The Minority Report (1954–1963): The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol. 4

Published between 1954 and 1963, these 18 works by legendary science fiction pioneer Dick are loosely linked by a core dystopian vision of a ravaged Earth, rife with inequality and struggling to accommodate a once-celebrated technology. The author’s trademark Möbius strip structure shapes “Explorers We,” the story of astronauts who return to Earth again and again and are never given the hero’s welcome they expect. “Service Call,” a rare Dick story set in the 1950s, features an everyman attempting to alter the future, while an earnest repairman from that future tries to foil him. Dick’s prescience is apparent in “The Mold of Yancy,” in which a bland morality is media-fed to an uneasy population via a virtual folksy ideologue, and in “The Days of Perky Pat,” in which the survivors of a nuclear war are obsessed with recreating an elaborate virtual replica of their lost world. The power of Dick’s storytelling rests in how completely his vision provokes the reader’s own disquieting sense of unease with the evanescent boundaries of reality. (Sept.)