Tony and the Beetles By Philip K. Dick

The inspiration for the upcoming film Total Recall, starring Colin Farrell and Kate Beckinsale, and directed by Len Wiseman. This ebook-only edition of Philip K. Dick's classic short story tells the story of Douglas Quail, an unfulfilled bureaucrat who dreams of visiting Mars, but can't afford the trip. Luckily, there is Rekal Incorporated, a company that lets everyday stiffs believe they've been on incredible adventures. The only problem is that when technicians attempt a memory implant of a spy mission to Mars, they find that real memories of just such a trip are already in Quail's brain. Suddenly, Quail is running for his life from government agents, but his memories might make him more of a liability than he is worth. Originally published as "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale."

Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of mid-day. A metal sphere. It raced up the hill after the Russian, its treads flying. It was small, one of the baby ones. Its claws were out, two razor projections spinning in a blur of white steel. The Russian heard it. He turned instantly, firing. The sphere dissolved into particles. But already a second had emerged and was following the first. The Russian fired again. A third sphere leaped up the Russian’s leg, clicking and whirring. It jumped to the shoulder. The spinning blades disappeared into the Russian’s throat.

In Radio Free Albemuth, his last novel, Philip K. Dick morphed and recombined themes that had informed his fiction from A Scanner Darkly to VALIS and produced a wild, impassioned work that reads like a visionary alternate history of the United States. Agonizingly suspenseful, darkly hilarious, and filled with enough conspiracy theories to thrill the most hardened paranoid, Radio Free Albemuth is proof of Dick's stature as our century's greatest science fiction writer.

Based on thousands of pages of typed and handwritten notes, journal entries, letters, and story sketches, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is the magnificent and imaginative final work of an author who dedicated his life to questioning the nature of reality and perception, the malleability of space and time, and the relationship between the human and the divine. Edited and introduced by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, this will be the definitive presentation of Dick’s brilliant, and epic, final work. In The Exegesis, Dick documents his eight-year attempt to fathom what he called "2-3-74," a postmodern visionary experience of the entire universe "transformed into information." In entries that sometimes ran to hundreds of pages, Dick tried to write his way into the heart of a cosmic mystery that tested his powers of imagination and invention to the limit, adding to, revising, and discarding theory after theory, mixing in dreams and visionary experiences as they occurred, and pulling it all together in three late novels known as the VALIS trilogy. In this abridgment, Jackson and Lethem serve as guides, taking the reader through the Exegesis and establishing connections with moments in Dick’s life and work. "A great and calamitous sequence of arguments with the universe: poignant, terrifying, ludicrous, and brilliant. The Exegesis is the sort of book associated with legends and madmen, but Dick wasn’t a legend and he wasn’t mad. He lived among us, and was a genius."—Jonathan Lethem

On October 11 the television star Jason Taverner is so famous that 30 million viewers eagerly watch his prime-time show. On October 12 Jason Taverner is not a has-been but a never-was -- a man who has lost not only his audience but all proof of his existence. And in the claustrophobic betrayal state of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, loss of proof is synonyms with loss of life. Taverner races to solve the riddle of his disappearance", immerses us in a horribly plausible Philip K. Dick United States in which everyone -- from a waiflike forger of identity cards to a surgically altered pleasure -- informs on everyone else, a world in which omniscient police have something to hide. His bleakly beautiful novel bores into the deepest bedrock self and plants a stick of dynamite at its center.

A master of science fiction, a voice of the changing counterculture, and a genuine visionary, Philip K. Dick wrote about reality, entropy, deception, and the plight of being alive in the modern world. Through his remarkable career Dick has established himself as a writer of the first order and his dreams of the future have proven to be eerily prophetic and even more prescient than when he wrote them. Vintage PKD features extracts from The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, VALIS, and stories including “The Days of Perky Pat,” “A Little Something for Us Tempunauts," and “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon,” along with essays and letters currently unavailable in book form.   Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers, presented in attractive, affordable paperback editions. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Philip K. Dick Near-Complete: The Collected Short Fiction 150 short stories by Science Fiction Master Philip K. Dick, plus biographical material. A must-read for the PKD aficionado. Scanned, converted, re-formatted, proofed, custom title page, custom book cover and eBook creation by Jerry eBooks.  

