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Philip K. Dick Message Board 1/1/2012
Talk about the novels, new and used books that Dick has written!

Author Dick's Book Reviews

A Maze of Death
Early in the 22nd century, 14 strangers find themselves assigned to the planet Delmak-O, but the mission plans get wiped out, so no one knows what they're supposed to do there. Tensions build and people get on one another's nerves. It doesn't help that small mechanical insects appear to be monitoring their activities. Then, one by one, they start dying violent deaths. This is another of Dick's very tricky point-of-view and what-is-reality plots, with an ...
A Scanner Darkly
"Fred" is an undercover narcotics agent for the Orange County Sheriff's Office. As "Bob Arctor," he lives in a messy pad with a bunch of other druggies and buys Substance D (known on the street as "death") in quantities from his sometime girlfriend Donna. The authorities set up cameras and microphones on the premises so that "Fred" can conduct 24-hour surveillance on himself and his housemates. But Substance D steadily separates the two halves of his bra...
Blade Runner
Blade Runner the film, the superb sci-fi Frankensteinian futurescape has given this book a new lease of life, as well as a new cover. The 1968 book inspired the film, however the book is far less competent. The plot revolves around a bounty hunter, who terminates androids. The healthy folks have fled planet Earth in the aftermath of a nuclear war, Mars being the romantic destination. The androids, virtual physical replicas of humans, are the new slave cl...
Clans of the Alphane Moon
Some years before, aliens of the Alpha star system lost a war with Earth, which placed a hospital for the mentally ill on one of the Alpha moons. It's been five years since anyone's had contact with the place, and the "inmates" are governing themselves. Back on Earth, CIA agent Chuck Rittensdorf is separated from his wife Mary, who is a marriage counselor. She decides to join an expedition to the moon (Alpha III M2), three light-years away, to check out ...

Dick booklist

Counter-Clock World
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
"DADOES" is ostensibly the story of Rick Deckard, a worldly, experienced bounty hunter sent to capture a group of escaped replicants (androids). The future-Earth in which Deckard inhabits is a poisoned, polluted nightmare ("tomb-world" seems to be the author's favorite description). However, this novella exists on far more levels than what we saw in "Blade Runner." The renegade androids have realer emotions than most humanoid characters; Earth's citiz...
Dr. Bloodmoney
Seven years after nuclear war destroyed much of society in 1981, people are scrabbling to survive in the Bay Area. Bonny Keller is a somewhat promiscuous married woman in the West Marin community, whose daughter Edie keeps referring to her "invisible" brother Bill, and is friends with Bruno Bluthgeld (German for "Bloodmoney"), the physicist everyone blames for the world's woes. He's now pretending to be "Jack Tree," a sheep farmer. The community is kept ...
Dr. Futurity
Dr. James Parsons is plucked from his own time, by an unknown force and for unknown reasons, and lands in a world immensely different from his own. He finds a society of young, healthy, ruddy-skinned "tribes". The tribes compete to see which has the best genes and are rewarded by their stock being used for the seeding of the next generation. The mystery of his suddenly appearing in this strange world and how the people know of events from his time beg...
Eye in the Sky
On Oct. 2, 1959, missile engineer Jack Hamilton and his wife Marsha are touring the proton beam deflector of the Belmont (California) Bevatron when a platform collapses and the couple, along with six other assorted people, are plunged through the artificially-generated cosmic rays to the concrete floor below. Shortly thereafter, Jack finds himself facing the eye of God ... only not really. Various other realities turn up, and it gradually dawns on Jack t...
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
Philip K Dick's 1974 masterpiece Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, is set in the near furure (1988!), where Universities have become prisons, people are condemned to forced labor camps for scant reason, and the Pols and Nats (police and national guard) monitor everyone constantly. It is in this bleak world that global celebrity and singing sensation Jason Taverner suddenly finds that no one knows who he is; that his identity is gone, that he seems never ...

