CIA Captain Edgar Lightfoot travels to Provo to capture some Fnools and bring them back to Major Hauk. Since they are small they are easily apprehended, but while transporting two of them back in his ‘copter he lets them smoke a cigarette. Suddenly both Fnools are now four feet tall. Back at CIA headquarters Major Hauk is in despair over a possible Fnool victory. He drinks from a bottle of scotch and hides in a bunker with his secretary. 

When Lightfoot and the Fnools arrive the Fnools overtake Lightfoot while he is preoccupied with Hauk’s scotch. The Fnools then drink the scotch and instantly become six feet tall. Both Hauk and Lightfoot realize it is hopeless, since the aliens are indistinguishable from humans at that size. That is until the Fnools encounter Miss Smith in the bunker. After this third vice, a woman, the Fnools become eight feet tall. Confident no one will mistake them for humans now Hauk is assured the Fnools will be defeated.

Cast of characters

• Edgar Lightfoot – Captain of the CIA
• Julius Hauk – CIA Major
• Miss Smith – Hauk’s secretary
• Hochflieger – a General in the West German Security Service
• Serge Nicov – local chief in Poland’s People’s Protective Agency for Preserving the Democratic Process
• The Fnools

The post The War with the Fnools appeared first on the world Dick made.

Bob is one of the many casualties of the rexeroid war, and boys under eighteen are then drafted in order to meet the quota for soldiers. Bob’s son Tommy is sent into combat against the natives on Calisto for the gleco that controls the keyless entry to their homes. He survives but dies not long after during the trektone war on Europa. Soon the only way for Terra to fill its ranks is to draft women, and Joan is enlisted for battle in the nymphite war on Saturn.

The last thing we see are aliens arriving from Orion some time later to find elaborate homes from an advanced civilization but no sign of the Terrans who used to live there.

In order to avoid having two stories credited to Philip K. Dick, “Some Kinds of Life” was published under the pseudonym Richard Phillips when it appeared alongside his story “Planet for Transients” in Fantastic Universe in 1953.

Cast of characters

• Joan Clarke – our protagonist
• Bob Clarke – Joan’s husband
• Tommy Clarke – Joan and Bob’s son
• Erickson – the Sector Organizer

The post Some Kinds of Life appeared first on the world Dick made.

Cast of characters

• Tony Rossi – a young colonist on an alien planet
• Joseph Rossi – Tony’s father
• Leah Rossi – Tony’s mother
• B’prith, Llyre – Pas-udeti children who Tony naively believes will remain his friends even after the tide has turned in the war with Terra

The post Tony and the Beetles appeared first on the world Dick made.

Four men volunteer to pilot the ship hoping it can reach Promixa. The first place they land is populated by tiny humans six inches tall. The second place they encounter is ruled by giants. At this point the men have recognized the similarities to Johnathan Swift’s fictional lands of Lilliput and Brobdingnag. Before they are crushed by a giant they return to Earth where a Ganymedean, who has arrived to claim the Gany property, informs them they were actually traveling in time and explains how the relativity of size in the expanding universe shrinks the past and enlarges the future.

Cast of characters

• General Thomas Groves, Major Stiller, Commander James Carmichel, Doctor Earl Basset – volunteers who take the captured Ganymedean ship on a test run

The post Prize Ship appeared first on the world Dick made.

The statistical computer can no longer reliably compute odds of victory at all once this ‘variable man’ is around. Security commissioner Reinhart wants Cole killed before the Council realizes the odds of winning the war are no longer in their favor, while the Military Design director Sherikov wants Cole to help him fix the control unit of the so-called Icarus bomb. Cole does eventually ‘fix’ the bomb by figuring out why it wasn’t working as a ftl drive in the first place. Reinhart still tries to kill Cole, Earth loses the war with Centarus when the bomb doesn’t explode (which doesn’t really matter since now Earth possesses the knowledge of faster-than-light travel), the scheming Reinhart is removed from power and Sherikov promises to send Cole back to his own time.

Cast of characters

• Eric Reinhart – the security commissioner
• Kaplan – lab organizer
• Peter Sherikov – director of Military Designs
• Thomas Cole – handyman from 1913 with the intuitive ability to fix anything
• Margaret Duffe – President of the Council
• Joseph Dixon – Reinhart’s second in command

The post The Variable Man appeared first on the world Dick made.

Dolores, wife of the engineer Kramer, suggests a professor from their college years as ‘the brain’, and Professor Thomas, quite old by this point, eventually agrees.

The professor though has lived long enough to understand the futility of war, and once his consciousness is in control of the ship it’s clear he has no intention of taking part in the plan to break through Proxima’s defenses. Instead he uses a couple of ruses to get both Kramer and Dolores on board and then sets off to find a habitable planet they can populate in order to build a civilization that can hopefully break the cycle of war.

Cast of characters

• Kramer – an engineer in Earth’s war effort against the Yucconae of Proxima Centauri
• Gross – Commander of Earth’s Internal Security
• Dolores – Kramer’s estranged wife
• Dale Winter – Kramer’s second in line
• Michael Thomas – a professor who taught Kramer and Dolores when they were in school

The post Mr. Spaceship appeared first on the world Dick made.

No one expects Unicephalon 40-D to fail, because it never has, but that’s before an army of aliens attacks, knocking out Unicephalon and promoting Fischer to Commander-and-Chief.

Fischer bungles the job, and news clown Jim Briskin claims Fischer isn’t legally President since he was never elected. Briskin then pushes for an election and announces his own candidacy. As Fischer moves to have the FBI silence Briskin, Unicephalon returns to power, declares war with the aliens and puts an end to these presidential shenanigans.

Cast of characters

• Jim Briskin – everyone’s favorite news clown. Briskin also makes a bid for the Presidency in The Crack in Space.
• Unicephalon 40-D – supercomputer / President of the United States
• Maximilian Fischer – union member chosen to be the next stand-by POTUS
• General Tompkins – chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
• Leon Lait – Fischer’s cousin and Attorney General while Fischer is in charge

The post Stand-By appeared first on the world Dick made.

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

The post War Veteran appeared first on the world Dick made.

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 post Precious Artifact appeared first on the world Dick made.

Dick had written nearly fifty short stories at this point as he really starts to dig into ‘what is human?’ a question he would spend a lot of time with in his later books and stories.

Gary Sinise stars in a 2002 movie, but there’s not much to recommend about such a dull adaptation… at least they kept the ending.

Cast of characters

• Spencer Olham – part of a team developing a weapon to use against the alien invaders
• Mary – Spencer’s wife
• Nelson – works with Olham
• Major Peters – member of government security

The post Imposter appeared first on the world Dick made.