For our Siblings Book Club in 2022, we’re scheduled to read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, the so-called genre-defining science-fiction author. While I’ve enjoyed watching movies based the man’s books and stories, I’m a bit surprised that I’ve never actually read anything by him! So in anticipation of reading the upcoming novel, I thought I’d dabble first in some of his short stories (since reading more short fiction is a personal goal I have for the year).

I began with this collection of five stories for no other reason than it was the only collection available at my library at the time. Having loved the Tom Cruise movie based off the titular story, I knew I’d sink into the author’s world quickly, and so I did.

“Minority Report” (1956)
This story was as exciting as the film version, and yet obviously different. It brought to mind the necessary adjustments that any film adaptation must make, turning something cerebral into something all visual, like all those changes I appreciated in both the book and film versions of The Bourne Identity. It’s comforting to recognize that the “genius” plots of Hollywood are merely reinterpretations of the true genius of original authors. In this story, Anderton is the founder and creator of pre-crime, having discovered and honed the skills of the precogs himself. He learns that the precogs have foreseen his act of murdering an important figure, an Army general who has manipulated precog data to destroy the precrime department entirely. In the end we find that Anderton cannot be proven guilty or innocent by the precogs’ foresight or by a wicked man’s plot, but rather by his own free will. He is the one who eventually makes a calculated decision, no matter what the precogs have foreseen, and he is willing to bear the consequences. It actually ends up being an important message from the author, not merely some fanciful story. I will say that the film did impact me in a way I hadn’t quite anticipated: as I read this story, my mind’s eye painted the whole world in blacks and blues. Thank you, Steven Spielberg. 

“We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (1966)
Another mind-bending plot based upon memories of what was and what might be. A man who’s always wanted to go to Mars seeks out a memory agency that will supply him with the memories, documentation, and even souvenirs to convince him that he’s actually traveled to Mars, and for a fraction of the cost of actually going there. What this process of memory implantation does, however, is open up a can of worms for the guy whose own memories of life as a government agent on Mars had once been previously wiped. This story took some extra brain juice to comprehend, and for a while there, I had imagined something different than what the story ended up being. I had actually thought that maybe the company had implanted the wrong kind of memories into this innocent schmuck, memories of a true secret agent whom this guy was not. Of course, that’s more like Buzz Lightyear’s situation, so maybe my imaginations are a bit childish.

“Paycheck” (1953)
We begin this story by meeting Jennings, whose previous two years of life have been erased, as if he’s been asleep the whole time, though he knows that it’s only his memory that’s been wiped. Time travel doesn’t exist in this story. Well, not exactly. The world has changed for Jennings, gotten much worse in fact. The world in this story is darkly dystopian, as it seems to be in all of Dick’s stories so far. While Jennings acknowledges that time travel is not yet a reality, the time scoop is, a claw of sorts that can open up holes in time to grab objects with its pincers from either the past or the future. There’s tons of information locked inside this short story, information about the politics of his era, the company he works for, the memory erasures, and the background of the time scoop. It’s almost too much to handle for such a short read and probably would have been better laid out as a full-blown novel. This was my least favorite story in the collection.

“Second Variety” (1953)
And this was my favorite story in the collection, even over “Minority Report.” The world devised here is post-apocalyptic with the Russians having obliterated virtually all life in North America. They crossed the borders to clean up whatever’s remained, yet somehow, the American military hiding in the bunkers have created a new weapon called “The Claw,” an orb that maneuvers across the landscape killing all life that’s not protected by a coded arm-band. As a Major in the U.S. Army picks his way across the burned-out countryside to discuss a cease-fire, he meets a child named David who asks to follow him wherever he might go. The Major lets him come, until a small band of Russian soldiers (“Ivans”) shoot the kid from hiding and reveal to the “Yank” that David was in fact a robot designed to befriend a human in order to discover their secret bases. The Russians have been all but wiped out by Davids, Variety 3 of a series of self-designed robots bent on destroying humanity. This small group of Ivans inform the Major that the focus of the war has now shifted to a war for the survival of their species, and they explain that their enemy of robots have three varieties, though they can only recognize the first and third varieties. Together they must uncover the identity of the Second Variety, and the author keeps us guessing throughout.

“The Eyes Have It” (1953)
OK, maybe I lied. This might be my favorite story of the lot, though it’s not really a sci-fi story. “Second Variety” can keep its place on the top of the favorite sci-fi stories list for now, but “The Eyes Have It” will jump onto my favorite list of short stories in general. You can find a free copy of the story here, and I tell you, it’s definitely worth 5 minutes of your life! This story is an amazing joke for writers of all types, whether bad writers or great. It’s literalism at its finest, and it definitely makes me look forward to reading more from Philip K. Dick.

©2022 E.T.

Read More Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic Novels:

• The Last New Yorkers by George Allen England (1911)
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)
• The Last Ship by William Brinkley (1988)
• Minority Report and Other Stories by Philip K. Dick (2004)
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
• The Hunger Games (series) by Suzanne Collins (2008)
• Son of Heaven (series) by David Wingrove (2011)
• Contamination (series) by T.W. Piperbrook (2013)
• Yellowstone (series) by Bobby Akart (2018)
• The Giver by Lois Lowry, adapted by P. Craig Russell (2019)
• Fairy Godparents: Raising a Fairy Child by Indahari Setyo (2020)