Second Variety and Other Stories
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Second Variety and Other Stories
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Narrated by:
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William Coon
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By:
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Philip K. Dick
About this listen
When asked by an interviewer "Why is there science fiction?" Phillip K. Dick responded, "There is science fiction because the human brain craves sensory and intellectual stimulation before anything else, and the eccentric view provides unlimited stimulation, the eccentric view and the invented world.... The function of SF, psychologically, is to cut the reader loose from the actual world that he inhabits…." And cut us loose he does. And never disappoints.
This collection of five stories from early in his career casts a spotlight on Dick’s incredible imagination. In "Second Variety", robot warriors appear to have given one side the advantage in a devastating war. But a small band of soldiers begins to question just what the robots’ endgame truly is. In "Beyond Lies the Wub", a member of a spaceship’s crew buys a Wub ("a huge dirty pig!") for 50 cents, thinking it might be a good source of meat for the long journey home. Then the Wub speaks. In "The Eyes Have It", a man’s imagination gets the best of him, as he takes the words in a paperback novel a bit too literally. In "Piper in the Woods", a doctor attempts to unravel the mystery of why workers on an asteroid base begin to behave as if they have become plants. In "The Variable Man", giant computers indicate earth will likely win an interstellar war that will free it from the limits imposed by an aging Centauran empire. Plans are disrupted, however, when a man from the past arrives and throws off all calculations.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 19
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 18
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 18
In this collection of five stories, all first published in the 1950s, Dick justified his existence by exploring a number of truly interesting ideas. In “Small Town” a man creates a perfect scale model of his own town, as a means of escaping his unbearable reality. In “Human Is” the wife of a scientist notices that her husband has returned from a scientific expedition a changed man, but she’s not complaining. In “Foster, You’re Dead” a father’s unwillingness to participate in his country’s preparations for a war that never happens, leads to unexpected consequences for his family....
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- Narrated by: Chris Lutkin
- Length: 1 hr and 52 mins
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 25
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 20
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- Length: 6 hrs and 56 mins
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 397
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 336
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 337
Though perhaps most famous as a novelist, Philip K. Dick wrote more than 100 short stories over the course of his career, each as mind-bending and genre-defining as his longer works. Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams collects 10 of the best. In "Autofac," Dick shows us one of the earliest examples (and warnings) in science fiction of self-replicating machines. "Exhibit Piece" and "The Commuter" feature Dick exploring one of his favorite themes: the shifting nature of reality and whether it is even possible to perceive the world as it truly exists.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
Liked most of the stories
- By F. Delaney on 08-24-18
By: Philip K. Dick
-
Radio Free Albemuth
- By: Philip K. Dick
- Narrated by: Jeff Cummings, Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 125
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 111
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 111
In Radio Free Albemuth, his last novel, Philip K. Dick morphed and recombined themes that had informed his fiction from A Scanner Darkly to VALIS and produced a wild, impassioned work that sounds like a visionary alternate history of the United States. Agonizingly suspenseful, darkly hilarious, and filled with enough conspiracy theories to thrill the most hardened paranoid, Radio Free Albemuth is proof of Dick's stature as our century's greatest science fiction writer.
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4 out of 5 stars
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- By Darwin8u on 01-02-17
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The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 840
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 750
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5 out of 5 stars
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Valis
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- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 827
-
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5 out of 5 stars
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What listeners say about Second Variety and Other Stories
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- E.
- 11-04-11
The narrator's accent / inflection ruins this book
The stories are great, but I cannot listen to this narrator. He does try to "perform" the stories using different accent and intonations, but his natural way of speaking makes me want to rip my headphones and ears off.
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Overall1 out of 5 stars
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Performance1 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- lavi
- 09-16-11
terrible acting
The phony accents were impossible to listen to. I'm certain that the stories are great, but
i won't know until I've checked it out in print.
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