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I read a lot of PKD when I was in my 20's. It all started with Ubik. Then Androids. A Scanner Darkly. And about 10 other novels. The early Total Recall is one of the better movie adaptations wrt covering the core concepts of the story. Waves and Waves of revelations about the nature of reality. Minority Report, not so much. And of course, Blade Runner is tangentially related to the book. (It's a masterpiece, but it's not Androids)

Once I started getting into the short stories, I started getting pretty paranoid. There's one theme that repeats throughout that reality is not your perception of it, to your eventual downfall. Repeated over and over, across post apocalyptic wastelands, it leads to a somewhat bleak view of the future. (One in particular, I think it's The Fifth Variety, seems to be tailor made to describe computer security from here on out. Spoiler: _Everything_ is a trojan)



I think you mean Second Variety [1], which is really great in my opinion as well. It, like many of PKD's works, was also made into a movie (Screamers).

Second Variety is freely available [2] on the Internet Archive, via Project Gutenberg.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety

[2]: https://archive.org/details/secondvariety32032gut


Yep. Lost track of the number of Varieties.


Yes, there were more than 2 varieties - it's kind of key to the story! ;)

I think (or at least hope) that's not a spoiler for anyone who hasn't read it yet - it's worth reading!


In his own words "Reality is made of cardboard and if you push too hard, you fall through."

Describes his stories perfectly.


You really need to read Ursula K Leguin's "the Lathe of Heaven" - it's a book written with her friend PKD in mind.

One of my favorite recent books.




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