“Professor Anthony Douglas lowered gratefully into his red-leather easy chair and sighed. A long sigh, accompanied by a labored removal of his shoes and numerous grunts as he kicked them into the corner. He folded his hands across his ample middle and lay back, eyes, closed.
‘Tired?’ Laura Douglas, asked turning from the kitchen stove a moment, her dark eyes sympathetic.”
In this third volume of Philip K Dick stories, we get a similarly varied collection of space, future, technology, magic, dimensional, and other kinds of science fiction (and some small amount of fantasy) that we can expect, especially by number three. The stories that are most famous from this collection are probably “Upon a Dull Earth”, “Sales Pitch”, “The Golden Man”, “The Father-Thing,” and “War Veteran”. “The Golden Man” has been recently adapted into the movie Next with Nic Cage, and I have no idea what the movie is about, but the story is about the discovery of a new species or new stage of evolution in which the title man can see into the future, but just a little, and makes decisions based on what he sees. In “The Father-Thing” we have a horror story based on the slow replacement of people and how the leftover people are dealing with the changelings among them. In “Sales Pitch” a man is ready to head out into the wilderness of a planet because of the constant stress and anxiety of being advertising to in increasingly aggressive ways, only to be visited by an intrusive robot who is selling itself. For me, “War Veteran” is my favorite of the stories here. An old man is walking along when he’s noticed by a group of soldiers. He tells them he’s a veteran of the Venusian War and last served in ’87. Only it’s 2170, and there hasn’t been a war at all. In fact Venusians (human colonists who adapted to Venus’s atmosphere in various ways) walk among Earthlings, experiencing more and more prejudice and violence. The old man tells those in charge that Earth lost the war. When they come to suspect he was transported back in time, his knowledge of the future gets interpreted in two very different ways: avoiding the war or avoiding defeat, and the implications of each path.
I continue to like this stories, and in fact I haven’t read any of the novels since working through three collections (which amounts about 8 or so of the novels’ worth of reading) and I am even a little wary of headed back to them. We will see soon enough.