the world Dick made

U.S. tempunaut Addison Doug shows up at his wife’s house, soon joined by fellow tempunauts Benz and Crayne, just after news comes in that their time capsule has imploded on reentry returning from a mission to travel one hundred years into the future. It’s understood that they are on some kind of ‘emergence time,’ but they may or may not also be stuck in a time loop. Signs point to Addison, the only person who suspects this, as the one who sabotaged their reentry in order to break them out of the loop for good.

I won’t pretend to understand everything about this story (particularly how the Emergence Time Activity is supposed to work), but it’s a clever reimagining of the Cold War U.S.-Soviet space race.

Cast of characters

• Addison Doug, Benz, Crayne – tempunauts in the U.S. time travel program
• Merry Lou Hawkins – Addison’s wife
• General Toad – in charge of the U.S. time travel program
• Officer N. Gauki – a Soviet chrononaut. I love the detail of U.S. tempunauts vs. Soviet chrononauts.
• Henry Cassidy, Everett Branton – TV newscasters covering the tempunauts’ funeral
• Dr. Fein – physicist from the Time Extrusion Labs

Garson Poole learns from a doctor that he is an electric ant (ant in this case refers to an organic humanoid robot) after he wakes up in a hospital following a squib accident. He soon finds everyone at his company already knows, and he is only a figurehead in charge because the owners want somebody they can control.

Knowing his true nature he begins to experiment with the punched tape roll in his chest that controls his sensory stimuli, screwing around with the input mechanism much like a human does by taking drugs in an effort to alter or figure out reality, until he manages to burn out the control and ‘die.’

It’s a simple story, but Poole is a sympathetic character and the ending is sad.

Cast of characters

• Garson Poole – owner of Tri-Plan Electronics
• Louis Danceman – Tri-Plan’s second in charge
• Sarah Benton – Poole’s secretary

“Faith of Our Fathers” was written for and first published in Harlan Ellison’s 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions.

The Communist Party (in an alternate-future North America under Communist rule) is hiding the true nature of reality from the population through the use of hallucinogens in the water supply.

Tung Chien sees through this phony world after being slipped an anti-hallucinogenic drug by members of a revolutionary group and proceeds to find out that the Absolute Benefactor is actually a horrible, god-like evil entity.

This one certainly feels like a bad trip. Dick has written enough stories along these lines that it’s remarkable how much he downplayed the significance of LSD as an inspiration in his writing process.

Cast of characters

• Tung Chien – works for the Postwar Ministry of Cultural Artifacts
• Darius Pethel – headmaster of a new school of indoctrination. This is also the name of the owner of Pethel Jiffi-scuttler Sales & Service in The Crack in Space
• Ssu-Ma Tso-pin – Chien’s supervisor
• Tanya Lee – member of a revolutionary group
• The Absolute Benefactor – the Communist Party leader

“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