I am forgetting something, but I think these are the only two Dick novels to be? If so, it's a real shame, because it's highly effective here. The narrator here is Angel Archer, the daughter-in-law of Timothy Archer, a radical bishop who soon becomes involved in a sexual relationship, a discovery of the origins of Christianity that might disprove the divinity of Christ, and supposed communications from the spirits of dead loved ones. What do we chose to believe in, and what do we not? Angel is a great narrator, with the strong sense of personality and voice; the events of the novel are tragic but often kept at a remove, in a way that feels very emotionally honest. There are lots of great bits: I really liked a conversation between the bishop and a car enthusiast about making the link between cause and effect; I liked how Angel (who was an English major in college) continually reflected on the way that literature gave her something to believe in, how it served as a sort of substitute religion—but also how that substitute keeps her at a remove from reality. As an English major (and, now, English professor), I can empathize, and I find the critique interesting. The last bit of the novel is really great.

Dick believed himself to have experienced a divine revelation in reality, but you wouldn't know it from these two novels. They're both about the limitations of belief in a way that I found very interesting. VALIS is technically sf, but I felt you could probably read it as a realist novel if you wanted to; on the other hand, there is the possibility that something supernatural actually did happen in Transmigration. (Angel doesn't think so, though, and neither did I.) Though they grapple with similar themes to much of his early work, I had a real sense that Dick had "leveled up" as a writer.

The Divine Invasion is different from the other two, because instead of being about belief, it's about the things one might believe in. It's also more like Dick's earlier novels, being set in the future, about colonists on other planets. A space colonist has to marry a woman who's undergoing a virgin birth; the child is God apparently. The child undergoes an experience much like the Temptation of Christ, though Dick puts a nice little spin on it. This book had its moments. Probably my favorite is that much of the novel is a flashback that the colonist has while he's in cryogenic suspension, only a malfunction in the mechanism means that his tube is picking up a radio station broadcasting string versions of music from Fiddler on the Roof. So the whole time the story is unfolding, he keeps asking other characters if they can hear the music. Which means we never see how things "actually" went! (If you believe Dick's VALIS cosmology, though, I think everything happens all at once, so there is no difference between the actual events and the recalled events.)

I liked all the stuff about the colonist; it was solid, mid-tier Dick, about an ordinary guy trying to stay afloat, work through a bad marriage, and deal with extraordinary things happening to him. A lot like, say Martian Time-Slip (1964) or Now Wait for Last Year (1966), both favorite novels by Dick. On the other hand, the religious discussions between the kid and other characters were frequently dull. I prefer reading about someone searching for truth, I guess, to hearing what Dick's supposed truth actually was. VALIS and Transmigration are skeptical in a way that Divine Invasion is not. So a decent work, but clearly (to me anyway) the weakest of the three.

Dick died after he wrote Transmigration but before it was published. It's a real shame for any number of reasons, but particularly because you have the impression Dick was about to kick into a third phase of his literary career. After the early write-tons-of-novels-and-some-will-be-great-and-some-will-not phase (1955-70) and the drugs-have-slowed-me-down phase (1970-77), he was picking up the speed again, and also developing his technique and talent in ways he had not done before. Alas, the final phase consists only of these three novels. I would have loved more sf novels like VALIS and more realist novels like Transmigration.

I've really enjoyed this journey... but I also have the vague sense that even though Dick published some thirty-plus novels while he was alive (and several more were published posthumously), that in these thirteen I've read the best of what he has to offer, and I'd be better off not chasing down, say, Time Out of Joint (1959) or The Penultimate Truth (1964). But if anyone thinks there's some Dick novel I haven't read that I really ought to, let me know! On the other hand, I've never read any of his short fiction except "The Minority Report," and it's been collected in its totality in five volumes, so I will be going through it. Not immediately, though; I need to take a break and tackle (now that I've voted in the 2022 Hugos), the Hugo-winning novel for 1964...

