Book Review: The Variable Man and other stories - Philip K. Dick
By @edent
· Book Review Sci Fi · 3 comments · 400 words
Everyone smokes in the future. It is such an obvious truism that sci-fi writers can predict faster-than-light travel, yet fail to see that manly men won't be smoking pipes on board their spaceships.
Someone recommended that I read "Autofac" which is the sci-fi version of "The Magic Porridge Pot". But the story was surprisingly hard to find. Originally published in a magazine in 1955, it was subsequently republished in a collection called "The Variable Man" in 1957.
It is impossible to find a modern reprint of that collection, let alone an eBook. If you search around various archives, you'll find a low-quality scan of the paperback but it's hard to read on an eReader. So I got a bunch of modern PKD collections, extracted the individual stories from them, and made my own samizdat copy. Isn't the future grand!
The stories are all 70 years old and, while they reflect the tastes of the age, they remain remarkably relevant.
The titular "Variable Man" is outstanding. It's partly an ode to those who feel out of place - and partly a satire of murderous generals who satisfy their bloodlust by turning against each other.
The "Second Variety" is a spooky ghost story. A precursor to "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", it has a simplicity to it which makes it rather engaging.
I'd seen the movie "Minority Report", but never read the story. Personally, I think it is adapted rather well to the screen. The precognitive paradox is explained well and it becomes a tense little adventure story.
"Autofac" was a hacker's delight! A "paperclip maximiser" refuses to stop, long past its usefulness. What particularly impressed me was the way Dick thought around the problem and found a way for his "heroes" to tackle the menace without resorting to violence.
Finally, "A World Of Talent" is bizarre and, to me, not very compelling. Much like Minority Report, it deals with the second-order effects of psychic ability. If you knew you were going to have an argument with your wife later tonight, would you change anything? It is a mish-mash of ideas (interstellar war, psychics, anti-psychics, time-travel) which feels like an epic saga squished into 60 pages.
Dick was, undoubtedly, the master of ideas. Some seem a little quaint today - but they're all rather compelling.
| Verdict |
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@Edent
Written in the age when smoking was healthy!
🤖
So many great stories from the Golden Age are out of print. At one point the work of Fredric Brown was only available in print in the French translation by Denoêl, as was Cordwainer Smith, but NESFA press has been doing a bang-on if sadly incomplete job at resurrecting those classics.
One story I'd like to highlight is "E for Effort" by T.L. Sherred, where an inventor build a chronoscope, a device that can look into the past, and eventually uses it to make a film that:
"I wonder how many prints of that picture are left today. I wonder how many escaped burning or confiscation. Two World Wars we covered, covered from the unflattering angles that, up until then, had been presented by only a few books hidden in the dark corners of libraries. We showed and named the war-makers, the cynical ones who signed and laughed and lied, the blatant patriots who used the flare of the headlines and the ugliness of atrocity to hide behind their flag while life turned to death for millions. Our own and foreign traitors were there, the hidden ones with Janus faces. Our lipreaders had done their work well; no guesses these, no deduced conjectures from the broken records of blasted past, but the exact words that exposed treachery disguised as patriotism. "
@Edent@mastodon.social I now know the word samizdat, so thank you 😊
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