Collected Stories Of Philip K. Dick Vol. 2, Philip K. Dick PDF Collection, Short Stories

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The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Vol. 2
by Philip K. Dick
Table of Contents
Introduction
By Norman Spinrad
Philip K. Dick's debut story,
Beyond Lies the Wub,
was first published in 1952. This
volume,
SECOND VARIETY,
contains 27 short stories published between 1952 and 1955,
when his first novel,
SOLAR LOTTERY,
appeared. What is more, it does not include every
story he published during the first four years of his career either.
That in itself is quite remarkable. Few writers could boast such prodigious publication in
the first four years of their careers, even in this period, when markets for short sf were
relatively abundant and editors had many slots to fill. And while it must be admitted that
there are a certain number of fairly trivial gimmick stories in this book, the majority of them
already show many of the unique virtues of Dick's more mature work, and even the least of
them are written in his unmistakable voice.
Considering that they were written in such a brief period by a new writer in the first flush
of his career, that Dick must have been churning them out rapidly to make money and a
name, these 27 stories are also quite remarkable for what they are not.
There is not really an action-adventure formula story in here. No space opera. No nuts and
bolts. No fully-developed alien civilizations. No intrepid stock heroes, villains, mad scientists,
no real good guys versus bad guys at all. From the very outset, Dick wrote as if the
commercial conventions of the sf genre did not exist. Even the one-punch gimmick stories
are
Dickian
gimmicks. From the beginning, Dick was reinventing science fiction, turning it
into a literary instrument for his own concerns, and yes, obsessions.
What we have here is a kind of fascinating time capsule, 27 stories published before Philip
K. Dick's first novel, the compressed short fiction apprenticeship of a writer who was to go on
to become one of the great novelists of the twentieth century and arguably the greatest
metaphysical novelist of all time.
Dick began writing during what at least in a publishing sense was the greatest
transformation that science fiction has ever seen. In the early 1950s, the magazines were still
the dominant mode of sf publication, meaning that short fiction was still the dominant form.
By the time he published
SOLAR LOTTERY
in 1955, the paperback book was on its way to
becoming the dominant publishing mode, and the novel therefore the dominant form.
In the 1950s, with the standard advance for an sf novel being about $1500, any writer
trying to eke out a precarious living writing sf was still constrained to crank out short stories
for the magazines. And what with novel slots still being limited, one was also constrained to
make one's mark as a short story writer before a publisher was about to grant a novel contract
at all.
Nor, in hindsight, as evidenced by this volume, was this, in literary terms at least, a bad
thing, even for a writer like Dick, whose natural metier was the novel. These 27 stories, and
the others published before
SOLAR LOTTERY,
were an apprenticeship in the best sense of
the term.
Reading these stories one after the other in a single volume, one is indeed struck by a
certain sameness, a certain repetitiveness, a certain series of recurrences, a sense of a writer
staking out the territory of his future oeuvre. We would see the same thing in the short
fiction of other writers of the period, and even much later, in the early short fiction, for
example, of John Varley, William Gibson, Lucius Shepard, Kim Stanley Robinson.
But in this book, what we see is a uniquely Dickian sameness.
Most sf writers who stake out a territory in their early short fiction that they will later
explore at greater length and depth tend to create a consistent universe like Larry Niven's
"Known Space" or recurring characters like Keith Laumer's Retief or a historical template like
Robert A. Heinlein's "Future History," and not infrequently all three.
In part this is a commercial strategy. A new writer naive or crazy enough to actually
attempt a career as a full-time sf short story writer has to write a lot of fiction rather rapidly
to stay afloat. It is much easier to reuse settings, history, and characters than to begin from
zero each time out, and, as network TV has long proven, the episodic series is the fastest way
to build an audience too.
That, however, is not what Philip K. Dick did. There are no real recurring characters in
these stories. There is no attempt to set them all in a consistent universe. Except for some
rather tenuous connections between
Second Variety, Jon's World,
and
James P. Crow,
there
is really no attempt at a consistent future history either.
But there most certainly
are
recurrences of theme, imagery, and metaphysical concerns,
and we will see them again and again in Dick's subsequent novels, expanded upon,
recomplicated, deepened, made quite vast.
The Earth reduced to a nuclear ash heap. Robot weapons systems evolving towards baleful
anti-empathetic pseudo-life. Human freedom ground down in the name of military security,
economic prosperity, or even order for its own sake. Interpenetrating realities. Ironic time-
loops and paradoxes. Ordinary people holding ordinary jobs as the heroes and heroines trying
to muddle through.
These stories were written during the fever pitch of the Cold War, the height of the anti-
Communist hysteria engendered by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American
Activities Committee, the nadir of the nuclear war paranoia, when school children were
taught to hide under their desks when the air raid sirens went off. And on an obvious level
they reflect this quite overtly. They show that Dick was a writer of deep political concern from
the very outset.
But they show something much more. At a time when there was no little danger in voicing
such views, Dick spoke out loud and clear
against
the prevailing hysterias of the times --
against militarism, security obsession, xenophobia, and chauvinism.
Further, what these stories juxtapose against these large scale political evils are not
equally large scale political virtues but the intimate small scale human and spiritual virtues
of modest heroism, caritas, and most of all the empathy that, in the end, is finally what
distinguishes the human from the machine, the spiritual from the mechanical, authentic
being from even the most cunningly crafted pseudo-life.
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Collected Stories Of Philip K. Dick Vol. 2, Philip K. Dick PDF Collection, Short Stories

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