A recent sale on audiobooks at Apple’s iTunes store resulted in my purchasing Minority Report and Other Stories by Philip K. Dick. The audiobook contains a number of short stories, two of which I had seen the movie adaptations for: Minority Report and We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, (which Total Recall was based on.)
I have to say, I loved the stories. All of them. Aside from the aforementioned stories, Paycheck was perhaps my personal favorite. It’s the story of a mechanic who wakes up with two years of his memory gone as part of the conditions of a job he took, and learns he decided to forgo his salary in exchange for a bag of seemingly worthless objects that he had left for himself before his memory was erased. Second Variety was another great story worth mentioning.
Anyways, after finishing the audiobook, and being totally taken by Philip K. Dick’s extraordinary talent for science fiction, I decide to buy five volumes of his collected short stories. It will take some time to get through these volumes, and I’m excited to get started.
If you like the shorts you might really like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? This is the novel that was adapted as Blade Runner.
Here are some short stories that are considered particularly good:
The Electric Ant
The Adjustment Team
Faith of Our Fathers
Have fun!
Randomly clicked on your link from that facebook group you’re in: deliciously synchronistic in the jungian sense – I’m a whopping great fan of Philip K Dick – got all his short stories and tons of his novels too.
As well as ‘Do Androids Dream..’ I’d highly recommend ‘Now Wait For Last Year’ and ‘The Man in the High Castle’ – now there’s two more books crying out for film adaptions…
Cheers for the interesting blog!
Thanks for the recommendations Laura and Irving. I have put the novels you both recommended on my Amazon Wishlist and will certainly order them in the near future. I will also keep watch for the short stories Laura mentioned.
As of today, I’ve read six short stories for the first volume of collected short stories by Philip K. Dick. I just finished “The Skull” and that one is probably my favorite of the ones I’d not previous read. I think “Paycheck” is my favorite of all the ones I’ve read so far — but there’s still lots more to go!