Paycheck and Other Classic Stories in Philip K Dick

Mar 10, 2012 Jack Stovold rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Having never read any Philip K. Dick, but long having an interest, I’ve decided to read through all his works in chronological order as best as I can (for various reasons, I won’t be able to read his first novel, Gather Yourselves Together, until July). I want to give you my impressions of his works as a first-timer and observe the evolution of his writing.
I started with this one.
This collection contains most of Dick’s earliest stories, mostly written in 1952, although the first one, “Stabil Having never read any Philip K. Dick, but long having an interest, I’ve decided to read through all his works in chronological order as best as I can (for various reasons, I won’t be able to read his first novel, Gather Yourselves Together, until July). I want to give you my impressions of his works as a first-timer and observe the evolution of his writing.
I started with this one.
This collection contains most of Dick’s earliest stories, mostly written in 1952, although the first one, “Stability”, is his earliest known story, written in 1947 but first published nearly forty years later.
I was hooked as soon as I read “Stability”, which contains a classic time travel paradox, and a truly bizarre ending that I don’t fully understand, but like so many of the stories in this collection left a vivid image in my mind.
Perhaps the thing that surprised me most about this collection, based on my impressions of Dick, was the frankly fantastical and earnest nature of most of these stories. Dick is definitely not a “hard” sci-fi writer here, in that the “science” in many of these stories is vaguely sketched out at best. In fact, a number of them, such as “Expendable” (a tale of a man caught between the war for earth’s fate between sentient ants and spiders), “Roog” ( the terror experienced by a dog perceiving garbagemen as marauding invaders) “The Builder” (about a modern day Noah), “Out in the Garden” (a man is concerned his toddler son is actually the product of his wife’s affair with a duck), and the two Doc Labyrinth stories, “The Preserving Machine” (Labyrinth creates a machine to turn musical compositions into animals), and the title story “The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford” (Labyrinth creates a machine to bring inanimate objects to life) are in fact just trippy little fantasy vignettes. They’re a lot of fun.
One other thing I like is how casually Dick throws in sci-fi tropes like aliens, time-travel and interplanetary councils and wars. For example, the Martians in “The Crystal Crypt” are almost comically under-explained. They appear to be human and dark-skinned, but they apparently have a millennia old civilization. Whether they are truly alien or an ancient human colony is entirely unexplained. Similarly, in “Prize Ship”, the people of the nine planets of the solar system are obviously human colonists, but the Ganymedeans appear to be alien and have a different language, but I can’t be sure. (Also unexplained: do the people of Jupiter, Saturn, etc; actually live on gas planets? Dick obviously cares little about these things).
Speaking of “Prize Ship”, the story has an example of what I perceive to be one of Dick’s greatest strengths throughout this collection, the ability to create vivid imagery. The image of the tiny medieval warriors in “Prize Ship”, the eerie scene of malevolent butterflies gathering in a grassy meadow in “Meddler”, the epic moonlit battle between the elves and the trolls in “The King of the Elves”, and the time-travel scenes and bizarre ending of the above-mentioned “Stability” are still rattling around in my head weeks after finishing this.
Many of the sci-fi tropes featured in this book seem almost clichéd, but one has to remember Dick has been imitated so often that many of these must have seemed much original at the time, especially time-loop paradoxes, which Dick uses often to great effect, at least three times in this collection, in “Stability”, “The Skull”, and “Meddler”. However, at other times Dick thinks of something striking, as in the consequence of time travel in “Prize Ship”. I had never considered and never seen explored in any other work (this consequence is also ignored in Dick’s other time travel stories).
Other tropes familiar to sci-fi readers, especially sci-fi of the 50s, are cold-war paranoia, either of endless apocalyptic war with the Russians (“The Defenders”), post nuclear wastelands (“The Great C”, “The Gun”), time-travel (a whole bunch), interstellar war (“Mr. Spaceship”, “The Variable Man”), and brain transference into a machine (“Mr. Spaceship”). One of my favorite little stories, “The Indefatigable Frog”, featured petty rival professors and strongly reminded me of Asimov. “Beyond Lies the Wub” also featured a twist ending reminiscent of Asimov.
The two longest stories in this collection, “The Variable Man” and “Paycheck” were quite good. “The Variable Man” was simultaneously thrilling and amateurish, but I keep thinking about it. It contains Dick’s most “science-fiction-y” concept in the bomb used to destroy the Alpha Centauris. I’m surprised it hasn’t been made into a movie yet. On the other hand, the exciting “Paycheck” has been made into a movie that falls short of the story, disappointing as both a Dick adaptation and as a John Woo film. (“King of the Elves” is also apparently in the works as a CG kids movie from Disney).
Perhaps what charmed me most about this collection was the pulpy, almost comic-book like nature of many of these stories, which was something I didn’t expect. “The Infinites”, another of my favorites, could easily be an episode of the original Star Trek. Many others remind me of the “The Twilight Zone”.
Highly recommended. The only drawbacks are the tossed-off nature of many of the sci-fi concepts in here. This might turn off some people, especially if you’re used to harder sci-fi like Asimov. The concepts here are less important than how people react to them. I haven’t read any later Dick, but the stories here are by and large pulpy, and many of them don’t have any underlying theme or message, instead just focusing on telling an entertaining yarn. A few of them are slight and unmemorable (“The Builder”, “Out in the Garden”). On the whole, however, I found this very entertaining, and I look forward to more Dick.
...more

12 likes · Like · see review

Aug 14, 2014 Ümit Mutlu rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: stories, favorites, foreign, science-fiction

İçinde belki de bir tane bile vasat öykü bulunmayan bir külliyatın ilk halkası, ilk cildi. Daha 20'li yaşlarında bile dehanın gelişi yavaştan belli ediyormuş kendisini. Pek çok öykü fikirsel anlamda harika yenilikler ve yaratıcılıklar barındırıyor. Her şeyiyle müthiş.

PKD'nin bu öykülerinin Türkçe olarak -geç de olsa- yayınlanıyor olması bizler için bir nimet, ancak yayıncı Büyülü Fener'in dikkat etmesi husular var; dizgi, imlâ ve çeviri hataları, bilhassa da baştan sona çok ucuz bir görüntü serg ...more

2 likes · Like · see review