At the beginning of the story the priest Philos Diktos witnesses the Sibyl talking with two Immortals who predict two thousand years of darkness and ignorance. Jumping forward to 1974 Philip remembers growing up and his desire to be a science fiction author all the while having dreams and visions of ancient Rome. One night when he is an old man he is visited by the two aliens who tell him they now work through mortals to wake people up and bring springtime to the winter world. Back in Rome we find all that was an account of Philos Diktos who had traveled into the future. He documents this in a scroll to his fellow Romans along with the poet Virgil’s declaration that the tyranny in the future will eventually come to an end and springtime will be reborn.

Cast of characters

• Philos Diktos / Philip Dick – a Roman priest / twentieth-century sci-fi author
• The Cumaean Sibyl
• Carol Heims – Philip’s psychologist
• J’Annis and F’fr’am – the Immortals from Albemuth

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Edwin Fermeti and Aaron Tozzo who work at the Emigration Bureau have an unorthodox idea. They will go back in time and find out from one of the famous twentieth century pre-cogs how to deal with their re-entry problem. 

These ‘pre-cogs’ turn out to be science fiction authors of the 1950s. Tozzo and coworker Craig Gilly travel back to 1954, kidnap author Poul Anderson from a San Francisco science fiction convention and bring him to the future hoping he can use his precog abilities to tell them how they can restore mass to the humans in space travel. Anderson initially escapes from them but gets recaptured and writes them a story which does include the formula they need. They can’t send him back to his time with knowledge of the future so first they wipe his memory. 

They realize their error as soon as Anderson is gone. Because his memory was wiped he couldn’t write the story the future was based on, and the ripple effects from this change create an alternate reality where Tozzo, Gilly, Fermeti and the Emigration Bureau itself is transformed into something from a different story.

When Anderson returns to 1954 the only clue he has to his adventure is a piece of paper with notes scribbled on it which he doesn’t remember writing and which he hands over to be auctioned off at the end of the convention. 

The inclusion of a boatload of Dick’s sci-fi contemporaries and the fish-out-of-water scenarios are both great. This is a very meta story. I’m only a wannabe scholar of mid-century sci-fi (I had to look up half the authors he mentioned), so I have a feeling a lot of it went over my head.

Cast of characters

• Aaron Tozzo, Craig Gilly – work for the Emigration Bureau
• Edwin Fermeti – Tozzo and Gilly’s superior
• Donald Nils, Pete Bailey – prisoners on a trip to the Proxima system
• Poul Anderson – Hugo and Nebula award-winning author who Tozzo and Gilly kidnap in 1954
• A.E. van Vogt, Jack Vance, Ray Bradbury, Jack Williamson, Evelyn Page, Margaret St. Clair, Robert Bloch, Tony Boucher, Howard Browne – science fiction authors who have cameos at the convention

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Although he doesn’t tell Sharp this, Humphreys decides there is nothing he can do for him. The story ends with Giller meeting with his own psychoanalyst and complaining about the compulsion he’s always had for great heights and the irresistible urge to push people. 

Cast of characters

• Paul Sharp – suffers from a fear of heights and falling
• Humphreys – Sharp’s psychoanalyst
• Giller – wants Sharp to rebuild the Petaluma-Sonoma area in Northern California

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Somehow the precog Curt locates the first known Anti-Psi Pat on the underdeveloped Proxima VI and with the help of the parakinetic Big Noodle brings her to Proxima III. The head of the telepathic corps sees a threat from an Anti-Psi who could block their abilities, and he has Pat killed just as he had done with the Anti-Psis he had found out about in the past.

Curt has Big Noodle send him to Prox VI where he hopes to find a Psi who can reanimate Pat. There he runs into an old man who he encountered several times earlier and discovers it is his son Tim. They believed Tim didn’t have Psi powers, except it turns out the offspring of the two precogs is a new class of Psi who has the ability to travel in time. Tim, to wrap this up, somehow manipulates the timeline and brings Pat back to life.