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: Way Station by Clifford D. Simak

Hugos Side-Step: A Maze of Death by Philip K. Dick

VALIS and Later Novels by Philip K. Dick: A Maze of Death / VALIS / The Divine Invasion / The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
edited by Jonathan Lethem

My continuing journey through the Philip K. Dick Library of America collections is nearing its end; the final one collects his "VALIS novels" from the 1980s... but despite the "later novels" subtitle, throws in also A Maze of Death, which was published in 1970 and thus chronologically goes back between Ubik (1969) and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). It comes from the very end of what I think of as his early period (1955-70), when he publishing two or three novels most years.

Collection published: 2009
Novel originally published: 1970
Acquired: August 2014
Read: August 2022

It also feels like one of those early period novels; it clearly predates the shift that came with Flow My Years and A Scanner Darkly (1977). It's about ordinary people on another planet; a discontented group of space colonists have all been resettled on the uninhabited planet of Delmak-O... only they don't know why, because the message that's supposed to tell them this is damaged. You can see how this comes out of the same sort of area as, say, Martian Time-Slip (1964), though it's the first of Dick's novels that I've read where interstellar travel is in the foreground, not just interplanetary. (Certainly interstellar travel is an element in many of his other novels, but this is the first I've read where the narrative predominantly takes place outside of Earth's solar system.)

So it's clearly early Dick... and it's clearly also weaker Dick. It starts promisingly enough, and there's a bit of a trippy twist... but then there's another and another, and it felt more like a formula than something disconcerting. Like, Dick knew what people liked about his books was reality being upended, and so dutifully wrote a book that did it, but didn't put the work into making the reader feel upended. None of those moments here land the way similar ones did in Martian Time-Slip, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), or Ubik (1969). I don't know that I could tell you why without digging more deeply into A Maze of Death than I really feel motivated to do, but there it is.

So, I'm left a bit baffled as to why Library of America included this here. As I write this, I'm not quite done with VALIS, but I've read enough of it to know that what Dick is doing here, stylistically and thematically, is not really what he was doing in A Maze of Death at all. I guess they wanted the volume to be a bit longer, and A Maze of Death does have an attempt at creating an original religion in it. But honestly I wonder if a short volume omitting it would have been preferable; definitely weakest of the ten Dick novels I've read thus far.

Side note: once character is said to wear a "peek-n-squeeze bra." Other than the text of the novel itself, the only Google hit for this is a guy on Twitter wondering what a "peek-n-squeeze bra" is, and a bunch of people replying to him who also googled it and found him to be the only hit, going back to 2014! One commenter: "Every couple of years I get a notification in this thread - it’s like being in a bookclub for the most baffling phrase in science fiction." I think, though, that it might be a different term for a "peek-a-boo bra," where there's a cut-out for the nipples. It would make sense in context. I spent way too much time researching this (though it is mentioned at least twice in the text), and probably should have done it in private browsing! Who knows where Dick got the term from.

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: VALIS / The Divine Invasion / The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Philip K. Dick

Hugos Side-Step: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said / A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s by Philip K. Dick: Martian Time-Slip / Dr. Bloodmoney / Now Wait for Last Year / Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said / A Scanner Darkly
edited by Jonathan Lethem

The second half of the second volume of the Philip K. Dick Library of America editions takes us out of Dick's shockingly prolific 1960s period into the 1970s, with Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) and A Scanner Darkly (1977). (As this is part of my series about books that won the Hugo, and books related to books that won the Hugo, I should note that Flow My Tears was a finalist for Best Novel in 1975, Dick's third and final Hugo nomination.* It lost to The Dispossessed.) Both of these books are about drugs. Not that Dick hadn't tackled drug use before (drugs that alter reality played key roles in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time-Slip, and Now Wait for Last Year), but A Scanner Darkly in particular represents his deepest engagement with the reality of drug use.

Collection published: 2008
Novels originally published: 1974-77
Acquired: August 2014
Read: June 2022

Flow My Tears is good, solid, minor Dick. It's a lot like, say, Ubik, in that it starts great but ends up petering out once the explanations arrive. A television celebrity (there are a lot of variety show hosts in Dick's novels; their continued cultural relevance is one of his predictions that did not really pan out) wakes up one day to find that he doesn't exist and never has. How does he navigate such a world? Especially considering that the United States has become a police state where being without papers is a crime. Jason Taverner moves from encounter to encounter with people who don't know who he is... and as he goes on, it seems that his original reality is breaking through. It's a great idea, but I didn't find the ultimate "explanation" of what had happened very interesting or convincing. It might have been better to just not explain it!