Fourteen strangers came to Delmak-O. Thirteen of them were transferred by the usual authorities. One got there by praying. But once they arrived on that planet whose very atmosphere seemed to induce paranoia and psychosis, the newcomers found that even prayer was useless. For on Delmak-O, God is either absent or intent on destroying His creations. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Time Out of Joint is Philip K. Dick’s classic depiction of the disorienting disparity between the world as we think it is and the world as it actually is. The year is 1998, although Ragle Gumm doesn’t know that. He thinks it’s 1959. He also thinks that he served in World War II, that he lives in a quiet little community, and that he really is the world’s long-standing champion of newspaper puzzle contests. It is only after a series of troubling hallucinations that he begins to suspect otherwise. And once he pursues his suspicions, he begins to see how he is the center of a universe gone terribly awry. From the Trade Paperback edition.

"Shell Game" was originally published in 1954 for the first time. Later it was expanded into the "Clans of the Alphane Moon." (1964) When CIA agent Chuck Rittersdorf and his psychiatrist wife, Mary, file for divorce, they have no idea that in a few weeks they will be shooting it out on Alpha III M2, the distant moon ruled by various psychotics liberated from a mental ward. Nor do they suspect that Chuck's new employer, the famous TV comedian Bunny Hentman, will also be there aiming his own laser gun. How things came to such a darkly hilarious pass is the subject of Clans of the Alphane Moon, an astutely shrewd and acerbic tale that blurs all conventional distinctions between sanity and madness.

While sightseeing at the Belmont Bevatron, Jack Hamilton, along with seven others, is caught in a lab accident. When he regains consciousness, he is in a fantasy world of Old Testament morality gone awry—a place of instant plagues, immediate damnations, and death to all perceived infidels. Hamilton figures out how he and his compatriots can escape this world and return to their own, but first they must pass through three other vividly fantastical worlds, each more perilous and hilarious than the one before. Winner of both the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards for best novel, widely regarded as the premiere science fiction writer of his day, and the object of cult-like adoration from his legions of fans, Philip K. Dick has come to be seen in a literary light that defies classification in much the same way as Borges and Calvino. With breathtaking insight, he utilizes vividly unfamiliar worlds to evoke the hauntingly and hilariously familiar in our society and ourselves.

Many thousands of readers consider Philip K. Dick the greatest science fiction mind on any planet. Since his untimely death in 1982, interest in Dick's works has continued to mount and his reputation has been further enhanced by a growing body of critical attention. The Philip K. Dick Award is now given annually to a distinguished work of science fiction, and the Philip K. Dick Society is devoted to the study and promulgation of his works.This collection includes all of the writer's earliest short and medium-length fiction (including some previously unpublished stories) covering the years 1952-1955. These fascinating stories include Second Variety, Foster, You're Dead and The Father-Thing, and many others."A useful acquisition for any serious SF library or collection". -- Kirkus"The collected stories of Philip K. Dick is awe inspiring". -- The Washington Post"More than anyone else in the field, Mr. Dick really puts you inside people's minds". -- Wall Street JournalFrom School Library Journalea. vol: 400p. Underwood-Miller. 1987. set: $125. ISBN 0-88733-053-3. LC number unavailable. YA Dick is not just a good craftsman of short stories, but a successful writer of short science fiction stories. These vignettes will expand readers' points of view and challenge usual cultural assumptions. This collection traces Dick's growth as a writer, and also the application of major sci/fi themes over the 30 years between his first story in 1952 and his last in 1982. Thermonuclear war, xenophobia, and the tension between man and technology are among the recurring motifs. Each volume contains brief notes that date the stories and offer some context from the author's perspective. The price may seem high, but it compares favorably with the investment many libraries have in Heinlein and Asimov. These books lend themselves to ``cover-to-cover'' reading, an unusual feat for a five-volume collection. Dorcas Hand, Episcopal High School, BellaireCopyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalEncompassing 34 years and over 100 stories, this collection of the short fiction of the late author provides a retrospective of his contribution to sf literature. Arranged chronologically (with publication history and, in some cases, Dick's own commentaries at the end of each volume), the progression from early stories such as "The Preserving Machine" (1953) to "The Little Black Box" (1964) and "Frozen Journey" (1980) traces the development of one of sf's most eccentric and articulate minds. Highly recommended for any library whose budget can afford the price. JCCopyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

When a group of men crash to the surface of an alien planet, they are hemmed in on all sides by a deadly, un-crossable bog. Attacked by an unknown enemy, the group grows increasingly uncertain as the violence escalates while the enemy combatant remains unseen and no bodies are ever recovered.Philip K. Dick was an American science-fiction novelist, short-story writer and essayist. His first short story, "Beyond Lies the Wub," was published shortly after his high school graduation. Some of his most famous short stories were adapted for film, including "The Minority Report," "Paycheck," "Second Variety" (adapted into the film Screamers) and "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" (adapted into the film Total Recall).HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital...