Customer Reviews

Second Variety (The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol. 3)

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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.

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.

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).

In May of 1987 Underwood-Miller published a five volume set titled "The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick". The third volume of the collection was subtitled "The Father-Thing". In April of 1991 the Carroll Group republished the third volume changing the subtitle to "Second Variety". In addition to the change of title this volume now contains the story "Second Variety" which was originally in the second volume of the Underwood-Miller set. It seems clear that they made these changes in order to take advantage of the release of "Total Recall", which was around the time of the Carroll Group's re-release of the second volume of the series, and that did have the cascading effect of destroying the chronological approach that the original set of books used, but that doesn't change the fact that this is an excellent series of books and well worth owning by anyone who loves science fiction. Ultimately, this book contains the same stories as volume 3 in the original set, with the addition of "Second Variety" as the last story in the book.

There are 24 stories in this book, with a greater number of longer stories than were in the first two volumes of the series. While Dick's short stories are excellent, the novelette length gives him a bit more room to really explore some of his ideas, something which he uses to great effect in several of this book's stories. One theme which appears in several of the stories here is that of mutation. Dick clearly rejected John W. Campbell Jr.'s idea that mutations should always be viewed as good and leading humanity into the future. This idea is central to stories like "The Golden Man" , "A World of Talent", and "Psi-man Heal My Child", though that is not to say that Dick viewed mutations as bad either, simply that he used a more balanced and realistic approach to the subject.

Another theme which appears in several stories in this volume is that of humanity losing control of their technology, and we see this in such stories as "The Last of the Masters",
"To Serve the Master", and the title story "Second Variety", which was the basis for the 1996 film "Screamers". Along the same lines, we see mankind on the brink of elimination in stories like "Tony and the Beetles", and "Pay for the Printer" along with several of the stories which I had already mentioned. It is not surprising that Dick revisited many of these ideas over and over, as most authors do. Dick also had an incredible output of stories during the early fifties was incredible, with nearly all of the stories in the first three volumes were written between 1952 and 1954, so again one would expect a fair amount of repeated themes. What is surprising is that he manages to make the stories fresh by taking the reader in different directions each time.

This is a great volume in a great collection of Philip K. Dick's work. While changed slightly from the original collection, which was ranked 3rd on the Locus poll for collections in 1988, the completeness of the collection is still in tact. Outside of the stories I have already listed, there are other very good ones as well, such as "The Father-Thing", "Foster, You're Dead", and "Shell Game". The longer stories in this volume put it in front of the first two volumes in terms of the overall quality, but the whole series is certainly worthwhile.

The mind of Philip K. Dick continues to intriue me. The ideas, the thoughts, the bizarre worlds he created amaze and bewilder. Read any one of his short stories and it will change the way you look at the world around you. After you read a number of his stories you will begin to perceive things about this world you never would have imagined before. Brilliant, simply brilliant.

Screamers, Total Recall, Blade Runner... more... Ever wonder who wrote the stories some movies were based on or inspired by? Take a look at a master writer. Philip K. Dick can get your attention be it with clever science fiction or by bashing your senses with humanity and the things we do to each other.

What is there to say? It is PKD in mid-career short story mode. A must for fans of sci-fi with a human basis, fans of the surreal, or readers who are just ready for some very interesting, well written change of pace. The man is a master.

Philip K. Dick's novels I read long ago. And have reread many since. So believe me when I tell you what a treat it is to finally get around to reading some of his short stories. Even if you're not primarily a PKD fan; maybe you're an aficionado of the short story, and this book comes up in the 'we recommend for you ' list. Take it as serendipitous that you've made it this far and buy this book. You will not regret it.

The man is good. If you have not read any of Philip K. Dick I would highly recommend any of his books. He is by far the best Sci-Fi writer ever. Some of my favorite short stories from this book are "The Father-Thing, The Golden Man, The Hanging Stranger." Heck, they are all good. They remind me more of episodes of "The Twilight Zone" then just Sci-Fi.

Although not on quite the same level of Volumes One and Two in this five book set of all of Philip K. Dick's short fiction, Second Variety and Other Classic Stories is a worthwhile read for any PKD fan.

Dick cranked out stories very quickly in his early years, and some of these tales do have a certain sense of being rushed, but others, including the title story are nothing short of brilliant. As usual, Dick focuses on dystopic futures that are politically and/or environmentally ravaged; usually these stories have a level of humor too, but others in this collection are more purely downbeat.

While some stories are just okay, I particularly enjoyed "The Golden Man," "Second Variety" and "Foster, You're Dead." There are some other great ones, too. I would recommend this to any science fiction fan who wants to read some truly original fiction; this is another good collection of Dick's short stories.