The paratext here indicates Dick's goal was to write a novel about different kinds of love, inspired by a drug trip Dick had where he experienced pure love. To be honest, I would not have picked up on this theme myself, but upon being told about it, it's a fascinating one: we see selfish love, sexual love, self-less love, animal love, incestual love, delusional love. What doesn't quite work, for the theme or the novel as a whole, is that I didn't really find that Taverner had a meaningful revelation about love himself. The revelation in Now Wait for Last Year, for example, was better handled.

A Scanner Darkly, on the other hand, was a very different treatment of drugs. (I actually have read it before, back in 2007. Like all of the Dick I read before this year, I read it because of the movie... but I never actually got around to watching the movie!) While most of Dick's drug novels focus on an idea that drugs can literally alter reality, even sending you through time, A Scanner Darkly focuses on perceptual reality. Maybe that should be a comedown, since that's the things drugs actually can do, but Dick handles it well here. So well you maybe don't even need the drugs, actually!

A Scanner Darkly is about an undercover drug cop who becomes an absolute master at segregating his two identities: Fred the cop and Bob Arctor the dealer. This is because one of the drugs he's own is separating the two hemispheres of his brain... but it also feels like a riff on the idea that we are different things to different people, and you don't need any drugs to be that. Those are the best parts of the book, Fred hearing about Bob and having to pretend he's not Bob, and in a sense, not pretending he's not Bob, because Bob is someone else, and Fred's reality slowly begins to crack. But overall there's a lot to like here; as usual for Dick, the characters maybe are types, but they feel like real people, and the imagery is vivid. There's a lot of dialogue here, and it's excellent stuff, it feels like real people talking. I have no way of knowing how accurate the glimpse into 1970s drug culture is—or, indeed, drug culture of any era—but it feels real to me. The twists and turns are good, there are good jokes (the one about the Planet of the Apes films is hilarious), the ending for Donna is haunting, the author's note at the end is very well put. A lot of Dick novels start well but don't really stick the landing. This one does.

So, as I continue to enjoy them, I am on to the third and final LOA Dick, which collects his infamous VALIS trilogy plus one other volume, though I'll take a bit of a pause to read some other stuff first...

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: A Maze of Death by Philip K. Dick

* In addition to winning Best Novel for The Man in the High Castle, Dick was a finalist for "Faith of Our Fathers" in Best Novelette in 1968.

Hugos Side-Step: Martian Time-Slip / Dr. Bloodmoney / Now Wait for Last Year by Philip K. Dick

Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s by Philip K. Dick: Martian Time-Slip / Dr. Bloodmoney / Now Wait for Last Year / Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said / A Scanner Darkly
edited by Jonathan Lethem

I enjoyed volume one of the Library of America Philip K. Dick editions enough to go straight on to the second, which contains five novels. They fall into two distinct periods, so I'll cover them in two separate reviews. The first three are all works of the mid-1960s—Martian Time-Slip (1964), Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along after the Bomb (1965), and Now Wait for Last Year (1966)—and in fact, they overlap with the novels published in Library of America's Four Novels of the 1960s. (This post is part of my series about books that won the Hugo, plus related books. It ties in because Dick won the Hugo for The Man in the High Castle.)

Collection published: 2008
Novels originally published: 1964-66
Acquired: August 2014
Read: April 2022

I recently read a post about Philip K. Dick in r/printSF, where someone criticized his prose and characterization. A bunch of defenders of Dick swooped in to explain that, yes, his prose and characterization were bad... but the other aspects of his books made them good anyway. My reaction was, "Hold on! You guys are his 'defenders'!?" I feel like sf fans often don't know what characterization is, and these "defenses" prove it... because how many writers in 1960s sf or even contemporary sf match Dick for characterization? All of Dick's characters feel like real people to me, with their little obsessions, their fragile self-images, their internal contradictions, their neediness. What makes his books work, in my opinion, is that even though they are set in the future, their protagonists feel like people from now, where "now" is both the 1960s and the 2020s. People trying to do jobs they hate, support families, deal with prejudice, make it through bad marriages. I like the real workaday aspect to his characters, especially in Martian Time-Slip and Now Wait for Last Year. These are people on Mars or during an interplanetary war, yet they are ordinary people trying to get done whatever needs to be done. Now Wait for Last Year, in particular, is a triumph: I found the ending surprising but uplifting and fascinating, and not something that fits with the stereotypical image of Dick. A real portrait of character and character growth.

