Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Must for the Dick Fan and a Good Introduction to PKD, January 13, 2004
This review is from: Second Variety (The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol. 3) (Paperback)
There would be little point in giving a synopsis of each of the 24 stories in this book. That would give a false sense of repetition since many feature images of ash and overturned bathtubs -- the aftermath of nuclear war -- or struggles between mutants and normal humans, each fearing their extinction. But they don't seem any more repetitious than a skilled musician working variations on a theme for that is what many are. These stories, written in 1953 and 1954 -- with one exception, are arranged chronologically, so the student of Dick can see him play with an idea for two or three stories in a row. Along the way we get the humor, intricate plotting, and sudden reversals in our moral sympathies characteristic of Dick. And there are the machines that so often are a force of death in Dick though they behave more and more like life. Such is the case with the title story, one of Dick's most paranoid and basis for the movie Screamers. When sophisticated weapons take on human guise and began to stalk man, what Dick calls his grand theme, knowing who is human and who only pretends to be, is starkly exhibited. Other famous stories are "The Golden Man" with its purging of mutants before they infect the human gene pool, "The Father-Thing" which is what a boy realizes has replaced his real father, and "Sales Pitch", a story which anticipates, with its all purpose android advertising its virtues through rather thuggish means, the work of Ron Goulart. There are some memorable stories not so well known. "Foster, You're Dead" was originally conceived as a protest against a remark by President Eisenhower that citizens should be responsible for their own bomb shelters. Its young hero lives terrified in a world where making knives from scratch and digging underground shelters are parts of the school curriculum and each new year brings the newest model of bomb shelter, terrified because his father can't afford to buy one for the family. "War Veteran" reads like a futuristic _Mission Impossible_ episode. The spirit of Charles Fort may be at work in "Null-O", a satire on the absurd philosophy that no distinctions between things are valid, a philosophy practiced by "perfect paranoids". (Fort may have inspired the weakest and first story in the collection, "Fair Game", with its van Vogtian plotting giving way at the end to a silly twist.) Dick fans will see "Shell Game", with its colony of paranoids, as sort of a test run for Dick's Clans of the Alphane Moon, and the time jumping child of "A World of Talent" is reminiscent of Manfred Steiner in Dick's Martian Time-Slip. This collection also features one of Dick's occasional fantasies, "Upon the Dull Earth". Any admirer of Dick will want to read this collection, and those needing an introduction to his work will find no bad stories in this exhibit of 14 months in Dick's career.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
There'll Never Be Another Like Him, October 19, 2000
This review is from: Second Variety (The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol. 3) (Paperback)
This book, third in a set of five from Citadel Press (who are doing similar definitive collections of Robert Bloch & Theodore Sturgeon), collects all of Dick's short stories, the vast majority of them from the 50s - not coincidentally, the high-water mark of the sf pulps. All are introduced by later-era sf writers like Tom Disch, Norman Spinrad & this volume's John Brunner; unfortunately, all take pains to point out that the true value of these stories was in their raw wealth of ideas, which Dick later cannibalized and expanded upon in his novels. During his short-story tyro period, Dick wrote fast and furious (how does a story a week sound?) and the conventional wisdom states that these tales are too one-dimensional, formulaic and crudely-written to have much artistic quality on their own merits. I strongly disagree. While Dick's later novels are of course worth reading, these early stories literally SEETHE with fevered imagination: it's important to note that he does not employ recurring characters or settings here. He literally starts each story with a blank canvas, which only makes his prolific output that much more astounding. All of his obsessions and central themes are already present, but emerging as they did against the backdrop of the American 50s, the oft-noted 'flaws' in these small gems lend an eerily authentic surrealism and subversive power that his 60s and 70s work (when the world he lived in was already waist-deep in 'science fiction time', to use a Spinrad phrase) somewhat lack. Actually, Dick's COLLECTED STORIES, like much of the most resonant 50s sf, can be savored as much for their horror-story frissons, or their mythic and allegorical properties, as they can as pure speculative fiction. (And one could make the argument that such work, produced under the spectres of McCarthyism, The Bomb, flying-saucer sightings, a growing militarism and the incipient gray-flannelled paranoia festering in the newly-minted utopia of suburbia, was much more daring and revolutionary than similar Dick-inspired work published in the far-less-restrictive, anything-goes 60s). Sure, many of the characters in COLLECTED STORIES read like print versions of Kenneth Tobey and Morris Ankrum, but therein lies their power; they're true to the era in a way that 'better-written', more fully developed protagonists probably couldn't be. Anyway, to cut a long-winded sermon short, readers drawn to either sf or horror, as well as those who nominally detest both genres but do enjoy a touch of strangeness and obsessiveness in their fiction, should run out and buy SECOND VARIETY and the other four books in this series. You may be surprised to find many of these 'one-dimensional' stories, written hastily for money, clinging like burrs to your subconscious long after the work of Great Authors have slid noiselessly from memory. Mandatory reading.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Considerable Overlap!, August 21, 2009
This review is from: Second Variety (The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol. 3) (Paperback)
I just wanted to make everyone that might be interested in this excellent book aware that there is considerable overlap between it and The PKD Reader:
-= The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Volume 3 (Second Variety) =-
1. Fair Game
2. The Hanging Stranger
3. The Eyes have it
4. The Golden Man
5. The Turning Wheel
6. The Last of the Masters
7. The Father-Thing
8. Strange Eden
9. Tony and the Beetles
10. Null-O
11. To Serve the Master
12. Exhibit Piece
13. The Crawlers
14. Sales Pitch
15. Shell Game
16. Upon the Dull Earth
17. Foster, you're dead
18. Pay for the Printer
19. War Veteran
20. The Chromium Fence
21. Misadjustment
22. Psi-Man Heal My Child!
23. Second Variety
-= The Philip K. Dick Reader =-
1. Fair Game
2. The Hanging Stranger
3. The Eyes have it
4. The Golden Man
5. The Turning Wheel
6. The Last of the Masters
7. The Father-Thing
8. Strange Eden
9. Tony and the Beetles
10. Null-O
11. To Serve the Master
12. Exhibit Piece
13. The Crawlers
14. Sales Pitch
15. Shell Game
16. Upon the Dull Earth
17. Foster, you're dead
18. Pay for the Printer
19. War Veteran
20. The Chromium Fence
21. We can remember it for you wholesale
22. The Minority Report
23. Paycheck
24. Second Variety
So if you already have The PKD Reader you might not want to purchase this book (and vice-versa).
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
