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Five Great Novels by Philip Dick
01/09/2004 . Source: Tomas L. Martin 
pub: Gollancz. 841 page enlarged paperback. Price: £12.99 (UK). ISBN: 0-575-07581-3. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out website: www.orionbooks.co.ukGollancz
Philip K. Dick had a huge influence on the Science Fiction field. You just have to look at the huge numbers of Hollywood blockbusters made from his work to see how packed full of ideas and mind-bending plotlines they are. 'Blade Runner', 'Total Recall', 'Minority Report' and 'Paycheck' all originated as short stories or novels from his hand and their harsh, dystopian futures are unmistakably his.
This collection brings together five of his most acclaimed novels into one thick volume. Along with perhaps his most famous work, 'Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?' which became 'Blade Runner', four other quality pieces of long fiction are included, spanning a large portion of his career.
The first two novels, 'The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch' and 'Martian Time-Slip' are also the earliest of the volumes collected here, both being written in 1964. Dick was a prolific writer, turning out more than fifty books in his long career. Both 'Palmer Eldritch' and 'Martian Time-Slip' have a slight Golden Age feel to them but their subject matter is no less Dickian.
In 'The Three Stigmata', the industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from an alien world with a new drug, Chew-Z. Fashion maker (using the regular Dick appearance of pre-cogs reading the future) Leo Bulero tries to stop Eldritch from introducing the whole Solar system to this hallucinogenic drug, but gets drawn into a permanent shared illusion by Chew-Z.
'Martian Time-Slip' combines two ideas: Autism and Mars. Another industrialist, Arnie Kott, owns all of the water services on Mars but wants to expand his empire using the autistic boy, Manfred, to predict the future of the nearby mountain range. But tapping into the speeded up and withdrawn autistic world of the boy causes reality to break down for all those involved with him.
'Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep' has bounty hunter Rick Deckard hunting a party of eight androids that have escaped from Mars and are posing as humans. As Deckard stalks the ingenious robots through the dark streets filled with the fallout of a major war he is forced to come face to face with his own humanity.
Death is the subject in 'Ubik' where Glen Runciter and his team of telepaths and anti-telepaths travel to the moon, a bomb kills him or does it? The people he leaves behind begin to decay and travel back in time at the same time and only Ubik can save them. First they have to work out what Ubik actually is.
Philip K. Dick's life was marred by his involvement with drugs, which at various times during the sixties and seventies controlled his life. In one of his latter books, 'A Scanner Darkly', he reveals a near-future world where everyone is taking drugs and the hallucinogens warp reality. It's a very sobering tale in which government agent Bob Arctor goes undercover to catch drug pushers but gets dragged under by the substance itself.
Each tale in this collection is unique and interesting but the three latter ones are better reads, in my opinion. Whilst I found the first two intriguing their characters weren't as engaging as Rick Deckard or Bob Arctor and, as a result, I felt a little detached from their stories. Whereas I ripped through the last three books in under a week, the first two books took a lot longer and I didn't want to pick the book up as I did later on in the collection.
'Ubik' surprised me. I had read some Dick previously but this one had passed me by. I'm glad this volume introduced me to it, as it was my favourite of the five. Dick's books almost always bent reality somehow but the way the world around the telepaths crumbles and decays is electric. The tension and mystery involved in this story is clearer and tauter than in some of the others, in which the reality warps confuse things a little.
'A Scanner Darkly' is a fantastic book, a really impressive warning about the dangers of drugs and what it threatens to do to our world. The future in it is a lot closer to our present than the others and the cause of reality breaking much closer to home, which makes it if anything scarier. The dedication at the book's end mentioning the friends of the author killed or permanently damaged by their addiction is haunting.
Overall, this collection is a fine introduction to the incredible world of Philip K. Dick. Anyone with any interest in SF owes it to themselves to read the man's work, for the influence he had in the genre cannot be underestimated. I think, having read some of his other works, that I'd have preferred the incredible alternate history novel 'The Man In The High Castle' to one of the first two books but even without that classic this is an essential selection. Any of these books could easily become the next great blockbuster, and probably will. The man had ideas like no other.
Tomas L. Martin 
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