2007 books

[peteryoung]

89) Philip K. Dick, The Father-Thing, 1987
Volume 3 of the Collected Short Stories, 23 of them all written between 1953 and 1955 before the publication of his first novel Solar Lottery. I picked this up because I recently watched the film Next, which wasn't all bad, and which was based on 'The Golden Man' included here – if the screenplay were closer to the story itself it might have made a good 1960s Outer Limits episode, but the film has little enough in common with the story other than Dick's name being attached to it. Most of these tales inhabit that unsettling borderline zone where the human race, via the stories of Dick's clunky characters, can be seen as either losing or reclaiming its humanity, often as a result of evolutionary mutations such as psi-powers. But he also knew when to play it for laughs, such as in the tongue-in cheek and Van Vogtian 'Null-O', the daft 'The Eyes Have It', and 'The Turning Wheel', a pretty good piss-take of L. Ron Hubbard. Creepiest and most disturbing is 'The Crawlers' but best of all is 'Foster, You're Dead!', proof enough that Dick could also write a perfect gem when inspiration struck him the right way.