Second Variety is a story set using the cold war between the US and Soviets as a backdrop. The writing is a bit dated, but the content is more relevant than ever. I think we humans stand a good chance of coming to the same fate.

I give it four varieties out of five varieties.

The audiobook is just a hair until 2 hours. You can find it at librivox.org ( )

The second volume of Philip K. Dick's complete short stories has been variously published under the titles Second Variety, We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (not actually included in the 1999 Gollancz edition I have, and confusingly also the title of volume five in the Gollancz editions), and Adjustment Team, and contains stories originally published from 1953 to '55 (the collections overlap in publication date a little bit because they are collected in sequence of composition).

I didn't find this quite as strong as the first volume. There are a lot of fantasy stories in this one, which are less to my taste, and a few too many stories where some spooky happens at the end and then the story stops, also a few too many stories about people exploring space. Which is usually my favorite subgenre of sf, but not one that plays to Dick's strengths. Some are undermined by seventy years of subsequent science fiction: "Second Variety" could be great, but if you've read later stuff, or even just another stuff by Dick, you'll see the twist coming. A similar complaint can be lodged at some of the time travel stuff here. Some of the stories have good concepts but don't totally convince on the worldbuilding, like one about a father in a world where robots do the childrearing... only he's somehow never heard of this dramatic change in social norms, or another about robots that are discriminating against humans, but ends up making everything too easy for a human to push against it.

That said, when Dick hits, he scores. There's some good satire of military imperialism in "Some Kind of Life," where every year some new excuse is thought of for good Terrans to go off to war—for the benefit of the Earth economy, of course. "The World She Wanted" is a weird story about someone convinced she can arrange the world the way she wants... and maybe she really can! "Breakfast at Twilight" is a neat glimpse of an ordinary suburban family suddenly plunged into a world at war. "Human Is" is a little bit predictable but effective all the same, about a man who may have been replaced by an alien. Dick loves this theme, of course; "Human Is" focuses on a wife uncertain about her husband but there's another where the replaced person themself is uncertain. On slightly similar lines, there's "Small Town" about a guy who obsessively builds a model of the town he lives in in his house's basement, taking out his dissatisfaction with his real life on the model...

My favorite here, though, was "The Commuter," where the main character begins slipping into another world, a world where a commuter town was built in the suburbs that never existed in his own. Like Dick's best stories, it captures the unease and uncertainty of modern life.

Good, tight short story, typical PKD paranoia throughout. Some of the covers spoil the ending ( )

PKD - one of the most inventive SF authors ever and a prolific writer of novels and short stories. Unfortunately some of these stories have become predictable because since they were written the ideas have been recycled too many times. Others are unintentionally amusing as 1950s gender roles survive unchanged several centuries into the future - but people will say the equivalent about much contemporary SF in 70 years from now, too. Although some of the stories are conventional (e.g. consequences of nuclear war) Dick, like Bradbury, also wrote a different kind of SF from most of his contemporaries. Not interested in pulp adventure stories or stories that turn on some application of science, Dick instead starts to question identity and reality. These themes began in this volume (1950s) and came to dominate later. Of course, this is a new viewpoint on the age-old question of what it is to be human? An angle that also was adopted and developed into a staple SF theme by those who came after.

Which is all to say PKD was a pioneer in many ways and I should read more. ( )

Synopsis: The Russians and the Americans are at war, but they have developed robots that do most of the fighting for them. However, these robots have evolved, on both sides, to become more and more human-like. They are now difficult to tell from real humans. The positive outcome is that they have also developed a hatred for each other and are preparing to fight each other.
Review: This 1953 Space and Science Fiction story holds no hope that the wars will end, but puts forth the idea that humans will be destroyed by the machines they invent. ( )