Most Helpful Customer Reviews
56 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Dick the Revelator, June 20, 2002
This review is from: The Collected Stories Of Philip K. Dick Volume 4: The Minority Report (Citadel Twilight) (Paperback)
You can't compare Philip K. Dick to any other science fiction writer. About the only other author he can be fairly compared to at all is Franz Kafka - but a workingman's Kafka, shorn of all pretension or artiness. All his heros are the same besieged everyman as K., wrestling with elusive metaphysics, impossible transformations, a cosmic bureaucracy and a dysfunctional society - but also with overdue rent bills, intrusive advertising, and messy divorces. Precogs show up in many of Philip K. Dick's works, but Dick himself was not particularly in the prediction business. Nearly every world he created, large (in his novels) or small (in stories like these) was a future dystopia. But whereas the dystopias of other sf writers make you shudder and think, "Yes, it could be like that... If Things Go On," Dick's have a different flavor, a different kind of immediacy. And the reason for that is, that Philip K. Dick was not so much a science fiction writer as a prophet. He showed us a future that mirrored the present so faithfully that he could convince us of what he always felt - that dystopia is already here; apocalypse is already here; all you have to do (the original meaning of apocalypse) is tear away the veils. Many people are going to take a fresh interest in Mr. Dick's writings because of the movie Minority Report. For them, I give this advice: go first to his novels (some of the best ones are "Ubik", "A Scanner Darkly", "Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch", "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"). You have to immerse yourself in his world to grasp where he's coming from, and short stories don't give you room to do that. For those who already know his stuff, this book is a treat. Besides the great title story, you'll see the seeds of some of his novels here ("Palmer Eldritch" prefigured in "Days of Perky Pat", "Simulacrum" in "The Mold of Yancy", and "Ubik" in "What the Dead Men Say"). This is the fourth of five volumes Citadel has published of his complete short stories. This and the fifth volume are most worth owning. Once you become a fanatic, of course, you'll want to have them all. (There was once a single volume, shorter than this, of collected best short stories, but I believe it's out of print.)
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Unbelievable collection, May 26, 2002
This review is from: The Collected Stories Of Philip K. Dick Volume 4: The Minority Report (Citadel Twilight) (Paperback)
Although these are not necessarily Philip K. Dick's best short works, they are necessary reading for every fan. As the writer in the introduction says, the reason I read PKD is because he has that oddest and most unique of all virtues in a writer - strangeness. You'll be hard-pressed to find stories stranger than this anywhere. As PKD himself says in the notes section at the end of the book, he often sold his stories to the flexible SF magazine Galaxy, as the more famous Astounding and its editor, John W. Campbell, considered his stories "nuts." Also, this notes section is very interesting for other reasons: it becomes apparent in reading them that these stories have much deeper meanings than they at first appear to have. It is quite entertaining enough to read them for their sure strangeness - you will laugh out loud often reading PKD - mostly at the dialogue, which you'll be hard-pressed to determine whether it is entirely unreal, or more real than most. However, deeper and more profound themes were always resonating at the bottom of the well of Philip K. Dick's stories. Although he was quite consistent and extremely prolific with his writings, some of his stories were definitely better than others. Still, everything the man ever wrote is worth reading. This particular collection contains some of his best - and most interesting - shorter works. Covering the period from 1954-1964, we get such classic stories as The Minority Report, an all-time classic SF story; The Unreconstructed M, a dramatic story of spine-tingling SF suspense; and many others - classic stories, profound stories, and just plain weird stories. This is some of the best science fiction published since the Golden Age of Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimove. Essential reading for any fan of science fiction, or of off-kilter writing in general.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Unabridged Audio Collection..., March 1, 2006
Keir Dullea does a great job narrating this collection of stories by Philip K Dick. Not only does it have five very good stories, FOUR of them are the basis of Dick movies. First off is "The Minority Report." The idea was the same as the movie, but the story was totally different. I definitely didn't see the end coming... it would have made an interesting movie.
Second was "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale," which became the movie "Total Recall." The story was pretty short, shorter than I would have liked, but it was good. The movie was similar, but a lot was changed.
Third was "Paycheck," later made into the movie with Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman. This was actually the most faithful adaptaton. A man wakes up with no memory, finds a bag of clues, and uses them to trace his way back to a secret project. Only the end was different, and of course the movie expanded and added characters, but I liked the story better.
Fourth was "Second Variety" made into the movie "Screamers" starring Peter Weller. Again, the two were much alike. A very good SF story set on a bleak planet where clone robots have wiped out much of civilization and have found a way to manufacture themselves.
The fifth and shortest is "The Eyes Have It," which is a brief, humorous piece where the main character takes the wording from a romance novel literally...
A strong collection and a good recommendation for anyone who wants to compare the stories and movies and wants to get almost all of them in one shot. If only it had contained the story for "Imposter."
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
