Review: 13 Short Stories by Philip K. Dick

13 Short Stories by Philip K. Dick by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

One of my rare forays into science fiction. It still isn't my favorite genre, but it's nice from time to time. 

These stories sound very cold-war-ish, which I guess they are, and after a while they all have similarities, so I can guess what the twist is, or how it will end. 

Once again, Goodreads does not give me enough space for all my private notes, so I will have to store them here in the public notes section. Along those lines, everything that follows below CONTAINS SPOILERS:

SPOILERS BELOW:

1: Beyond lies the Wub. There is a fat pig-like creature that is sold by "natives" to people on a spaceship. They want to kill the creature and eat it, but the creature speaks. It asks not to be killed (but doesn't beg or anything). The captain decides to shoot it anyway. He is the only one to then eat it, and after a while it turns out the creature is speaking through him, and just transferred body. The author missed an opportunity not calling this "Therein lies the wub", imho. 

2: The gun: Some astronauts come upon a country devastated by nuclear fission. But they are shot at by a gun. They land for repairs. The planet sounds like earth to me. Anyway, turns out the gun was operating automatically, so they disarmed it, planning to return with a team to retrieve all the objects. As they leave more robots are fixing the gun. 

3. The Skull: A man is sent back in time to kill a man who will end all war. Turns out the man he's supposed to kill is himself. 

4. The Defenders: Everyone's living underground due to nuclear holocaust. Robots on the surface fight their war for them. Turns out the robots were lying and it isn't radioactive anymore, but they weren't told bc the robots were trying to end war. Cheesy ending where they meet some Russians and somehow communicate and get along. 

5. The eyes have it: Amusing criticism of turns of phrase, and possibly bad editing (which would be ironic, given the not-so-good editing of this book)

6. Hanging Stranger: A man sees a body hanging from a lamppost in town. But everyone besides the main protagonist seems so nonchalant about it. Turns out it was bait so the aliens could find out who they weren't able to turn. 

7. Mr. Spaceship: In the interplanetary war, they decide to control a spaceship using a brain. They find an old professor, who accepts, with some tweaks. Anyway, he's taken control of the spaceship, and gets two of his pupils (male and female) to repopulate a new planet with a brand new (very inbred) human race. 

8. Piper in the woods: People start turning into plants (or being convinced they are plants), including the man sent to the woods to figure out what was going on. 

9: Second Variety: This was probably my favorite thus far. There are robots created to destroy humans (heat-seeking). Turns out the robots have been building other robots, which look just like humans. An American gets taken in by Russians in their bunker. One of them kills the other, thinking he's a robot. But he's not. Turns out the russian shooter was a robot. The American tells the remaining russian girl how to get to the base (he is injured) on the moon. He discovers she was a robot too. He smiles thinking how this new race of beings already started finding ways to destroy each other, like humans did. 

10: Tony and the beetles: A human kid, living on a beetle planet, plays with beetle friends. Humans must be colonists, because when the war turns in the beetles' favor, they start treating the boy badly. I noticed they called the humans "white grubs", "because of their softness, their whiteness". So, I guess only white people colonized the planet. 

11: The Variable man: This was the longest story, and possibly my favorite. A man from 1913 is brought to the future by mistake. altering the probabilities of successfully annihilating some other planet (but no one knows why). Regardless, a bad politician plans to kill him, while the engineer wants to hire him. He is able to and the man fixes their space rocket that can travel faster than the speed of light, so they don't need to annihilate the other planet anymore (they can travel to other dimensions or something now). The bad politician is arrested. 

12: Beyond the door: An odd story. A man buys a cuckoo clock for his wife. she loves it and speaks to it, but she's having an affair with another man and gets caught. She gets kicked out.  The man decides to smash the cuckoo clock, but it apparently pecks at him and makes him fall and die. 

13: The Crystal Crypt: 3 terrans find a way to miniaturize a Martian city and fit it in a globe, escaping on the last ship to earth. They tell their story to a man, who turns out to be martian and stops them. Once again, Martians see humans as pale, so I guess only white humans are on Mars or something. 

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