the world Dick made

A survivor of a war between Venus and Earth appears to somehow travel back in time, arriving on Earth days before the conflict begins when tensions between the two planets is at an all-time high. Earthmen at the City Hospital eventually uncover the Venusian plot to use a simulacra of a war veteran from the future to trick Earth into believing they will lose an upcoming war in order to prevent a war between the planets that Venus doesn’t want to fight.

This pulp potboiler, like a number of other stories Dick wrote in the 1950s, is populated with wooden characters and much too long.

Cast of characters

• David Unger – the titular war vet who supposedly served under Nathan West
• Vachel Patterson – cancer specialist at the City Hospital
• Edwin LeMarr – neurologist at the City Hospital
• Evelyn Cutter – records keeper at the City Hospital
• John V-Stephens – a Venusian surgeon at the City Hospital
• V-Rafia – a Venusian girl rescued from a crazed mob
• Nathan West – Lieutenant on the battleship Wind Giant
• Francis Gannet – owns Transplan Industries

Leon Wiseman is in charge of making sure imported Ganymedean toys are safe for human children. His preoccupation with an ultimately benign group of toy soldiers that storms a citadel allows a Monopoly-like board game to slip through the approval process with ironic results. The end of this one made me laugh.

Cast of characters

• Leon Wiseman – works at the Terran Import Bureau of Standards
• Fowler – Wiseman’s boss
• Pinario – works in the testing labs of the Import Bureau
• Joe Hauck – sales manager at a toy store
• Bobby and Lora Hauck – Joe Hauck’s children

Doc Labyrinth can’t stand the idea that all of our culture’s art, literature and especially music will one day be lost to time. His unorthodox solution is a machine which outputs animals after being fed sheet music of famous composers.

These animals, created from Mozart, Brahms, Bach, etc., eventually make their way into the woods behind his house, and when Doc and his friend next encounter these creatures, they find they have evolved into vicious beasts. When one of these is returned to the machine to be converted back into music the hideous result bears no resemblance to the original score.

Cast of characters

• Doc Labyrinth – inventor of the titular preserving machine
• the unnamed narrator – Doc’s companion

Victor Kemmings’s cryonic suspension malfunctions while en route to a distant planet. Because only his brain is awake, the ship’s A.I. system decides to create simulated realities in Kemmings’s mind in order to prevent him from becoming a vegetable during the remaining ten years of the trip.

The initial world constructed by the ship takes Kemmings back to when he was married with his first wife Martine, but Kemmings’s mind rejects it. The second world goes farther back in his subconscious to an incident during his childhood when he helped his cat kill a bird. This world, like the others to come, is also rejected because of Kemmings’s deep-seated neurotic anxieties.

The ship decides to simulate a world on the colony planet as if they’ve already arrived. Kemmings’s mind sees through this phony setup too as the scenario plays out again and again. When they finally do arrive in the real world, where the ship has arranged his first wife Martine to greet them, Kemmings still believes he is trapped in the loop of simulated realities.

This story was originally published under the title “Frozen Journey” in Playboy in 1980.

Cast of characters

• The ship’s A.I.
• Victor Kemmings – an emigrant on his way to the colony planet LR4-6
• Martine – Kemmings’s first wife

This brief story is part of a recap in an intergalactic trial.

Three humans on a monitoring mission in the vicinity of the Proxima Centaurus System are killed during an accident. Because of the location, the so-called “Approximations” from Proxima intervene. Two of the humans are fully and totally dead, but the Approximations are able to regenerate the brain of the third human, a female named Rautavaara.

What happens next occurs in Rautavaara’s brain as time runs backwards to just before the disaster, and Rautavaara and her two companions are visited by Christ. The Approximations decide to conduct an experiment, and they alter Rautavaara’s hallucination so that the humans encounter the Approximation’s version of a savior instead of their own. This Proxima savior proceeds to eat the humans (noted as a reversal of the Christian sacrament when humans eat the flesh of the deity), and the horrified court then elects to shut down Rautavaara’s brain activity.

Cast of characters

• Agneta Rautavaara, Travis, Elms – three humans killed during a mishap in space
• “Approximations” – ET from the Proxima Centaurus System

Dick ham-handedly tries to encourage collegiate freethinking in this tale of Bob Bibleman who is tricked into mandatory acceptance at ‘the College’ and once there ends up in the possession of some documents the head of the College previously stated were top secret.

The College demands the documents back, and Bibleman eventually hands them over, failing the test set up to see if a student would comply or share the documents which could benefit all mankind. He is expelled for doing what he is told instead of thinking for himself and returns to his old, meek existence.

Cast of characters

• Bob Bibleman – new student at the College
• Major Casals – head of the College
• Mary Lorne – a fellow new student at the College