I loved this collection of short stories. It included some of my favorite Philip K Dick yarns. I was struck by how original and lateral he could be while remaining engaging and ahead of his time. ( )

This volume would act as a great introduction to PKD for those unfamiliar with his work. All his main themes are represented and the average standard of the stories is very high. I'd read most of them before in one place or another but none of it was time wasted for me. ( )

Rating: 4* of five

I'd give the episode 4.5 stars because it's a lot richer and more nuanced, and because it's got the ineffably lovely Essie Davis of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries fame as the female lead.

PKD's story is a different animal in the details...Vera and Silas Herrick are a scientist and a Colonel respectively, while Jill and Lester Herrick in the story are a housewife and a scientist respectively...but the broad strokes are the same. What exactly does it mean to be human? What makes someone a human being, mere accident of birth or some more inscrutable, indefinable something?

Both stories center on this question and answer it in the same way. These issues aren't unfamiliar to the modern audience, either. We face our McCarthyite issues by not facing them, just as our parents didn't face them in the 1950s until they were forced to do so by one courageous, outraged man.

We are still waiting for a man the equal of that one to arise, and wanna bet me he'll be a woman this time? She'd better get a wriggle on. Crap's gettin' all too real for the Dreamers and the deportees.

The episode's other beauties are all about textures of the world of 2520. The writer and the producers make this a very different Terra, and the visuals are glorious. The world-building is done so much more readily with images than it is with words. PKD did little more than sketch in a world like the 1954 he was living in but with robot servants, robants. The showrunners made the Earth Vera and Silas live on a major factor in the story, where to PKD's story it was unimportant.

Don't sprain anything hunting up the story. Sprain ankles, wrists, elbows if necessary to get the show into your eyes. It is outstanding. ( )

Dick's characters are horrible human caricatures (in both senses). It is not clear that it is always intentional. I cannot be more complimentary about his science either. Irony often works, though.
+ means hit, - means miss:

+ Beyond Lies the Wub (1952)
You are what you eat.
- The Defenders (1953)
Humans turn cold war hot, but machines know better.
- Roog (1953)
Dogs.
+ Second Variety (1953)
Robot arms race exploits human weakness.
+ Impostor (1953)
Alien identity bombs.
- The Preserving Machine (1953)
Theriomorphic music adapts to survive.
- The Variable Man (1953)
Magic hands beat FTL.
+ Paycheck (1953)
Time makes one smarter.
- Adjustment Team (1954)
Dogs are in on reality mirage.
- The Father-Thing (1954)
Body snatchers.
+ Foster, You're Dead (1955)
Cruel, cold war suburbia.
+ Human Is (1955)
Cold scientist, warm alien.
+ The Mold of Yancy (1955)
Ideological marketing, on Callisto.
- If There Were No Benny Cemoli (1963)
Alien investigators trust postapocalyptic, automated newspaper.
- The Days of Perky Pat (1963)
Postapocalyptic doll play, taken way too seriously.
+ Oh, to Be a Blobel! (1964)
Shades of Gift of the Magi, without sympathy.
+ We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (1966)
Memory, an economic alternative to experience, mostly.
+ The Electric Ant (1969)
Self experiments of a von Neumann machine.
- A Little Something for Us Tempunauts (1974)
Time loop death wish.
- The Pre-Persons (1974)
Abortion ridicule. ( )