4 stars for his imagination. He is just so inventive that it makes me gasp! Perhaps 3 stars for delivery which is not his strong point but works fine for short stories. And definitely 1 star for misogyny. Women are definitely a lower life form than robots and are given no inner life at all. ( )

These are really just precursors to his later novels, before he fully fleshed them out. They're not very good, but interesting to see how he developed these early themes.

4 stars for his imagination. He is just so inventive that it makes me gasp! Perhaps 3 stars for delivery which is not his strong point but works fine for short stories. And definitely 1 star for misogyny. Women are definitely a lower life form than robots and are given no inner life at all. ( )

I tried to give this a go but after the 4th or 5th story in which a protagonist comes to realise his psychiatrist and family are inducing a false perception of reality for him it all began to blend together. I suspect Dick was trying to excise his own demons in these stories.

My favourites in this fifth volume of Philp K Dick's complete short stories are the epic 'The Faith of Our fathers', the almost moving 'Chains of Air, Web of Aether', the fascinating solipsistic philosophy of 'The Electric Ant' and the cleverly amusing 'Not by Its Cover', about sentient fur cover binding (from the infamous wub creature) that re-writes the contents of the books it encloses.

This is an excellent collection, with only a couple of stories really failing to make any impact on me ('The Eye of the Sybil' and 'Strange Memories of Death'). Each of the others has at least a couple of points to recommend it and most are at least very good. Philip K Dick, although not a stylish or fluid writer, has a talent for introducing extraordinary themes and ideas through his rather bland characters, and in the short story form he has no trouble drawing the reader quickly in to each new tale. This is a collection you can easily read cover to cover in a few days (as I did!) ( )