Books like The Best of Philip K. Dick

If I had to choose just one fiction writer to read for the rest of my life, it would probably be PKD. His work rarely fails to fill me with awe, and fear, even if he has put out a few clunkers over the years (understandable considering his need to crank out novels at a rapid clip in order to support himself). That said, I've always gravitated more toward his novels as opposed to his shorts. When I enter Dick's world, I want to fully immerse myself in the weirdness. Whereas many readers feel he peaked in the early to mid-60s, I think that's when he just started to hit his groove, and became a much more polished writer as time went on, with more fully-realized characters and worlds. Which is why I'm always a bit disappointed when I pick up a random PKD collection only to find that most or all of the stories are from the mid 50s. It only makes sense, since the majority of his short work was produced in the 50s, but too many of the tales seem little more than an average Twilight Zone episode. I love that show, but after experiencing total mind-benders like A Scanner Darkly, Three Stigmata, Valis, etc. it became harder for me to get into early Dick.But now that several years have gone by since I've read any of his "major" novels, these early tales worked a lot better for me. My favorite of the 1950s pieces collected here is "The Father Thing" (1954) which is as effective a horror story as I've ever read, and just as chilling now as when I first read it over 20 years ago, about a boy who suspects his father may have been replaced by an alien impostor, so he recruits his friends to help reveal the truth. There are three later-period PKD stories here, and they're probably my favorites, along with "The Father Thing." "The Faith of Our Fathers," first published in 1967 in Harlan Ellison's seminal Dangerous Visions anthology, details a future communist world where the population is kept under control by mind-altering drugs, but when the main character discovers an anti-drug that counteracts the effects, he finds that the world isn't what he thought it was. Sort of like They Live, but without the sunglasses, bubblegum, and ass-kicking. The best story, imo, is "The Electric Ant" (1969), where a top-level executive named Garson Poole discovers one day that he's an organic robot, whose reality is being fed to him from a tape reel inside his chest. What happens to him, and the world, once he starts altering the tape is for you to discover, so I dare not say more, other than it's a masterpiece of head-fuckery. Very nearly as good is "A Little Something for us Tempunauts" (1974), which I first read in the massive 1987 horror antho, The Dark Descent, edited by David G. Hartwell. It concerns a future US where time travel is run similarly to the space program of the 60s, and when a group of "tempunauts" accidentally get sent only a few days into the future instead of a century, they learn from the news that something causes their return journey to be fatal. I usually steer clear of time-travel stories, as they either: A. Make my brain hurt due to time loops and whatnot, or B. Infuriate me due to the laws of cause and effect being ignored if the story demands it. This one caused a little of "A," but overall was an excellent bit of wibbly wobbly timey-wimey....stuff.This collection may be the best single-volume representation of PKD's short work, at least as far as vintage paperbacks go. The more recent Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick (2002) is very similar, though it's inexplicably missing "The Father Thing," but does have "The Minority Report" (1956), "We Can Remember it For You Wholesale" (1966, basis for Total Recall), and excellent later period stories like "The Exit Door Lead In" (1979), and "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" (1980) to more than make up for it.4.5 Stars.BTW, every time I look at that cover on my shelf I always think it's an action figure at first. It looks just like an unopened GI JOE-type figure from the 80s.