Philip K. Dick list of books

Galactic Pot-Healer
An unemployed potter in a near future earth is visited by the manifestation of an alien from a far off planet. The alien is seeking help lifting a cathedral from the bottom of an ocean and fixing it up....
Lies, Inc. (The Unteleported Man)
Vintage, Mar 2004, 12.00, 202 pp. ISBN: 1400030080 To control the aggressiveness of citizens living on top of one another in crowded file cabinets like anthills in overpopulated urban regions, Lies Incorporated uses computer software to keep people sublimely quiet. A metropolis is simply an industrial work zone with contented “prisoners”. The only escape from this drab existence is through the services of Trails of Hoffman, Inc. which can telep...
Martian Time-Slip
Jack Bohlen is one of the best repairmen among the sparsely populated colonies on Mars, circa 1994. Arnie Kott, the wheeling-and-dealing head of the plumbers' union colony, has an inkling that Manfred, one of the "anomalous" children kept in a special school and perhaps scheduled for deportation and destruction by the UN administration, may be able to foresee the future. Kott hires Bohlen to work with Manfred, partly because Bohlen is so handy and partly...
Now Wait For Last Year
The setting is Earth, which actually is a lost colony of our mother planet, at war with an insect life form. An artificial surgeon who is in his wife's shadow gets promoted into the U.N. president's chief doctor. Now his miserable, yet simple, life is complicated with addiction to lethal time traveling drugs, an ailing egomaniac and sick leader, shifting allies and espionage in the war, and getting back to his own time and universe. He manages to he...
Our Friends from Frolix 8
It's 2135, and Earth is ruled by a coalition of 6,000 "New Men" (mutants with hugely increased brain capabilities) and 4,000 "Unusuals" (individuals of more normal intellection but ESP powers). Nick Appleton, a humble tire regroover (he carves new treads in old used tires so they can be resold), hopes his son Bobby will test high enough to qualify for training as a New Man. Willis Gram, Council Chairman of the Extraordinary Committee for Public Safet...
Radio Free Albemuth
A posthumously published companion volume to Dick's famous VALIS trilogy (VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer), Radio Free Albemuth condenses in one volume Dick's Gnostic-inspired themes regarding an alien power trying desperately to save humanity from its enslavement to bogus values as represented by the U.S.'s barely democratically elected president Ferris F. Fremont. The progtagonist starts out as a humble clerk at a S...

Philip K. Dick novels

Solar Lottery
In the year 2203, power is transferred through a random lottery that picks the Quizmaster, the most powerful position on Earth. Challengers may be chosen to take out the Quizmaster legally by assassination. This is not an easy method, however, because the Quizmaster is protected by a Corps of telepaths (known as "teepers") who can easily tell when a threat is near. When 10-year Quizmaster Verrick is toppled and replaced by 63-year-old Cartwright, an elec...
The Cosmic Puppets
Ted Barton returns to his hometown only to find it very much changed. He then gets into battles with huge mountain-high beings who represent the forces of good and bad in the universe. Through his mind he can control some of the town and change it back the way it was when he lived there. His wife meanwhile thinks he's crazy and leaves him. Ted befriends some kids in the town who turn out to have magical powers. The book has themes that the author used in...
The Crack in Space
In a near future, the american election is approaching. Jim Briskin, the black candidate of the minorities, must find new ideas to be elected. Then comes the opportunity when a defective translator, a door that lets people travel in space and time, has been brought back for repairing. One soon finds a crack in the translator ; when entering it, one discovers a superb planet very similar to Earth and waiting for colonization. To Jim Briskin, it's the idea...
The Divine Invasion
Conceived on the planet CY30-CY30B, Manny is still in the womb when his mother Rybys and father Herb return to Earth. In a car collision, Rybys is killed and Herb thrown into a coma which lasts 10 years, but Manny is brought to term by a synthowomb and taken in hand by an old man named Elias Tate. Elias intends to protect the boy from the authorities, political and religious powers supported by the giant AI system known as Big Noodle, who have foreseen t...
The Game-Players of Titan
After wars between China and the US wiped out all but several million on Earth, the inhabitants of Titan -- known familiarly as "vugs" -- found it easy to take over. For some reason, though humans have found the key to long life, they also experience great difficulty reproducing, and the vug administration has imposed the Game on earthlings as a method of keeping them occupied. Pete Garden, 150 years old, has been married 18 times (hardly out of the ordi...
The Ganymede Takeover
Later in the 21st century, the Ganymedians will have conquered the Earth. They look like big worms, they are telepathists and consider the human people as an underdeveloped species. Only a few black men, under the commandment of Spike X, still resist hidden in the Tennessee mountains. After having escaped from the jails of a mad psychiatrist hired by the worms to break his resistance, Spike X steals some machines that do have the power to create illusion...

