Intro
A 2017 TV series entitled Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams recently came to my attention. It's a collection, an adaptation of ten, less than novel length, stories.
An intriguing aspect of the TV series is the age of the stories selected for adaptation. PKD wrote all of the stories during the 1950s, close to the start of his career as an author. As such, all ten stories are apparently now in the public domain.
Readers can utilize archive.org links, found near the bottom of this webpage, to read the pertinent source stories. Three stories are found in archive.org's online copy of The Philip K Dick Reader.
Happy reading to all PKD fans!
Title, teaser, cover, & blurb
| Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams |
| The stories that inspired the original dramatic series. |
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|
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 fiction of self-replicating machines. “Exhibit Piece” and “The Commuter” feature Dick exploring one of his favorite themes: the shifting nature of reality and whether it is even possible to perceive the world as it truly exists. And “The Hanging Stranger” provides a thrilling, dark political allegory as relevant today as it was when Dick wrote it at the height of the Cold War. Strange, funny, and powerful, the stories in this collection highlight a master at work, encapsulating his boundless imagination and deep understanding of the human condition. |
Original Story Links
| Original title | Publication | Page number | Adaptation |
|---|---|---|---|
| “Exhibit Piece” | Worlds of IF, August 1954 | 63 | "Real Life" |
| “The Commuter” | Amazing Stories, August-September 1953 | 140 | "The Commuter" |
| “The Impossible Planet” | Imagination, October 1953 | 128 | "The Impossible Planet" |
| “the hanging stranger” | Science Fiction Adventures, December 1953 | 122 | "Kill All Others" |
| “Sales Pitch” | The Philip K. Dick Reader | 175 | "Crazy Diamond" |
| “The Father-Thing” | The Philip K. Dick Reader | 101 | "The Father-Thing" |
| “The Hood Maker” | Imagination, June 1955 | 92 | "The Hood Maker" |
| “Foster, You’re Dead” | The Philip K. Dick Reader | 221 | "Safe and Sound" |
| “Human Is” | Startling Stories, March 1955 | 67 | "Human Is" |
| “Autofac” | Galaxy, November 1955 | 70 | "Autofac" |
Links
© 2020 Don Kuenz