Similarly, people praise Dick for the disconcerting nature of his books. You're reading a story about some perfectly ordinary guy on Mars, and then suddenly the guy realizes he can see through people's skin and that everyone around him is a fake, or time starts skipping back and forth. This all done incredibly matter-of-factly, which is what makes it so effective... how does this happen if not through Dick's prose? I never once felt while reading a Dick novel that I read a clunky turn of phrase; Dick writes smoothly and without showing off. This is what makes his stuff work as a writer, because the creepy, weird stuff is as matter-of-fact as everything else. As I said in my previous reviews of Dick, I think he really captures the dissociated aspect of modern life, which has only gotten worse in the sixty years since these novels were written. I don't feel like I can see people's skin... but I do feel alienated from the people around me. The way people fall through time, in both Martian Time-Slip and Now Wait for Last Year, is very well done.

Something I don't think Dick gets praised for enough is his worldbuilding. I really enjoyed the early chapters of Martian Time-Slip, before the weirdness ratcheted up. I found its depiction of a new society, its interplay with the old, all compelling and realistic; I like the idea of a corrupt union man being one of the major players on a Martian colony, and its focus on humdrum things like land speculation. New world but same old bullshit. I also like that Dick reuses a lot of worldbuilding elements from book to book even when the books clearly don't take place in the same fictional milieu; it lets you quickly orient yourself. The exploration of how a great leader might extend his greatness via time travel or alternate selves, similarly, is a great idea the Dick plays with well... and he does so without getting bogged down in technical details, or committing to one interpretation of events, or anything else that might drain the weirdness from it.

I will say that I found Dick's postapocalyptic novel, Dr. Bloodmoney, the least interesting of the seven Dick novels I've read so far this year. Decent characters, some neat concepts, but I feel like no character was strong enough to grab me. But Dick published an astounding seventeen novels in the 1960s (if I am counting correctly), so it's not too surprising if they are not all winners.

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: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said / A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

Hugos Side-Step: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik by Philip K. Dick

Four Novels of the 1960s by Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik
edited by Jonathan Lethem

Given I enjoyed The Man in the High Castle, and given that I owned it in a Library of America edition bundled together with three other novels, there seemed little reason to not just go ahead and read those three other novels as part of my journey through classic winners of the Hugo Award and adjacent works. Four Novels of the 1960s contains three other early sf works by Philip K. Dick: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), and Ubik (1969). I'd read Do Androids Dream before, back in high school, but the other two were new to me.

Collection published: 2007
Novels originally published: 1965-69
Acquired: August 2014
Read: January 2022

None are really like The Man in the High Castle, except in that they largely focus on "ordinary" people. These people all live in extraordinary worlds, and sometimes even do things that would be extraordinary to us, but in every case, they are people just doing jobs, working in offices, dealing with petty bullshit, even when their job is to hunt down killer androids or achieve corporate superiority through telepathic espionage. Dick is extraordinarily good at capturing a feeling of alienation from modern life: these books were written in the 1960s, and set in the future, but they feel every bit as relevant to the 2020s. These books are filled with people desperately seeking connections and meanings, and finding that the whole world is oriented against letting this happen.

In each case, Dick is also really good at what you might call "slippage," slowly easing you into an utterly weird thing that happens with total matter-of-factness, causing you to question the reality of what you are reading: the visions of the future in Three Stigmata, the entire alternate police force in Do Androids Dream, the advancing decay in Ubik. I liked all three a lot, but I especially liked Ubik; each chapter was a such a beautiful surreal poem, almost, as the world began to decay around our protagonists, and they desperately tried to hold it back with whatever "Ubik" happened to be at that moment. (And I loved the Ubik advertisements; as I've noted before in this reading journey, 1950s/60s sf was very much interested in the power of commercial advertising.)

