Search Results for: Philip K. Dick
We now come to the last four stories in The Philip K. Dick Reader. These are also stories all made into movies. “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” (F&SF April 1966): The story that became the movie Total Recall. Douglas Quail is an office worker with an obsession of going to Mars. The wife […]
This is the fourth installment in a series wherein I examine a batch of stories from The Philip K. Dick Reader. So far, the stories show the Cold War with the potential for WWIII weighed heavily on Philip K. Dick’s mind. Robots were also a favorite topic. “Upon the Dull Earth” (Beyond Fantasy Fiction #9, […]
This is the third batch of stories examined from The Philip K. Dick Reader. “To Serve the Master” (Imagination, February 1956): Applequist is outside and finds a half-buried robot in a ravine. The robot is dead but not damaged. They were all thought destroyed years ago. Applequist lives in one of the underground cities run […]
Last week, I began to examine The Philip K. Dick Reader. I had quoted Algis Budrys who observed Dick’s short fiction in the 1950s was all over the place. Here are the next five stories: “The Last of the Masters” (Orbit No. 5, November-December 1954). Post-apocalypse is a recurring item in Dick’s fiction. This starts […]
If you go to the Internet Movie Database and type in Philip K. Dick, there are 38 credits listed. I can’t think of any other American science fiction writer from the classic era of magazine and mass-market paperbacks with this many media adaptations. Philip K. Dick was a prolific writer of science fiction stories during […]
Sensor Sweep: Philip K. Dick, Anti-Heroes, Black Colossus, Derleth Mythos, Robert Heinlein
Monday , 8, July 2019 Sensor Sweep 3 CommentsPhilip K. Dick (Salon): Once considered a cult figure, the science fiction author Philip K. Dick is now recognized as one of the most prescient and powerful writers of the 20th century. His work not only foreshadowed many of the technological anxieties and possibilities of our era, but shaped the sensibility of the sixties and seventies […]
Sensor Sweep: Black Mask, A. Conan Doyle, Philip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny, and more F. Scott Fitzgerald
Monday , 24, December 2018 Sensor Sweep 2 CommentsWriting (Black Gate): The hardboiled school was born in the page of Black Mask Magazine under the editorship of George W. Sutton, with Carroll John Daly’s “Three Gun Terry” (which I wrote about here…) and “Kings of the Open Palm,” and Dashiell Hammett’s “Arson Plus,” appearing in 1923. In 1924, Sutton resigned and circulation editor Phil Cody […]
Sensor Sweep: Weird Tales, Lin Carter, Pin Ball Machines
Monday , 9, June 2025 Sensor Sweep 2 CommentsFantasy (Dark Worlds Quarterly): Continuing our series of Sword & Sorcery Firsts we are technically still in the Pulp Era until 1954 or so a few of the following happened in a Pulp magazine. The Digests take over shortly thereafter. Fantasy Fiction as a whole, whether it is S&S or not, has faded from much […]
Last year, a friend of mine mentioned he planned on rereading Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream without irony. Synchronicity as I had been thinking of doing the same thing. Norman Spinrad wrote one of the greatest Star Trek episodes, “The Doomsday Machine” from Season 2. He wrote a couple competent space operas in the 60s, […]
I have reached a milestone with the Castalia House blog: ten years of blogging. My first post was “The Mid-1980s Paperback Sword and Sorcery Extinction Event” on December 28, 2014. The blog posts have continued without interruption with the exception of once when the site was down. I have also written some extra blog posts […]
Sensor Sweep: Godzilla, Poul Anderson, Keith Taylor, Solomon Kane
Monday , 4, December 2023 Sensor Sweep 1 CommentPublishing (Free Press): It’s about a parallel publishing space that has risen up while the legacy publishing houses in New York have been declining thanks to a combination of threats that are both external (the internet; the upending of print) and internal (new progressive staffers; sensitivity readers; etc.). Cinema (Stephen Mark Rainey): As a diehard […]
E. C. Tubb’s “Dumarest of Terra” ran for thirty-three novels from 1967 through 1997. Ace Books published the first eight novels. Donald A. Wollheim took the series with him to DAW Books from 1973 through 1985. Wollheim’s daughter, Betsy, appeared to have purged a lot of her father’s favorites in the mid-1980s when she took […]