Lawrence Person's Futuramen

The Collected Stories of Phillip K. Dick, Volume 2: Second Variety
Underwood/Miller, 1987

People think I’ve read every damn SF book in the world, but this isn’t even remotely true. For example, I’m still trying to catch up to the works the previous generation of SF readers read when they were growing up. So while I’ve generally read the highlights of their work, I’m still trying to catch up on authors like Henry Kuttner, C, L. Moore, R. A. Lafferty, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance and Philip K. Dick.

In this second volume of Dick’s collected short stories, the themes of “what is reality” and “who is human” that would dominate so many of his novels crops up again and again. The title novella (the longest here) is set during a third world war after a U.S./Soviet nuclear exchange, where U.S. forces are only able to hold off the Soviets thanks to the development of semi autonomous “claw” robots assembled in automated underground factories. A U.S. soldier goes out under truce to a small band of Soviet survivors, only to have a little boy tag along behind him, a boy that’s shot on sight approaching the bunker, as he’s one of two known “impostor” claws varieties in human form. In the bunker, our protagonist is told that there’s a “second variety” of impostor, who’s form is unknown. Paranoia ensues, especially when he returns to his own bunker to find out they’ve been overrun by claw impostors. “Human Is” and “Impostor” also question what it means to be human, and how can you tell if you’re really human?

“Adjustment Team” is another Dick story where the protagonist finds out that Reality Is Not What he Thought it Was, being given an accidental glimpse of something adjusting the world. Believe it or not, they’re making it into a romantic comedy starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. Because “romantic comedy” is the first thing you think of when talking about the work of Philip K. Dick. (Although “The World She Wanted,” in which absolutely everything goes exactly right for the woman the protagonist meets (because, after all, it is her world) could also be considered one.)

By this point, Dick was already a technically proficient author capable of moving a story swiftly along with a minimum of wordage. The overwhelming majority of stories in this volume come in at 10-20 pages long, and finish long before they wear out their welcome. As with all Dick’s work, none is perfect, but all have their points of interest. Amazingly, every story in this book (according to the notes at the end) was turned out between August 27, 1952 and April 20, 1953, a rate of productivity that was probably only surpassed by Robert Silverberg at the highpoint of his robotic pulpy period. I can only imagine what sort of effect these stories had on the field when they were originally published, and they’re still well worth reading today.