Rat’s Reading

I’ve decided to start blogging a Sunday Salon entry, at least periodically. My current reading routine is to sit at The Black Drop starting in the late morning and read for a few hours prior to heading to my mother’s. However, The Black Drop is closed Sundays. So I need a new routine. We’ll see if this one works for me.

Though I’m not sure exactly how this routine will work. Ms. Hamel’s Sunday Salon page describes a large room where lots of people read. I tend to think of The Black Drop when I read that. Nearly every time I’m there about half the clientèle can be found reading a book, though usually it’s a textbook in front of a W.W.U. student. Here, I’m sitting at home. It just doesn’t feel very salon-like to read in bed. Perhaps I’ll head downstairs to my sofa and read there. It’s winter though, and this townhouse seems to have a problem keeping the first floor well heated. Like at The Black Drop though, I will have a cup of something hot to keep the insides toasty, despite the dearth of heat in my living room. I picked up a Bodum De Chine teapot with infuser from Remedy Teas in Seattle. I’m not drinking one of their teas today though. Today I am drinking a Market Spice tea. My mom gave me all her loose-leaf tea last week, since she no longer can drink it and my step-father is a Folgers coffee person.

For today’s reading I’ve grabbed a collection of Philip K. Dick’s short stories from my ever-growing stack of books to read. He’s the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which became Blade Runner in the cinematic world. A number of his short stories were also turned into movies as well. Four of them are included in the tome I just started.

Fair Game

Extra-dimensional aliens watch a nuclear physicist, who realizes what’s going on. He becomes obsessed and determines they are watching him because he is the pre-eminent nuclear physicist in the world.

The Hanging Stranger

A man emerges from a day of work in his basement. On his way to the store he owns, he sees a body hanging from a post. Strangely though, everyone else doesn’t seem to pay it much thought. Including even the police officers who arrive to take his statement when he calls the authorities. He figures something is wrong and begins to run.

The Eyes Have It

This isn’t so much a story as Dick using a character to ruminate on some figures of speech.

• his eyes slowly roved about the room
• his eyes moved from person to person
• his eyes fastened on Julia
• he put his arm around Julia
• she asked him if he would remove his arm
• we split up
• Bibney lost his head again

Look at those lines again. Taken literally, we’d have some pretty amazing bodies that could do those things. Wouldn’t we be aliens if we could do those things?

The Golden Man

Mutants! Every time I read a mutant story, I really want to know whether it predated or postdated the X-Men. The X-Men was a comic that was used to examine prejudice in a non-threatening fashion. It wasn’t completely analogous to race or other stigmatized traits. Black people, by the color of their skin, are not a threat to anyone. Mutants, on the other hand, can do things like start flamethrowing from their hands! The comic used the fear of such actions as a proxy. And an appropriate question to follow is, why would you be afraid of someone because of what they can do rather than what they have done or what they’ve threatened to do?

Dick’s story is about a Golden Man. A mutant. The government is quite afraid of mutants. Not individually, however. The agents who find and track the Golden Man are pretty sure they can subdue any individual mutant. The fear is that mutants will breed and that will out-compete regular humans. The Golden Man is fast, lightning quick. And he can see the future. So, for instance, he knows where a gun will be fired, and its aim. He can move quickly enough to get out of the way.

What always gets me about these stories is similar to the same reaction I have to the argument against allowing homosexuals to marry. The other doesn’t threaten you. Mutants aren’t threatening normal humans in the story. Not individually. And not as a group. Not one normal human is harmed in the writing of this story. The fear is that, as a group, they will be replaced. The fear is that in the future, there won’t be people like themselves anymore. That’s it. If white people were to decline in percentage of the population because they were not having as much sex, would I feel threatened because 100 years from now there won’t be any pudgy sunburned bald white guys? Not hardly.

The Turning Wheel

Dick must have seen some sort of connection between Scientology and Buddhism, because this story imagines a future where the two are welded. Combine the Buddhist idea of reincarnation into higher or lower forms of life with the idea that karma is Scientology’s state of clear and you get this. It’s somewhat of a straw man though, as few people espouse the idea that the world is exactly as it should be and should not be changed. That’s the cosmic plan ascribed to the religion in the story. Good job knocking this one down Philip!

The Last Of The Masters

In the future, people tire of government and overthrow it. Except in one isolated area, where a small town-like place continues to exist. The rest of the world is ungoverned, and has no technology really either. Members of the Anarchist League patrol the countryside, looking for renegade governments. If they find any, they issue a call to arms to overthrow it.

The Father-Thing

Charles realizes one day that his father is no longer his father. Something has taken over his dad.

