Uncertain realities, artificial people, war, and abuses of power.
Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) was an American science fiction writer. Born in Chicago, he spent most of his life in California and began publishing professionally in 1952. He wrote many short stories for science fiction magazines before becoming widely known for novels such as The Man in the High Castle, Ubik, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
His stories often follow workers, soldiers, and families who discover that their understanding of the world is wrong. “Second Variety” follows soldiers trying to identify an enemy that can imitate human beings. In “Beyond Lies the Wub,” a spacecraft crew must decide how to treat an animal that can speak and reason. Questions about authority, empathy, and the distinction between humans and machines recur in his work, often alongside suspense and dark humor.
From a quick encounter to a longer story.
A hungry starship crew buys a hulking Martian animal, then learns its mind may be more civilized than their own.
A shopkeeper notices a corpse that his entire town ignores, then realizes being the only person alarmed may mark him as prey.
A major crosses a ruined battlefield to negotiate peace, unaware that the autonomous weapons around him have learned to look human.
A cuckoo clock takes sides in a failing marriage and refuses to behave like the possession its owner thinks he bought.
A dying professor lends his brain to an experimental warship, and the machine begins making decisions its creators never authorized.
When soldiers on a remote asteroid declare themselves plants, a psychiatrist enters the woods to find who taught them.
Three Terran agents flee Mars with a stolen city hidden among office supplies, but one fellow passenger asks too many questions.
After eight years underground, three men risk the radioactive surface and find the robots fighting their war have kept a secret.
A casual reader finds an alien invasion hidden in plain sight inside the figures of speech in a paperback novel.
Explorers land on a dead planet and discover that one weapon has outlived the civilization it was built to defend.
A condemned hunter is sent two centuries into the past to kill a religious founder, armed only with a gun and the target’s skull.
A Terran boy visits his alien friends on the day their people finally begin winning back a century of conquered worlds.
