Both the U.S. and Communist governments are threatened by the rise of Mercerism, a proto-religion formed around a man of unknown origin named Wilbur Mercer. Followers of Mercer watch him on a television screen and by grasping the handles on a black empathy box are able to feel the suffering Mercer feels as he walks through a desert on the way to his death. 

Everything else about Mercer is a mystery, but the State Department suspects he is an extraterrestrial connected somehow to jazz harpist Ray Meritan. In cahoots with the Chinese Communists they send Meritan’s mistress Joan Hiashi to Cuba under a ruse hoping she will connect Meritan to Mercer. 

While performing on a live TV broadcast Meritan exposes himself as a follower of Mercer, Joan is arrested in Cuba as a political agitator and all empathy boxes are rounded up and destroyed. Meritan avoids getting captured and finds one last remaining empathy box. When he grabs the handles he is connected telepathically to Bogart Crofts of the State Department who had been holding onto the empathy box at the same time. The state department knows then that Meritan is not Mercer but intend to arrest him anyway. Mercerism is illegal and with all the empathy boxes destroyed they are confident the religion will be eradicated. 

The state department releases Joan as bait to find out where Meritan is. When Meritan meets up with Joan they expect a hard time staying one step in front of the government, but help comes from a strange peddler who surreptitiously passes them instructions on how to assemble an empathy box out of ordinary household objects. 

The Mercerism religion makes an appearance later in Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Cast of characters

• Bogart Crofts – works for the State Department
• Joan Hiashi – Asian scholar in Zen Buddhism. Joan Hiashi is also in The Ganymede Takeover
• Ray Meritan – a telepath and jazz harpist suspected by the State Department to be Wilbur Mercer
• Douglas Herrick – Secretary of State
• Mr. Lee – a Chinese telepath

Loyalty to the Free Union is enforced by telepaths. Someone has been anonymously mailing ‘hoods’ (metal alloy bands that block the ‘teeps’) to members of the government. Once the Anti-Immunity Bill, which outlaws the use of these hoods, is passed through Congress there won’t be any way to stop the teeps from taking over the Union. Walter Franklin, a director of a government department, is sent a hood, and he is chased by the teeps until he meets up with hood maker James Cutter who explains what is going on. 

They go to meet Senator Waldo, the author of the Anti-Immunity Bill, to try to convince him to kill the legislation, but it turns out Waldo has been a teep all along. Cutter then spills his secret: the teeps aren’t the next step in human evolution as everyone believes, but rather they are just freaks from a radiation blast who are unable to reproduce. Cutter is more than willing to be scanned by the teeps at that point so that this news can be disseminated to everyone.

“The Hood Maker” was adapted for the first season of Electric Dreams. They tweaked the story to be more about the conflict between the non-telepaths and the oppressed teeps, only one of whom has just started working with the government to scan the citizens. Unlike a lot of the other chintzy episodes in the series this one visually looks great. All the telepaths have a facial birth mark of sorts to identify them, and the ‘hoods’ are actual creepy-looking hoods instead of some silly metal band.

Cast of characters

• Clearance Director Ross
• Peters – works for Director Ross in Clearance
• Ernest Abbud – a telepath employed by Clearance
• Walter Franklin – Director of the Federal Resources Commission
• James Cutter – the titular Hood Maker
• Senator Waldo – author of the Anti-Immunity Bill in Congress

After years as second-class citizens the Centaurian colonies have decided to secede from Terra. The colonists have the advantage of Psi-class individuals who don’t exist on Earth, and the separatist movement is kept alive with the help of two precogs and the parakinetic talents of an overweight idiot savant Psi who keeps them safe.

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

Dick wrote his sole screenplay after being approached in 1974 by a French film producer about an adaptation of his 1969 novel Ubik. The producer paid Dick for the completed work, but financing for the movie fell through and it was never made.

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

“Beyond Lies The Wub” is Dick’s first published short story appearing in Planet Stories in 1952.

On an expedition rounding up Martian animals Captain Franco encounters the wub, a pig-like creature he intends to eat even after it turns out to be an intelligent form of life with a tendency toward philosophical discussion.

Cast of characters

• The wub – a pig-like telepathic extra terrestrial
• Captain Franco – a wrangler of alien lifeforms
• Peterson, Jones, French – crew members aboard Franco’s ship

Solar Lottery is Dick’s first science fiction novel. In the early ‘50s he had some success with short stories and had previously written a couple of unpublished mainstream books (Gather Yourselves Together and Voices from the Street), but this was his first full-length novel to be published when it came out as one half of an ACE Double in 1955.

In 2203 a Quizmaster, chosen randomly from over six billion people, rules the solar system. This Quizmaster has to fend off assassins, and even with the protection of a telepathic corps, it’s rare for a Quizmaster to stay in power very long. Reese Verrick though manages to hold onto the position for ten years until lowly electronics repairman Leon Cartwright figures out how to game the system.

The main story is entertaining in the pulpy style of the 50s even if it does get bogged down in a lot of jargon (bottle twitching, Minimax M-game theory) that isn’t very well explained. It has one too many things going on with a side story about a mythical tenth planet, supposedly discovered by some crackpot, whose followers travel to the far reaches of the solar system to try to find it.

Dick said that he borrowed from the other sci-fi greats of the era when writing this one, like A.E. Van Vogt (I assume that’s where the wooden characterization comes from) and Alfred Bester whose The Demolished Man directly inspires the telepathic corps that protects the Quizmaster. The speechifying Ted Benteley has a lot in common with the angry and idealistic Stuart Hadley from Voices From the Street which Dick wrote just before writing Solar Lottery.

Cast of characters

• Ted Benteley – pledges allegiance to Verrick without knowing Cartwright is the new Quizmaster
• Reese Verrick – the former Quizmaster
• Eleanor Stevens – Verrick’s secretary. A former telepath who gives up her ability to stay on with Verrick
• Peter Wakeman – one of the Quizmaster’s teeps
• Leon Cartwright – the new Quizmaster
• John Preston – deceased figurehead of the Prestonites. Preached of a undiscovered tenth planet called the Flame Disc
• Rita O’neill – a Prestonite. Cartwright’s niece
• Major Shaeffer – part of the Quizmaster’s teep Corps
• Herbert Moore – a biochemist working for Verrick
• Al and Laura Davis – Ted Benteley’s longtime friends
• Keith Pellig – the assassin chosen by the Convention
• Bill Konklin & Mary Uzich – Prestonites on board the ship to the Flame Disc
• Captain Groves – the pilot of the ship on the way to the Flame Disc
• Judge Waring – the judge who decides whether Benteley broke his oath to Verrick