The Short Fiction of Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick wrote dozens of short stories for the pulp magazines of the 1950s, and this collection gathers the ones that have entered the public domain. In them you find the obsessions that would define his career: reality that will not stay fixed, ordinary people who suddenly cannot trust their senses, machines pursuing their own agendas, and Cold War paranoia pushed to its logical extreme. The stories range from the deadly self-replicating robots of “Second Variety” to the deadpan comedy of “The Eyes Have It,” where a nervous reader mistakes ordinary figures of speech for proof of an alien invasion. Together they show a restless imagination working out ideas that later films and novels would borrow for decades. Free to download as a PDF or EPUB.