Philip K Dick

A drug dealer of the future periodically moves away from his spaced-out world to become an informer for narcotics agents until he becomes unable to separate his two personalities.

"Jason Taverner is a Dix, the product of top secret government experiments forty years earlier which produced a handful of unnaturally bright and beautiful people. He is also a TV star, the prime-time idol of millions... until, inexplicably, all record of him disappears from the data banks. Now he is a man with no identity, in a police state where everybody's records are monitored. Can he ever be rich and famous again... if, indeed, those memories...

"I have never seen [its] theme handled with greater technical dexterity or given more psychological meaning."—Fantasy and Science Fiction
When a routine tour of a particle accelerator goes awry, Jack Hamilton and the rest of his tour group find themselves in a world ruled by Old Testament morality, where the smallest infraction can bring about a plague of locusts. Escape from that world is not the end, though, as they plunge into a Communist...

The Eyes Have It is a humorous, early short story by Philip K. Dick that first appeared in Science Fiction Stories in 1953. In it, a bus-riding reader of a discarded melodrama with an overactive imagination is persuaded by the hackneyed prose that the world has been taken over by aliens. Thus, when eyes slowly roved around the room, the reader imagines disembodied eyeballs traveling of their own free will. A rare example of satire from the Dick canon....

In Beyond the Door, a man buys a cuckoo clock for his wife who has always wanted one. When he catches her cheating on him, the man throws his wife out of the house with her lover. Though he never really cared for the clock, he keeps winding it because he dislikes the silence. But the cuckoo clock, who preferred the wife's company, begins to plot against its owner.

In The Gun, a group of space explorers are shot down above a deserted planet. While some of the crew work on repairing the ship, the remainder set out to investigate the planet. Otherwise unpopulated, they discover the huge gun that shot them down sitting atop a trove of cultural artifacts from a bygone civilization. What harm could come of dismantling the gun and taking a few of the artifacts home with them?

In Tony and the Beetles, ten-year old Tony Rossi, an Earthman growing up on Betelgeuse, becomes aware that the natives, known as the Pas-Udeti, are driving out the Earthmen colonists on nearby Orion. His father, a staunch believer in the superiority of Earthmen, describes Tony's native friends as Beetles. A trip into town to meet his native friends leads to awkward encounters with a Pas-Udeti cab driver and a fellow bus passenger. When his newly aggressive...

"World War III is raging -- or so the millions of people crammed in their underground tanks believe. For fifteen years, subterranean humanity has been fed on daily broadcasts of a never-ending nuclear destruction, sustained by a belief in the all powerful Protector. But up on Earth's surface, a different type of reality reigns. East and West are at peace. And across the planet, an elite corps of expert hoaxers preserve the lie."

An artist searches for God so he can paint his portrait in Philip K. Dick's collaboration with Roger Zelazny. After World War III, the Servants of Wrath cult deified the mysterious Carlton Lufteufel, creator of the doomsday weapon that wiped out much of humanity. But to worship the man, they need an image of him as a god, and no one has ever seen him. So the high priests send a limbless master painter named Tibor McMasters into the wilderness on

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In The Variable Man, Earth (The Terran System) is in a cold war with the older, corrupt Centaurian System, suppresses Terra from exploring space and expanding its borders. When a devastating new weapon called Icarus is developed by Terra, everyone expects the odds to tip in Terra's favor. But the computers calculating these odds find an unknown variable that throws off the odds. A time traveler from 1913, known as Thomas Cole has arrived. Can this...