NO wear and absolutely NO publisher overstock or black remainder mark on page edges!! BRAND NEW, NEVER READ soft cover -- NO blemishes -- A+ MINT!! . From a dry/smoke free environment --Tight, crisp, and clean - you'll hear the book CRACK when opened! Published originally in 1987. This book by Kensington Printing, 2002, stated FIRST Kensinging printing. Book has NO names, highlights, underlines, dog ears, loose pages, or wrinkles. Soft cover is in excellent condition!! GIFT QUALITY!! NOT ex-library book with markings. I ship daily. Carefully packaged with bubble wrap for the journey and I provide email verification at time of shipment. Delivered in 3-6 days (Expedited) or 6 -14 days (Standard) -- additional delivery time required for AK, HI and APO. Expedited shipping recommended for speedy delivery. Book will ship same or next day! Customer service and satisfaction is a priority. Know EXACTLY what you are buying with our detailed description -- Full disclosure on all books all the time! Read our feedback and buy with confidence from an Amazon Pro-Merchant. Double click on our name -RED BICYCLE BOOKS-- and find our STOREFRONT where you can see our complete and current inventory.
| ||||||||||||
Browse our Bookshelf Favorites store for big savings on popular fiction, nonfiction, children's books, and more. |
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images? |
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
95 of 96 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A decade ago, Philip K. Dick's complete short stories were published as a five volume series. Prospective buyers should note that this is simply a reissue of the fourth of those five volumes. It isn't a "best of" short story collection; you get the brilliant along with stories tossed off to keep bread on the table. It's still worth four stars. (The fifth volume is also particularly worth owning, and all five are still in print on backorder.)
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, insistent 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. The novels do.
For those who already know his stuff, this book is a treat. Besides the great title story, you'll see the seeds of several 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").
30 of 30 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The Minority Report is volume four of the collected shorts of the late, and very great, Phillip K. Dick. This collection spans his writing period between 1954 and 1964, but you may be surprised at how up to date the feel of Dick's fiction is. In spite of their age, these stories have maintained a freshness that can only be found with excellent human characterizations nestled inside technical sci-fi.
Along with the short, The Minority Report, which the 2002 Spielberg movie starring Tom Cruise was based upon, there are many other strange treats in store for your science fiction palate. Here are a few of my favorites:
Autofac, where a post-war network insists on running the world for the good of the citizens. The Mold Of Yancy, a lovely yarn about a seemingly harmless autocrat on an outer colony. The Unreconstructed M, where murder comes in small, shifty boxes. Explorers We, a never-ending cycle of hopes dashed. War Game, the harmless, or not so harmless, tactics of market domination. What The Dead Men Say, exploring a world where half-life after death is expected. Oh, To Be A Blobel digests the aftereffects of infiltrating the enemy's forces by changing appearances. And my favorite, The Days Of Perky Pat, where survivors of the last great war fight their battles with dollhouses.
I believe that this is one of Dick's better collections, so if you are hankering for some good, old-fashioned sci-fi that will let you kick back into the future, pick up The Minority report, and Enjoy!
TOC:
AutoFac
Service Call
Captive Market
The Mold Of Yancy
The Minority Report
Recall Mechanism
The Unreconstructed M
Explorers We
War Game
If There Were No Benny Cemoli
Novelty Act
WaterSpider
What The Dead Men Say
Orpheus With Clay Feet
The Days Of Perky Pat
Stand-By
What'll We Do With Ragland Park?
Oh, To Be A Blobel
Enjoy the book!
Along with the short, The Minority Report, which the 2002 Spielberg movie starring Tom Cruise was based upon, there are many other strange treats in store for your science fiction palate. Here are a few of my favorites:
Autofac, where a post-war network insists on running the world for the good of the citizens. The Mold Of Yancy, a lovely yarn about a seemingly harmless autocrat on an outer colony. The Unreconstructed M, where murder comes in small, shifty boxes. Explorers We, a never-ending cycle of hopes dashed. War Game, the harmless, or not so harmless, tactics of market domination. What The Dead Men Say, exploring a world where half-life after death is expected. Oh, To Be A Blobel digests the aftereffects of infiltrating the enemy's forces by changing appearances. And my favorite, The Days Of Perky Pat, where survivors of the last great war fight their battles with dollhouses.
I believe that this is one of Dick's better collections, so if you are hankering for some good, old-fashioned sci-fi that will let you kick back into the future, pick up The Minority report, and Enjoy!
TOC:
AutoFac
Service Call
Captive Market
The Mold Of Yancy
The Minority Report
Recall Mechanism
The Unreconstructed M
Explorers We
War Game
If There Were No Benny Cemoli
Novelty Act
WaterSpider
What The Dead Men Say
Orpheus With Clay Feet
The Days Of Perky Pat
Stand-By
What'll We Do With Ragland Park?
Oh, To Be A Blobel
Enjoy the book!
16 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format: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 Asimov. Essential reading for any fan of science fiction, or of off-kilter writing in general.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Short stories from the mid 1950's and early 1960's
This volume of Philip K. Dick Short stories includes stories written between 1954 and 1964 and are very heavily influenced by the Cold War and Dick's aversion to any sort of... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Interested Reader
5.0 out of 5 stars
AMAZING
Thank you so much for this book. My boyfriend is in love with him and this made him smile so big. Thank you.
Published 4 months ago by JESSICA HAMRICK
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great Collection of Sci Fi Stories
The collection is fantastic, but the story that stood out most to me is The Minority Report. I enjoyed absolutely everything about this story. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Laura Haggart
4.0 out of 5 stars
More short stories from one of the best!
In The Minority Report And Other Classic Stories, Philip K. Dick continues his brilliance of the sci-fi genre. Read more
Published 22 months ago by B-Goody
5.0 out of 5 stars
Memories of reading PKD
I have been a lover of Science Fiction all my life, and many of the stories in this collection are ones I read as a child. Read more
Published on April 18, 2011 by Arthur E. Williams
4.0 out of 5 stars
Classic stories by a talented writer. Some of them very good.
I was particularly interested by the Minority Report story (having seen the movie first). It's rare to find unique plots. Read more
Published on December 25, 2010 by TK
4.0 out of 5 stars
It's good to be different.
PKD just doesn't think like everybody else, at least not the way we think when we're awake. That these stories were written 40 to 50 years ago under the cloak of the cold war gives... Read more
Published on November 21, 2010 by Todd@Oates
5.0 out of 5 stars
Awesome story teller what a brilliant mind
I've been a HUGE fan of PKD for many years now. (And not just because I weigh close to 300 pounds!) I own nearly every book/story that he's ever written and this collection is just... Read more
Published on October 30, 2007 by Hey Man Jesus Saves
5.0 out of 5 stars
Strange and Wonderful...
The minority report is a great book if you like short science fiction. Phillip Dick is one of the masters of the genre. Read more
Published on January 21, 2006 by P. Robinson
4.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting--to say the least
This was my first introduction to PKD, and although all the stories aren't the best they do entertain. Read more
Published on July 15, 2003 by K Shelton
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
