by Philip K. Dick, Steven Owen Godersky (Foreword), Roger Zelazny (Introduction)
Format 432 pages, Paperback
Published January, 1990 by Citadel Twilight
After six years of immersion, doing a podcast, writing a book about Philip K. Dick I was over due to read these early stories as a whole. But that is not how I have PKD short stories in the past. Volume two of the Collected stories is the second PKD I bought, in the early 90s, and that copy sits under this book on my shelf. Those stories were my first serious introduction to PKD, after that, I just read random stories usually not in collections. A story we covered for the podcast or for research.
This gives me an excuse to talk about why I am reading this book. All of PKD’s short stories are collected in five volumes. They are collected in other forms, best of, Movie tie-ins, but to read the complete stories you need this volume. So Last year Keith Giles and I can up with a bold idea. Compile a Philip K. Dick encyclopedia. A Dickapedia. We couldn’t do this alone, knew we needed volunteers and cause for the book to benefit. Bringing back the Philip K. Dick Festival to California and giving it a budget to work with seemed the idea.
So Dickapedia will have entries for all invented, planets, species, technologies, government agencies, and stuff like that. Each researcher who picks up a novel to research and write the entries on becomes the expert on that book. (not too late to get involved) but one of the jobs I volunteered for was reading the first volume of short stories and doing the entries for Dickapedia. So keep in mind I was reading this volume with this in mind.
As a PKD guy it is almost impossible for me to divorce his novels or stories from the events happening in his life when I know he was writing them. We joked on Dickheads (podcast) about having to known if a novel was written by happy married Phil, or angry divorced Phil. The stories in this collection were mostly written during a prolific era for short stories 1952. Phil had just married Kleo, second wife (longest marriage) and they had moved into the Franciso house.
Look that is me when David Gill took me to visit Berkeley at the Francisco House…
The first story Stability was written in around 1947, Phil’s senior year of high school. We few of the others Roog and Beyond Lies the Wub were from ’51 and likely written for Anthony Boucher’s $1 Thursday SF writing classes. (Went to that house as well and there is a plaque outside the house) At least one “Out in the Garden” appears to be a pre-Kleo story, maybe as early as 1950. Most of the stories however were written in 1952. NATO was just formed, Eisenhower was president, The Lakers were still in Minnesota, and Signing in the Rain was the best movie of the year.
So Now the actual collection. Stability the opener perfectly reflects senior year Phil. This is very Van Vogt-inspired story is about a future dystopia. I would go as far as to say much like his first novel, he is trying to capture a Van Vogt feel, if you have not read the Canadian Golden ager you probably would never notice. It is not just like his Stabilization as it is written in this story mirrors elements of the Games Machine in Null-A and Phil’s debut novel Solar Lottery.
I am not going to go through each story but it is valuable to read this early era in this collection because it is pretty close to the order he wrote them in and you can see his growth. His first professional sale Roog is a comically surreal story. The humor and pulp elements are there in his first story to see print Beyond Lies the Wub. Mostly a funny story it plays with perception and a dash of philosophical ethics. While The Gun and The Skull are both excellent 50s SF that have deeper meaning and show what Phil is capable of, they are not the stories that most feel like a step forward to me.
The Defenders was in Galaxy magazine and Horace Gold liked it enough to put it on the cover of the magazine. A decade later Phil would expand and reboot the idea as part of the soup that would become his excellent novel The Penultimate Truth. To me this short is the first real masterpiece of the book, and thus Phil’s budding young career. He fits a ton of ideas, concepts and messages into a piece that is also heavy with world-building.
The next story that felt like an evolution and step forward was Piper in the Woods. This story has a little pulp in the world-building but it was the first time where I felt like Phil was going weird, and didn’t care if the elements had scientific explanations. Of course, The Preserving Machine and the title story The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford are where he lets go of all Pulp pretext.
All the stories come with a certain quality worth reading, some of the more fantasy ones I didn’t enjoy as much as the pulpy ones. The Variable Man, Phil’s first published novella shows what he could do. He had completed a novel at that point, maybe even writing the novella of Vulcan’s Hammer. Nonetheless, this is a great first attempt at writing longer SF.
Two of the stories would be rebooted in novels, Paycheck would become a Hollywood action movie, but why must you read this collection of work? This is the perfect view of the evolution of Philip K. Dick the science fiction writer. This is his first attempts at exploring the SF universe. So yeah. Collected Stories Volume 1. It is not just a must-have but an experience reading it in order.
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