Philip K Dick

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 The Skull, a convict is offered his freedom if he agrees to travel back in time and kill someone. He learns that the assassination target was the founder of a religious sect that grew in strength and influence from its inception in 1960. Carrying his target's skull so he can identify the religious leader, the convict comes to learn a terrible secret about why he was chosen to find its owner.

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...

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 Defenders, the Soviet and American survivors of a nuclear holocaust have created vast underground tunnels, so as to continue the war on the surface via remote control robots. When a robot from the surface is found not to be radioactive, a team of American scientists returns topside to investigate this anomaly. Expecting to see massive devastation, the scientists are unprepared for the shocking truth that awaits them.

In Piper in the Woods, an army doctor is asked to treat a soldier from Asteroid Y-3 who claims he is a plant. This wouldn't be a problem, but the soldier is incapable of any physical activity, preferring to stand still and point himself towards the sun. When more soldiers return from Asteroid Y-3 also claiming to be plants, Dr. Harris travels there to investigate. While there, he learns about a mysterious indigenous people living in the woods called...

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?

From the iconic author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, stories that inspired the original dramatic series. Though perhaps most famous as a novelist, Philip K. Dick wrote more than one hundred short stories over the course of his career, each as mind-bending and genre-defining as his longer works. Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams collects ten of the best. In "Autofac," Dick shows us one of the earliest examples (and warnings) in science...

From Philip K. Dick, the Hugo Award–winning author of The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—the basis for the film Blade Runner—Now Wait for Last Year is the novel of an Earth caught in an interstellar war and of an addictive hallucinogenic drug that causes time travel side effects.
Earth is trapped in the crossfire of an unwinnable war between two alien civilizations. Its leader...

"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 trapped in a mind-bending alternate reality ruled by Old Testament morality, where the smallest infraction can bring about a plague of locusts. Escape from that world is not

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