Dick would reuse some of these ideas along with the Anti-Psi character Pat Connley/Conley in Ubik. 

Cast of characters

• Tim Purcell – an eight-year-old child of two precogs
• Julie Purcell – Tim’s mother and a precog 
• Curt Purcell– Tim’s father and a precog
• Fairchild – a Norm-class bureaucrat
• Reynolds – chief of the telepathic Corps
• Sally – a thirteen-year-old girl and advanced Psi
• Big Noodle – a parakinetic Psi with the mind of a three-year-old. Big Noodle is also the name of Earth’s vast artificial intelligence in The Divine Invasion
• Pat Connley – an Anti-Psi with a counter talent against the telepaths. Pat Conley is also the name of the Anti-Precog in Ubik

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In 2007 “The Golden Man” was adapted as the movie Next starring Nicholas Cage. Instead of hunting mutants, the FBI chases after the human Cris Johnson, who can see two minutes into the future, because they need him to help stop some terrorists from detonating a nuclear bomb that will wipe out Los Angeles. It’s illogical and forgettable. Jessica Biel plays a mystery dream girl and five years later would play another mystery dream girl in the equally bad Total Recall remake.

Cast of characters

• Cris Johnson – a golden-skinned precog mutant
• Nat Johnson – Cris Johnson’s father
• Jean and Dave Johnson – Cris’s sister and brother
• George Baines – a DCA man hunting Cris Johnson
• Ed Wisdom – Director of DCA’s North American branch
• Anita Ferris – George’s fiancée and Director of the Semantics Agency 

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This published version is too novelistic, at least by modern screenplay standards, but if it wasn’t there wouldn’t be much of a draw in reading a screenplay for an unproduced movie. It seems to exist only for the curiosity seekers and completists among us, since the story and characters are nearly the same as in the book, except for some additional scenes at the end where Ella Runciter is reborn.

Ubik does appear destined though to make it to the screen in some way or another. The producer of the film adaptation of A Scanner Darkly had optioned Ubik in the early 2000s, Michel Gondry was in the beginning stages of developing a movie in 2011, and in 2018 yet another screenplay was being developed with a new writer and producers.

Cast of characters

• Glen Runciter – owner of Runciter Associates, an anti-psi prudence organization
• Ella Runciter – Glen’s dead wife in half-life
• Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsang – owner of Beloved Brethren Moratorium.
• Jory Miller – a dead fifteen-year-old boy in half-life cold-pac storage
• Raymond Hollis – employs telepaths. Runciter’s opposition
• G. G. Ashwood – one of Runciter’s telepaths
• Joe Chip – Runciter’s electrical tester
• Pat Conley– an anti-precog
• Stanton Mick – reclusive speculator and financier
• Zoe Wirt – Stanton Mick’s assistant
• Tippy Jackson, Edie Dorn, Al Hammond, John Ild, Francesca Spanish, Tito Apostos, Don Denny, Sammy Mundo, Wendy Wright, Fred Zafsky – Runciter’s inertials

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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

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Jones, a precog who can see one year into the future, is an interesting character in a world ruled by relativism where all absolute thought, in an effort to stamp out extremism and war, is forbidden. With his apparent proof of certainty, Jones becomes a demagogue, whipping his followers into a frenzy against the threat of amoeba-like aliens that have started to land on Earth. When it turns out these alien drifters are mostly harmless, something Jones didn’t initially know with his limited view into the future, he martyrs himself so as to blame his death on the relativists before he would have been exposed as a fraud.

The book’s two storylines don’t come together very well. The mutants being engineered to survive on Venus don’t have much to do with what is going on with Jones, but even Dick admitted the book would have been stronger if he had found a way to tie those two threads together.

*for example: moist skin, moist ground, moist legs, moist sack (don’t ask), moist car (how?), moist skin (again), moist breath, moist fog, moist atmosphere, moist hay, moist lips, moist lips (again) and moist air.