Strange Eden

After landing on a distant planet as part of some sort of expeditionary force, Brent finds the planet is inhabited. A strange but beautiful girl entices him. In the process Brent nearly becomes a rapist. This was a strange aspect to the story. Of course, things are not as they seem. It’s a Philip K. Dick story. Every single one of them so far has a fair amount of the paranoid schizophrenic component to the story: something has taken over someone’s body, aliens secretly have taken over the government, that sort of thing. I knew Philip K. Dick wrote dystopias, but I didn’t realize everything was a short story version of They Live. It’s good for a story. Perhaps even a decent movie. But story after story? I may have to recommend against reading this book even though I’m generally liking each individual story. We’ll see after I read the rest.

Tony and the Beetles

Tony is a kid on an alien planet. The aliens are the beetles, though that’s just the derogatory term most humans use for them. Tony is beyond that though. He and his Pas-udeti playmates. That’s the alien children. Anyhow, there’s a war going on between them, but the planet is human run and occupied. The aliens live by the sufferance of the humans. But the tide is turning halfway across the galaxy, and attitudes on the planet may be changing too.

Null-O

Lemuel is child devoid of normal human emotion. He sees things only logically. He sees the ideal as a universe of perfect uniformity. As in, everything reduced to Null-O, pure energy. Cue Information Society song please.

To Serve The Master

In the future, only Companies exist anymore, no governments. The Companies are governments, after a vast war, the result of which was that all fancy robots have been destroyed because they were on the losing side. Applequist is a letter carrier, and he stumbles upon a robot while out serving his route. He doesn’t reveal he found the derelict robot, but he starts asking questions. Of course, the company hierarchy in its not-so-infinite wisdom has decided that no one should really know anything. People should eat, do their jobs, and little else. Asking questions is verboten. So he sneaks parts to the robot, which repairs itself and in return answers Applequist’s questions about life before the war, and the history of the war. But again, all is not as it seems.

The Crawlers

Due to some sort of radiation accident, children in Ernest Gretry’s locale have been born without arms, legs, or pretty much anything that looks human, except for faces. Big amoeba-like worms they are. Most want to play in the dirt, and build underground tunnels. The populace looks at them with disgust, and the government finds them and puts them on a deserted island to play in the dirt to their own heart’s content. Yes, there’s a twist at the end. Yes it’s got indications of paranoia.

Sales Pitch

Now this is a truly brilliant story! Ed Morris is some sort of office worker on Ganymede. His home is on Earth. He travels in a Jetson-like personal space ship. Here’s the key though: there’s advertising everywhere. It’s transmitted straight to your ears and eyes as you drive by. It’s overwhelming. And once Ed gets home, a robot intrudes upon his domicile to give him yet another sales pitch, for a fasrad, short for Fully Automated Self-Regulating Android (Domestic). In other words, it’s selling itself. And it won’t take no for an answer.

Shell Game

Hey wow! Enough of stories with paranoid tendencies! How about a story about paranoid schizophrenics??! As in a ship full of them on their way to a hospital crash-lands, leaving them stranded. They construct not-so-rational delusions about themselves and how unknown outsiders are attacking them. Until one of them chances upon some tapes that reveal them to be paranoid schizophrenics. But even that could be a trick…

Upon The Dull Earth

This one is almost a fantasy story. But still, depressing. Silvia has a sixth sense for ghosts or angels or something from the beyond. She talks to them. She makes plans to join them early. But of course, her plans go awry and they take her too early in fact. Her fiancé Rick is understandably upset. He calls the beings from the beyond himself and implores them to return his beloved Silvia. They agree but warn that they are inexpert in returning people, and that the price could be fairly heavy. Rick says, not so shockingly, any price is worth it! And like all parables of this sort, we then get to see exactly how high a price Rick pays. It’s fairly inventive! Something that actually got me to think to myself Wow! That would be horrifying! But I’ll leave the spoiler off the review.

Foster, You’re Dead

Mike Foster is the son of John Sloane! No, that’s not an obscure literary reference. Let me explain. Mike Foster is a character in this story. The government has whipped up a frenzy of Soviet-fear. For years! And businesses sell new models of personal defense systems, bomb shelters, etc. every year. They make much money at this. They have new models to fight the latest movie-plot threat (Bruce Schneier should use this story). Mike Foster’s dad thinks it’s all a bunch of malarkey designed to sell these gadgets and refuses to pay for them. He’s a blowhard skinflint, like my friend Jason Sloane’s father. Mike Foster is the butt of jokes in school and the reject kid because he’s different, because of his family’s refusal to buy all these personal defense gadgets.

I personally love the nice little digs at the libertarian anti-government crowd that Philip K. Dick works into the story. One of the reasons why all the hype is blown up and geared toward products that individuals should purchase, is that the government won’t pay for the common defense. Because then it’s part of the commons and you run into the free rider problem. And people don’t value what they don’t directly pay for. No marginal cost, then people treat it like it has infinite marginal utility.

