Impostor and eternal war
The best stories are not only the best of , but also a collection of the author’s greatest fears, and perhaps even of humanity, at least the post-war one, living in the shadow of the atom and the Cold War. What if someone switches us to a fake? Or if we are already such a chocolate-like product, but we have no idea about it? How to protect yourself in the event of total war? What if it comes suddenly because another nuclear test will disturb space-time? And will we be able to recognize the opponent at all?
One of the leitmotifs of this collection is the fear of a doppelganger, an ideal copy that could replace a human being, push us out of our lives, take away work and family. Today Kazuo Ishiguro would look at the fate of such a clone, which probably wouldn’t be easy either. Dick, however, initially proposed radical solutions. Sometimes I wonder about the brutality and ruthlessness of these finals, the dispassionate destruction of a mysterious, new form of life – as in Father’s Copythe ending of which was surprisingly ruthless to me again, even though I have known the story for a long time. Only one story suggests that sometimes switching would do some good. In most cases, the impostors either die miserably or destroy humanity with a total victory. But what if the war of destruction had ended with a ceasefire? Take a look at Blob to be (or not to be) – this is a story about PTSD, but also about adaptation to new conditions, in which market mechanisms play a significant role. Dick here departs from balancing on the verge of horror to show “the senseless irony of war” (as he states in the afterword). In turn, in the later Electric Ant, the writer explores topics that also appear in Blade Runners. At the same time, he perversely plays with the assumptions of solipsism.
War is the second great theme of the Best Stories . In Option Two, Dick writes about an apparent clinch, a strange trench warfare in the middle of a completely dilapidated, scorched area. It is the constant hiding in the bunkers in the middle of the barren land, the image of the First World War which recurs in literature, which has recently been explored in our plot by, for example, Gołkowski . This story unfolds into a fairly typical science fiction story, in a similar vein to many of Lem’s texts. The military post-apo theme returns in Breakfast at Duskonly its heroes do not have time to get used to the new world, they find their way to it by accident, as a result of an unknown catastrophe. Dick explores the question of what would happen if our world suddenly became a totalitarian military dictatorship, so he touches on a dystopia, even if only sketched out by a few secondary references. Finally, you will see a completely different face of war, automated, in Autofaba , a story with intriguing ecological plots . In turn, the fear of extinction and its consequences in capitalist reality appear in You’re Already Dead, Foster . It is a simple story, but it does not lack psychological depth.
Dick’s stories are often full of action, which was carefully used by their adaptations, including Zapłata , which you will also find in this volume. Regardless of the saturation of the plot, they are ironic and sometimes even bitter, sarcastic. Small something for us, chrononauts, stands out against them . It’s a sad, reflective, declining thing with a mood similar to the later adventures of the Pirx pilot or some of Gibson’s stories from Burn Chrome .
Reading Dick at the beginning of the 21st century
We all know that Dick was a great writer, and no one is going to argue with that. The threads explored by him echoed through all of later fantasy literature (you will also find them in Liu Cixin ), you know them from cinema, they appear in discussions about science fiction or visions of alternative reality. And yet, or perhaps because of that, some aspects of his texts have gotten old. Sometimes it has a spiritual effect, other times it is a bit irritating.
There are hardly any women in Dick’s stories, and if they are, most of the time they will be wives named “Mary and the Kids.” They then take care of the home, that is programming the oven for the next month or servicing mechanized cooking tables – these are the hauntological 1980s, which never happened. If you know his work mainly from adaptations, you may be surprised by this lack of heroines, the script writers usually developed their characters to full-size people. However, I would be unfair, not to mention the intriguing girls from the Second Option or the funny miniature Human Thing. Another dishonesty would be not to mention that also not all of Dick’s main characters have a deep mental life. Sometimes the author is interested in the plot and its allegoricality rather than the characters.
The Best Stories is a canonical collection compiled by the author himself, so we can look at Dick’s work through his eyes. You probably already have some of them at home if you were collecting science fiction in the 90s or bought The Payment around the premiere of the Affleck and Thurman movie. I remember it well – this is my first conscious encounter with the stories of this author. This time we get a few of them in a different translation – take a look at the titles and you will see that those from the latest collection are simpler, as if minimalist. In addition, we have here both new translations, from 2020 or 2021, as well as older ones, from 1998.
The first lyrics in the Best Stories volume are from the 1950s, are Dick’s early works and can seem trivial. Their construction is based on a clear “concept”, so somewhere in the middle, as experienced recipients of pop culture, you guess the solution. So if you buy this tome just to get acquainted with Dick as a writer, start reading it from the inside out, perhaps from the still very recent Happy Pat Time or even from the bitter, tragic Faith of the Fathers . Only then should you come back to the beginning to follow the development of his pen.