The only disappointment was that in the end of each case, Dick seemed to feel compelled to tie everything up and explain it in the process. Do Androids Dream probably does this the least, but both Three Stigmata and Ubik get less weird near the end, as they explain why all the weirdness was happening, and this makes them a bit unsatisfying. I feel like it would be better to not entirely know or understand what was going on in these books. In being incomplete, I think they would feel more cohesive, ironically.

One last note: it's funny to compare Do Androids Dream to Blade Runner. I do like Blade Runner, but what is sort of subtext and an ending twist in Blade Runner—maybe Decker is the real replicant!—is just text in Do Androids Dream. You spend the whole book questioning who is real and who is not, because Decker himself is always doing this. I feel like Ridley Scott fanboys expect your mind to be blown by this, but where Scott ends is where Dick begins even though Dick came first, and I find that much more interesting, and that gives you much more to think about.

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: Martian Time-Slip / Dr. Bloodmoney / Now Wait for Last Year by Philip K. Dick

Hugos 1963: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

Four Novels of the 1960s by Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle / The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik
edited by Jonathan Lethem

Whenever I finish my Hugo reading for the year, I complement it by also picking up the oldest Hugo-winning novel I haven't previously read. For the 2020 Hugos, I read the winner for 1958, The Big Time; I actually have already read all of the winners from 1959 to 1962, so for the 2021 Hugos, that brings me to the winner for 1963, The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. Dick is an author I'm not as familiar with as I'd like; basically, prior to reading this, I'd only read three things by him, all ones that got turned into movies! (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, A Scanner Darkly, and "The Minority Report") Though I guess this got turned into a tv show, albeit one I never saw. (My dad was a fan.) Anyway, for many years now I've owned a Library of America box set of fourteen of his novels, and I was happy to have the motivation to dip in.

Collection published: 2007
Novel originally published: 1962
Acquired: August 2014
Read: January 2022

Since reading this but before writing up this review, I've gone on to read five more Philip K. Dick novels, and by the standards of many of his later ones, The Man in the High Castle is positively subdued. About a world where the Axis won World War II, and set mostly in Japanese-occupied California, there's not much in the way of a sfnal elements beyond that. I can see why it captured the Hugo electorate (it was one of only two of his many novels to be a Hugo finalist): it's a triumph of worldbuilding. We get a real solid sense of what this new world is like and how it functions, on the most local of levels: people in highway diners, people in factory jobs, people eating dinner together. From this, we can infer and understand the big political stuff that underlies the story and drives it in the background. The whole idea of the Japanese being obsessed with American pop culture, and Americans supplying obsessive collectors with counterfeit American artifacts was quite fascinating.

Dick also demonstrates a real solidity of character; these are ordinary people, both admirable and despicable in their ordinariness, which drives them to do things they often don't understand. I particularly liked Juliana Frink.

The novel is also quite well put together thematically: it's all about people placing value in things based on the extent to which they perceive them to be true, even when they are not actually true. Things mean only what we believe them to mean. When a pair of counterfeiters try to make their own jewelry, no one likes it because it doesn't carry the aura of authenticity, even though it is much more authentic than the fakes they have been making. Does the counterfeit become real if we believe in it enough? This all reaches a thematic climax at the end: many of the characters have been reading a novel about an alternate timeline where the Axis lost World War II, and they have been inspired by it. What the ending makes clear is that this novel-within-a-novel is not "real," as it does not depict our world, the real world where the Axis lost; its author imagines a completely different, and wrong, alternative history. So the book that has been inspiring resistance is utterly fake! But everything else the novel has told is would indicate this doesn't matter, because everyone in the novel believes it is real.

As I said above, I read this in an LOA edition. Editor Jonatham Lethem does a good job on notes throughout the whole volume, but in particular the end notes for this novel are very useful in explaining what German figures were real historical persons, and what their real roles were.

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 Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Ubik by Philip K. Dick