Pay For The Printer

This story fell flat for me. Post-apocalypse, an alien race discovers humans on Earth. Benevolent aliens that they are, they set up shop here and help humanity recover. The aliens have an ability to copy (print) any object they can get their hands on. Need a car? An alien can make a copy out of spit and ash, so long as he has an original to examine. Or a previously made copy. But now the aliens are dying, and people aren’t so happy.

War Veteran

A homeless veteran is found in a park. He’s not very healthy. But at the hospital the staff discovers that this veteran has an I.D. number from the future. And his war memories are of a war that hasn’t occurred yet. About to occur though. The hospital owner is one of the prime war proponents, because he thinks he can profit from it. But the vet’s memories of the war are that humans (as opposed to mutant human residents of Mars and Venus) lose. Decisively. And so the hospital owner begins to reconsider his support for the war. At first this story appears pretty complicated, but it’s a lot simpler than I thought.

The Chromium Fence

Don Walsh lives in a future where Purists and Naturalists are the political parties. The Purists want to force people by law to have no body odor, no unsightly hair, no halitosis. The Naturalists want everyone to be natural. Don Walsh thinks people are just find however they want to be, and doesn’t want to pick a side. In his view, it’s silly to kill people over body odor issues. The rest of society, however, disagrees.

We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (inspiration for Total Recall)

Now, when filmmakers get hold of a book, they often butcher it. This is not exception. Total Recall is not this story. But after reading the story, it’s pretty apparent that this wouldn’t have worked as written as a film. Nevertheless, the story is way better, just not suited for film treatment as written. Doug Quail has had a lifelong dream to go to Mars. But he can’t afford it on his government clerk salary. So he goes to Rekal, Inc. to have them implant a memory of a trip to Mars in his head. It will be just like he went there; he won’t even know it’s an implanted memory. But something goes wrong. In the film, Arnold Schwarzenegger as Doug Quail ends up going to Mars to figure out what’s going on, and finds out he’s a secret agent. The climactic scene is when a nervously sweaty man gives himself away as a real man when he’s trying to pass himself off as an implanted memory. The film version is more like Shell Game than this story, with people trying to determine if their memories are real replacing schizophrenics trying to determine whether delusions are real. But in We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, Doug Quail doesn’t have quite as much problem determining what is real. Read the story.

The Minority Report (inspiration for The Minority Report)

And now we have a story about precognition. Kind of standard knowledge of the future kind of story. If you know what the future is, can you change it? In this case, the government runs Precrime instead of the police. Precrime uses precognition to determine who is going to commit a major crime, then arrests the suspect before he can commit the crime. We begin when the precognitive savants/computers pick out the head of Precrime as the next murderer. It makes for a better movie than it does a short story actually, cause I’ve read this story before, just by other writers. And one irritating thing is how the former head of Precrime makes a speech about how immoral it is to incarcerate people based on crimes they won’t commit. Uh… I know Philip K. Dick had to have seen how obvious that was, and how out of character it would be for him to make the speech. Sure it’s classic irony, but it just doesn’t fit.

Paycheck (inspiration for Paycheck)

Here’s a question. What would your price be to lose some of your memory? Let’s say two years of your life. Not even your past memories. The proposition is: come work for Rethrick Industries for a couple of years and we’ll pay you an ungodly sum of money. The catch is, Rethrick will remove your memory of the incident. Now that’s an intriguing proposition to me. But that’s not even the real subject of the story. As in the movie, when Jennings comes to after having his memory erased, it turns out he’s decided against taking the money. Not that he can remember making the choice, that part has been erased along with the rest of the two years. Instead of untold riches, he gets seven little trinkets, and has to figure out what use they are. They must be worth more than the money, or he wouldn’t have picked them. I didn’t think this plot was anywhere near as interesting as the willingness to have one’s memory erased.

Second Variety (inspiration for Screamers)

The movie version is set on another planet, where two sides are at war. One side has created little robots, screamers, which kill soldiers (and other life) indiscriminately like roaming minefields or cluster bombs. Dick’s original was written well before the cold war was over, and it is all about the Americans versus the Soviets. Same scenario though, just played out somewhere in an apocalyptic France, halfway between the former countries. Only the robots are intelligent, and they start manufacturing new varieties of themselves. The new varieties look like people, and they can trick soldiers into letting the robots into protected bunkers. So which of the soldier-survivors left is robot, and which is human. More paranoia writing. For a better exploration of this in film than Screamers, check out Battlestar Galactica. At least the robots there are hot women, not ugly men with three day stubble.

Title: The Philip K. Dick reader
Author: Philip K. Dick
Cover artist: Zina Saunders
Imprint / publisher: Citadel Twilight / Carol Publishing
Format: Paperback
Length: 422 p.
Publication date:
ISBN-10: 0-8065-1856-1
Subject: Science fiction, American
LC classification: PS3554.I3 A6 1997

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