title: Upon the Dull Earth (The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick)
author:  Philip K. Dick 
description: Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) was one of the seminal figures of 20th century science fiction. His many stories and novels, which include such classics as The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, reflect a deeply personal worldview, exploring the fragile, multifarious nature of reality itself and examining those elements that make usor fail to make usfully human. He did as much as anyone to demolish the artificial barrier between genre fiction and literature, and the best of his work has earned a permanent place in American popular culture.Upon the Dull Earth is the third installment of a uniform, five-volume edition of The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick. This generous collection contains 22 stories and novellas written in 1953 and 1954, along with extensiveand valuablestory notes. Included here are a number of bona fide PKD classics, among them the title story, the brilliantly conceived account of a bizarre, ultimately catastrophic resurrection, The Father-Thing, in which a young boy comes to realize that his once familiar father has somehow changed, and The Golden Man (filmed in 2007 as Next), which tells the tale of a golden skinned mutant who may represent the future direction of the human race. These and all the other stories in this important and necessary book offer a wide range of literary and intellectual pleasures. At the same time, they provide a fascinating glimpse into the continuing development of this iconicand hugely influentialfigure.
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  ‘The most consistently brilliant sf writer in the world’
  
  John Brunner
  
  ‘In all his work he was astonishingly intimate, self exposed and very
  dangerous. He was the funniest sf writer of his time, and perhaps the most
  terrifying. His dreads were our own, spoken as we could not have spoken them’
  
  The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
  
  ‘For everyone lost in the endlessly multiplicating realities of the modern
  world, remember: Philip K. Dick got there first’
  
  Terry Gilliam
  
  ‘Dick’s plastic realities tell us more than we’ll ever want to know about the
  inside of our heads and the view looking out. In his tortured topographies of
  worlds never made, we see mindscapes that we ourselves, in our madder moments,
  have glimpsed and thought real. Dick travelled out there on our behalf. It is
  our duty to read the reports he sent home’
  
  James Lovegrove
  
  ‘Dick quietly produced serious fiction in a popular form and there can be no
  higher praise’ Michael Moorcock
  
  ‘The terror and the humou