“We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” might be my favorite title of any PKD story.

Douglas Quail dreams of an exciting trip to Mars, but since he can’t afford it on his Earth salary he settles for the next best thing, a session at Rekall, Incorporated which promises to implant a memory of a visit to Mars indistinguishable from the actual experience. During the procedure we find out he’s already been to Mars as an undercover agent after which his memory was wiped. Once aware of the truth he has to deal with the Interplan officers who want him dead.

Anyone who has seen Total Recall knows the premise. The Schwarzenegger movie, another of Dick’s best-known adaptations, heads off in a different direction from the telegraphed ending of the short story. I understand the interest in an updated film that differs from the Paul Verhoeven 90s time capsule, but watching the 2012 remake starring Colin Ferrell is a boring chore.

Again (as he did in The Penultimate Truth) Dick makes use of the real-life address of his literary agent at 580 Fifth Avenue in New York, this time as the main barracks of Interplan.

Cast of characters

• Douglas Quail – our protagonist
• Kristen Quail – Douglas’s wife
• McClane – Rekall, Inc. supervisor
• Lowe – Rekall, Inc. technician

In A Game of Unchance Dick imagines colonists on Mars as small-town rubes being played for fools by a ring of traveling alien carnivals.

After being swindled by one of these carnivals and losing most of their crops, members of a Martian settlement vow to get back at the next carnival that drops in. When another traveling sideshow visits they put their plan into action. A boy with psychokinetic powers cheats to help them snag a big prize, but the tiny figurines they win turn out to be an army of robots that soon take over their land like a plague.

The UN assumes the robots were meant for something else and that the Martian colonists thwarted some grand nefarious carny plan by winning that game. But then the next traveling carnival arrives with more rigged games, including one with a prize of homeostatic traps that would capture the robots previously let loose, and Fred and the others just can’t seem to grasp the cycle of loss they are caught up in.

Cast of characters

• Bob Turk – member of the Martian settlement
• Hoagland Rae – the Martian settlement’s leader
• Fred Costner – a young boy from the Martian settlement with psychokinetic abilities
• Tony Costner – Fred’s dad
• General Mozart, General Wolff  – UN officers

Mars is desperately needed by both Earth and Prox for their overflowing populations, but only Milt Biskle suspects that the Proxmen and not the humans were in fact the victors of the war fought over that planet.

When Milt travels back to Earth after his successful Martian terraforming project he finds his suspicions confirmed. The Proxmen have constructed an elaborate illusion that life on Earth has continued so they can lure the human engineers back to their home planet in order to now terraform it for Prox, since the oceans were vaporized during the war.

Milt eventually resigns himself to this reality and heads back to Mars with a kitten, the titular precious artifact which is itself part of the Prox simulation, something Milt doesn’t recognize.

Cast of characters

• Milt Biskle – a terraforming engineer on Mars
• Dr. DeWinter – Milt’s psychiatrist
• Mary Ableseth – Milt’s tour guide companion back on Earth

The underground-dwelling flukers* are all that remains of humanity after a hydrogen war leaves the land permanently uninhabitable due to radiation and feral mutated animals.

Members of the Pinole fluke pit in Northern California live off of care packages dropped by Martians and pass the time by playing a board game with a Barbie-like Perky Pat doll. When they hear about an Oakland fluke pit that plays a similar game with a doll named Connie Companion Norm and Fran Schein meet the Oakland flukers halfway in Berkeley to face them in a game where the winner receives the other flukers’ doll. The Scheins return to Pinole victorious, but when the rest of the Pinole flukers find out that Connie Companion is grown up, married, pregnant and has a job unlike the perpetual teen Perky Pat they get gravely offended (which I couldn’t quite grasp this overreaction), banish the Scheins, and Sam Regan decides to leave with them.

It’s an oddball story interesting mostly if seen as a sketch for one of Dick’s best novels The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

*because it was a fluke they survived

Cast of characters

• Tod and Helen Morrison, Norm and Fran Schein, Sam and Jean Regan – members of the Pinole fluke pit. Same or similar names as the Mars colonists in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
• Timothy Schein – the Schein’s ten-year-old boy
• Fred Chamberlain – a child from the Pinole fluke pit
• Hooker Glebe – mayor of the Pinole fluke pit
• Ben Fennimore – member of the Berkeley fluke pit
• Walter Wynn, Charley Dowd, Peter Foster – members of the Oakland fluke pit

With the help of three precog mutants, a precrime police agency eliminates major crimes in society by arresting people before they actually break any laws.

When precrime commissioner John Anderton is tagged by the precogs for killing a man he doesn’t know, he assumes he is being framed by the newcomer Ed Witwer who wants his job. What he doesn’t know is that the Army, rendered toothless by the precrime division, wants to return to power.

The precogs saw a future where Anderton kills the Army General Kaplan after their power grab. We find out that the precrime system relies on a majority report from two precogs who agree on an outcome in the future, which means the remaining precog generates a minority report where no crime is committed. When Anderton doesn’t kill Kaplan, Kaplan uses this to try to shut precrime down under the assumption that Anderton was about to be arrested based on a minority report that won’t come true. Anderton then chooses to kill Kaplan after all to renew public trust in precrime by proving that it does work after all.

It’s a great twisting story, and Spielberg’s 2002 movie is probably Dick’s most well-known adaptation. It alters the plot somewhat with a result that is a bit too convoluted and contrived, although it is second only to Blade Runner in its groundbreaking vision of a future based on Dick’s work.

A sequel to the movie aired as a TV adaptation on Fox for one season in 2015. I can’t say much about it other than it had poor reviews and I barely even remembered it existed.

Cast of characters

• John Anderton – precrime commissioner
• Ed Witwer – Anderton’s new associate
• Lisa Anderton – Andertons wife and an official executive of precrime
• Leopold Kaplan – an Army general and the man Anderton is supposed to kill
• Fleming – an Army major working for Kaplan
• Jerry, Donna, Mike – the three precogs
• Wally Page – Anderton’s assistant

After a war leaves humans scattered in settlements around the U.S., unmanned automatic factories continue to churn out consumer goods while expanding and using up more and more natural resources.

Humans, lacking any other way to stop these autofacs, pit the factories in adjacent cities against each other as the autofacs scavenge for the same raw materials. The Kansas City factory ends up destroyed by a factory from another city, or at least it appears that way until the humans discover that deep underground the factory has started to manufacture miniature replicas of the factory itself that will presumably take over the entire earth.

This story was adapted for season one of Electric Dreams which takes the premise in a different direction with a not-too-satisfying twist ending.

Cast of characters

Earl Perine, Morrison, O’Neill, Judith O’Neill – members of a settlement in Kansas City