Philip K. Dick - Complete Stories 3.pdf - Philip K.Dick - margozap

The Complete Stories of Philip K. Dick Vol. 3:

Second Variety and Other Stories

by Philip K. Dick

eVersion 3.0 / Scan Notes at EOF

Contents

The Cookie Lady

Beyond the Door

Second Variety

Jon's World

The Cosmic Poachers

Progeny

Some Kinds of Life

Martians Come in Clouds

The Commuter

The World She Wanted

A Surface Raid

Project: Earth

The Trouble with Bubbles

Breakfast at Twilight

A Present for Pat

The Hood Maker

Of Withered Apples

Human Is

Adjustment Team

The Impossible Planet

Imposter

James P. Crow

Planet for Transients

Small Town

Souvenir

Survey Team

Prominent Author

Notes

Second Variety is the third in a massive five-volume collection of the complete shorter fiction of

the 20th Century's greatest SF author -- Philip K. Dick. It brings together 27 stories and includes such

masterpieces as the title story, with its endless war being fought by ever more cunning and sophisticated

robot weapons; "Impostor", in which a man is accused of being an alien spy and finds his whole identity

called into question; and "Prominent Author", in which a fracture in space/time enables an ordinary future

commuter to achieve unexpected literary fame.

Again and again in these stories -- written and published while America was in the grip of

McCarthyism -- Dick speaks up for ordinary people and against militarism, paranoia and xenophobia.

But first and foremost these are marvellously varied and entertaining stories from a writer who

overflowed with ideas.

"One of the most original practitioners writing any kind of fiction." -- Sunday Times

"An elusive and incomparable artist." -- Ursula LeGuin

"The most consistantly brilliant SF writer in the world. . . author of more good short stories

than I can count." -- John Brunner

GraftonBooks

A Division of HarperCollins Publishers

77-85 Fulham Palace Road,

Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

Published by GraftonBooks 1990

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

First published in Great Britain by

Victor Gollancz Ltd 1989

Individual stories were copyrighted in their year of first publication

(see "Notes" at the back of each volume for more information) and

copyrights have been renewed by Philip K. Dick and The Estate of

Philip K. Dick as applicable. Previously unpublished stories are

The excerpt by Philip K. Dick which appears at the beginning of this

volume is from a collection of interviews with the author conducted by

Paul Williams and published in Only Apparently Real, Arbor House, 1986.

Used with permission.

ISBN 0-586-20765-1

Printed in Great Britain by HarperCollinsManufacturing Glasgow

Set in Times

in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,

mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior

permission of the publishers.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or

otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the

publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition

being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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.

And if we already see here what was to be the great theme and the spiritual core of Philip K.

Dick's whole career, so too do we see in these stories the genesis of the characteristic literary technique

which so cogently brings it down to an intimate and specific human level -- Dick's use of multiple

viewpoint characters.

True, his use of multiple viewpoint techniques is not always perfect in these early stories.

Sometimes he cavalierly shifts viewpoint within a scene for mere narrative convenience. Sometimes he

introduces a new viewpoint character in media res just to give us a scene he cannot easily render from

viewpoints he has already established. Sometimes a viewpoint character appears for only a few

paragraphs and then disappears.

Dick is learning multiple viewpoint technique in these stories. Indeed, it may be more accurate to

say that he is inventing it, for few if any writers had really used multiple viewpoint this way before Dick,

and all of us who were to adopt it later owe a great debt to him, whether we consciously realize it or not.

For what the Dickian multiple viewpoint technique allows the writer to do is to tell the story from

within the consciousness, the spirit, the heart, of several characters, not merely one. It allows intimacy, it

grants the reader empathy, with the multiplexity of the human spirit within the confines of a single tale.

And in the hands of a master like Philip K. Dick, it becomes a series of windows into the metaphysical

multiplexity of reality itself, the perfect merger of theme and form.

These 27 stories are not perfect. It would be a disservice to the truth and to Philip K. Dick's

literary reputation to contend that they represent the full flowering of the mature talent to come. But they

too are a series of windows, windows into the past, into the beginnings of a great spirit's long and mighty

journey, and windows too into the future, into the fully developed vision of the mature master the talented

young apprentice who wrote them was one day destined to become.

Norman Spinrad

October, 1986

Paranoia, in some respects, I think, is a modern-day development of an ancient, archaic sense

that animals still have -- quarry-type animals -- that they're being watched. . . I say paranoia is an

atavistic sense. It's a lingering sense, that we had long ago, when we were -- our ancestors were -- very

vulnerable to predators, and this sense tells them they're being watched. And they're being watched

probably by something that's going to get them. . .

And often my characters have this feeling.

But what really I've done is, I have atavized their society. That although it's set in the future, in

many ways they're living -- there is a retrogressive quality in their lives, you know? They're living like our

ancestors did. I mean, the hardware is in the future, the scenery's in the future, but the situations are really

from the past.

-- Philip K. Dick in an interview, 1974

The Cookie Lady

"Where you going, Bubber?" Ernie Mill shouted from across the street, fixing papers for his

route.

"No place," Bubber Surle said.

"You going to see your lady friend?" Ernie laughed and laughed. "What do you go visit that old

lady for? Let us in on it!"

Bubber went on. He turned the corner and went down Elm Street. Already, he could see the

house, at the end of the street, set back a little on the lot. The front of the house was overgrown with

weeds, old dry weeds that rustled and chattered in the wind. The house itself was a little gray box,

shabby and unpainted, the porch steps sagging. There was an old weather-beaten rocking chair on the

porch with a torn piece of cloth hanging over it.

Bubber went up the walk. As he started up the rickety steps he took a deep breath. He could

smell it, the wonderful warm smell, and his mouth began to water. His heart thudding with anticipation,

Bubber turned the handle of the bell. The bell grated rustily on the other side of the door. There was

silence for a time, then the sounds of someone stirring.

Mrs Drew opened the door. She was old, very old, a little dried-up old lady, like the weeds that

grew along the front of the house. She smiled down at Bubber, holding the door wide for him to come in.

"You're just in time," she said. "Come on inside, Bernard. You're just in time -- they're just now

ready."

Bubber went to the kitchen door and looked in. He could see them, resting on a big blue plate on

top of the stove. Cookies, a plate of warm, fresh cookies right out of the oven. Cookies with nuts and

raisins in them.

"How do they look?" Mrs Drew said. She rustled past him, into the kitchen. "And maybe some

cold milk, too. You like cold milk with them." She got the milk pitcher from the window box on the back

porch. Then she poured a glass of milk for him and set some of the cookies on a small plate. "Let's go

into the living room," she said.

Bubber nodded. Mrs Drew carried the milk and the cookies in and set them on the arm of the

couch. Then she sat down in her own chair, watching Bubber plop himself down by the plate and begin

to help himself.

Bubber ate greedily, as usual, intent on the cookies, silent except for chewing sounds. Mrs Drew

waited patiently, until the boy had finished, and his already ample sides bulged that much more. When

Bubber was done with the plate he glanced toward the kitchen again, at the rest of the cookies on the

stove.

"Wouldn't you like to wait until later for the rest?" Mrs Drew said.

"All right," Bubber agreed.

"How were they?"

"Fine."

"That's good." She leaned back in her chair. "Well, what did you do in school today? How did it

go?"

"All right."

The little old lady watched the boy look restlessly around the room. "Bernard," she said

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