Philip K. Dick information

The Man In The High Castle
The Japanese and Germans won the Second World War in 1947. Now it is 1962, and they are still jockeying subtly for power over their halves of the world, and especially in the former U.S. Frank Frink, an LA metalworker in one of the industries that fabricates historic weapons and other fake antiques for an avid collector's market, is recently divorced and has lost his job. His ex-wife Juliana is a judo instructor in Colorado. They, along with Robert Child...
The Man Who Japed
In the year 2114, Allen Purcell heads his own private research agency in Newer York. Ever since the late 20th century revolution headed by Major Jules Streiter, society has been run by the principles of "Morec" (Moral Reclamation). Most of Allen's work supports Telemedia, the government agency that controls all media communications, according to Morec. When the director of Telemedia announces his retirement, Allen is tapped as the replacement, but Allen ...
The Penultimate Truth
Fifteen years ago, governments of the Earth, fearing a nuclear apocalypse, have agreed to send the entire population under ground. Fortunetely no major bombing happened and peace reigns again on Earth. But people are still hidden. A technical aristocracy has decided to let the population unaware of the real situation on earth by using false broadcasts about a nuclear war still going on between the United States and Soviet Union. Nicholas Saint-Jam...
The Simulacra
The year is 2041. All entertainment is contracted to the White House (television is only educational/informational now), where the First Lady, lovely and youthful Nicole Thibodeaux, has ruled with a succession of simulacra (robots) unknowingly "elected" by the voters for 73 years. The government is quietly planning to dump the big corporation that has been building its presidents in favor of a very small company. Nicole and her team have also been using ...
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch takes place in a not too distant future where the Earth is becoming increasingly hot, and many people are forced by the government to "emigrate" to planets such as Mars. These expatriates live in cramped "hovels" and escape harsh reality by taking a mind bending drug called Can-D, which allowes them, for a short while, to inhabit dolls in a playset (not unlike Ken and Barbie), giving the illusion that they are back o...
The World Jones Made
Jones is a tryannical ruler who must be disposed of. It is very difficult, however, as he seems to know his aggressors' every move. For Jones has a strange defect - he mainly lives one year into the future - so that everything that others experience as 'now' happended a year ago for him. Another of Philip K's brilliant ideas, well presented. ...
The Zap Gun
Lars Powderdry is part of a fake arms race that falls apart when aliens invade. Lars Powderdry runs a fake weapons company in an alternate future 2004 where the cold war is faked so that governments can make money. Lars is unhappy with the fact that his company makes weapons that don't work. Workers are kept in a drugged state as they work and are shown comic book images so that they think the are really building weapons instead of furniture and toys. He...
Time Out of Joint
This is an older PKD work written in '59 but well worth a read today. It sets up the the theme of Man vs. Reality which became prevelant throughout all his subsequent writings. Interesting to note is how closely the film the Truman Show borrows the concepts from this novel. "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away" Phillip K. Dick. ...
Ubik
UBIK is a book written by Philip K. Dick in 1969. 1992. There is a latent war going on between Glen Runciter, head of Runciter associates, an organization that tries to discover people able to see the future and Ray Hollis who employs such people. Runciter and a dozen of his best hunters are hired by Stanley Mick, a wealthy businessman, and must fly to Earth's Moon in order to find Hollis's men working amidst his employees. But this is a trap and Runc...
Valis
This late (1980) novel mixes autobiography and science fiction, drug trips and theologic speculation, into a bewildering brew. Horselover Fat, troubled by the suicide deaths of several women friends and his own suicidal tendencies, argues religion with various friends, including the narrator ("Philip K. Dick"), until all of them catch a cheap science fiction movie called "Valis" that suggests an ancient, greater civilization placed a satellite in orbit t...
Vulcan's Hammer
A world government has finally been achieved, after many years of warring and turmoil, earth is united under the governing force of Unity, the worldwide governing system. Unity is not all that it's cracked up to be however; under the surface plots and counterplots seeth. The directors of the 11 regions that now make up the united Earth government are constantly jockeying for position, while those in the lower ranks vie to make the step up to the direct...
We Can Build You
It is 1982. Louis Rosen and Maury Rock are partners in a faltering keyboard factory in Oregon. Maury's 18-year-old daughter Priscilla (who has been hospitalized in the past for schizophrenia), has an idea for the company to create Civil War robots. Their first prototype is an Edwin Stanton, then they make a Lincoln. Seattle millionaire tycoon Sam Barrows shows interest in both the simulacra (as the robots are called) and Pris, but rather than deal he con...
World of Chance
Dick's story, published in 1956, bears an uncomfortable resemblance to present-day circumstances. In World of Chance, a few corporate powers control the world. When the Bottle twitches an unknown into the number one position, ironically restoring the original intent of the designers of the system, a team from the Directorate arrive. They expect that Cartwright will, like almost everyone else, have sworn fealty to one of the 'Hills' (multinational cor...