Cast of characters

• Floyd Jones – a precog who can see exactly one year into the future although he lacks the ability to change the future when it happens
• Louis, Frank, Vivian, Garry, Dieter, Irma, Syd – mutants engineered to survive on Venus who live in a moist refuge in San Francisco
• Doctor Rafferty – oversees the refuge
• Doug Cussick – member of the secret service
• Nina – Cussick’s wife
• Pearson – security director of the Baltimore secret service
• Max Kaminski – Cussick’s senior political instructor
• Hyndshaw – a traveling salesman who picks up Jones when he is hitchhiking
• Tyler Fleming – a young member of the secret service

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Back on the real Earth the pre-cog employees at P. P. Layouts try to determine which consumer goods will be popular so that they can be minified and sent to Mars for the colonists to use in their Perky Pat environments. This balance is upset when the industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from the Proxima system with a potent new drug that he plans to market to the colonists as a more effective escape from the drudgery of Mars.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch remains my favorite PKD book even after having read them all. You might assume it was inspired by the use of LSD, but Dick claims to have not yet tried that particular drug at this point in his life. Instead, fueled by large quantities of amphetamines, he wrote this during an incredibly prolific two-year period in 1963-64 when he also wrote some of my other favorites including The Game Players of Titan, Now Wait for Last Year, The Simulacra and Clans of the Alphane Moon.

Is the world of Perky Pat the same world from The Crack in Space? Who knows, but while in the mind of Walt, one of the colonists catches Jim Briskin, everyone’s favorite newsclown (or maybe just mine), on TV.

Cast of characters

• Barney Mayerson – a pre-cog. Head of pre-fash marketing at  P. P. Layouts
• Roni Fugate – a pre-cog. Barney’s assistant and mistress
• Leo Bulero – chairman of the board at P. P. Layouts
• Emily Hnatt – Barney’s ex-wife
• Richard Hnatt – Emily’s current husband
• Palmer Eldritch – the interplan industrialist who returns from Proxima
• Sam Regan, Mary Regan, Tod Morris, Norman Schein, Helen Morris, Fran Schein – Mars colonists
• Allen and Charlotte Faine – disc jockeys in a Mars satellite
• Felix Blau – head of the police agency
• Dr. Wily Denkmal – runs an E therapy clinic in Germany

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In this phildickian future of 1994 we learn the frightening statistic that one out of six people suffers from some form of schizophrenia. We also learn that someone with autism is trapped in a world they perceive as moving so quickly they can see into the future. Amid rumors of the UN’s interest in some Martian land for new settlements, Kott schemes to use Bohlen (a ‘former’ schizophrenic) and Bohlen’s connection to his young autistic neighbor Manfred to get a jumpstart on the competition and claim the land for himself.

This book is one of my favorites. The description of Jack’s first schizophrenic episode as a young man is terrifying, as is the entropic, “gubble gubble” world of Manfred as it encroaches into the minds of everyone around him.

Along with Dick’s ideas concerning autism, nothing about the planet in Martian Time-Slip suggests an attempt at rigorous science. PKD’s Mars features flowing water (although it’s scarce), breathable air and an indigenous population of natives called Bleekmen who were on the planet when Earth colonists arrived.

In the hard science fiction novel Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson named the 39.5 minutes of non-time between midnight and 12:01 when the clocks are stopped on Mars in order to simulate an even 24-hour day the ‘Martian time-slip’ as an homage to Dick’s book.

Cast of characters

• Jack Bohlen – our protagonist. A service repairman on Mars
• Silvia Bohlen – Jack’s wife
• David Bohlen – Jack’s son
• Leo Bohlen – Jack’s father. A land speculator from Earth
• Mr. Yee – Jack’s employer
• Arnie Kott – president of the Water Workers’ Local
• Anne Esterhazy – Arnie’s ex-wife. Circulates a political newsletter for women
• Norbert Steiner – Jack’s neighbor and dealer in black-market food
• Otto Zitte – a black marketeer
• Manfred Steiner – Norbert’s autistic son in Camp B-G for anomalous children
• Dr. Glaub – a psychotherapist
• Doreen Anderton – Arnie Kott’s mistress and Jack’s lover

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