Philip K Dick

Predictability has come a long way. The computers of the future can tell you if you're going to win a war before you fire a shot. Unfortunately they're predicting perpetual standoff between the Terran and Centaurian Empires. What they need is something unpredictable, what they get is Thomas Cole, a man from the past accidently dragged forward in time. Will he fit their calculations, or is he the random variable that can break the stalemate? - The...

Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick contains twenty-one of Dick's most dazzling and resonant stories, which span his entire career and show a world-class writer working at the peak of his powers. In "The Days of Perky Pat," people spend their time playing with dolls who manage to live an idyllic life no longer available to the Earth's real inhabitants. "Adjustment Team" looks at the fate of a man who by mistake has stepped out of his own time. In...

In The Skull, a convict is offered his freedom if he agrees to travel back in time and kill someone. He learns that the assassination target was the founder of a religious sect that grew in strength and influence from its inception in 1960. Carrying his target's skull so he can identify the religious leader, the convict comes to learn a terrible secret about why he was chosen to find its owner.

Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly is a semi-autobiographical novel of drug addiction set in a future American dystopia and the basis for the Hugo Award finalist film starring Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, and Robert Downey, Jr. Bob Arctor is a junkie and a drug dealer, both using and selling the mind-altering Substance D. Fred is a law enforcement agent, tasked with bringing Bob down. It sounds like a standard case. The only problem is that Bob and...

"Grappling with many of the themes Philip K. Dick is best known for--identity, altered reality, drug use, and dystopias--Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is both a rollicking chase story and a meditation on reality. Jason Taverner--talk show host and man-about-town--wakes one day to find that no one knows who he is. In a society where lack of identification is a crime, Taverner must evade the secret police while trying to unravel the mystery of why...

Following a devastating nuclear war, the Moral Reclamation government took over the world and forced its citizens to live by strictly puritanical rules-no premarital sex, drunkenness, or displaying of neon signs-all of which are reinforced through a constant barrage of messaging to the public. The chief purveyor of these messages is Alan Purcell, next in line to become head of the propaganda bureau. But there is just one problem: a statue of the government's...

In Mr. Spaceship, humans in the distant future are at war with alien life forms known as Yuks. Using outdated, mechanical machines to wage war against the life-based weapons of the advanced Yuks, a research team decides to build a spaceship powered by a human brain. Enlisting a dying professor who agrees to donate his brain to the project, the humans believe they have turned the tables on the Yuks. But the spaceship has other plans.

The war had been going on for two Terran months, with no sign of a break. The System Senate's difficult position came from the fact that Ganymede was the jump-off point between the System and its precarious network of colonies at Proxima Centauri. All ships leaving the System for deep-space were launched from the immense space cradles on Ganymede. There were no other cradles. Ganymede had been agreed on as the jump-off point, and the cradles had been...

This early work by Philip K. Dick was originally published in 1954 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography. 'Meddler' is a short story about time travel and possibilities of dire consequences. Philip Kindred Dick was born on December 16 1928, in Chicago, Illinois. Dick and his family moved to the Bay Area of San Francisco when he was young, and later on to Washington DC following his parents divorce. Dick attended Elementary...

In Second Variety, UN forces have retreated to a moon base in the aftermath of early Soviet victories in a nuclear conflict. In response, the UN forces developed special robots, called Claws, which feature spinning blades and rudimentary artificial intelligence. Six years later, the Soviet leadership asks for negotiations to end the war. A UN officer travels back to earth to discover that not only have the Claws learned to replicate themselves, they...