Book: "Selected Stories of Philip K Dick"

I did not pick this up after seeing one of the movies based on a PKD story.  For a while now, I have been reading what a great writer PKD was and I resigned myself to thinking that I just came along too late to appreciate his writing.  

I still think that in some of these stories.  "Adjustment Team" is in this book, and, heresy-of-heresies, I don't think it is far better than the movie "Adjustment Bureau" .  The movie adds a central plot line of a love story that isn't in the short story at all.  But then, the short story has this irritating imitation of a woman that is the main character's wife.  Yes--it appears that directors are constantly adding love stories to PKD's work.  Most of the men in all of these stories are sometimes happily, sometimes unhappily,  and sometimes boringly married.   These are people of the 50's and 60's who find themselves in an altered world.

But not too altered.  And that gives me a few diamonds.  In "Foster, You're Dead", one father is refusing to buy the latest bomb shelter for his family.  He wisely guesses that the now that the security of the country has been privatized--every community must protect itself--the selling of shelters has become just another capitalistic ploy.  As soon as he buys one, the powers that be announce that the enemy has developed the means to penetrate that model.  Everyone will have to buy a new one.

I had read "Minority Report" report; I will only say that it is more cynical than the original.  And there is no redemption for the pre-cogs.  The technology in the short story is outdated. (That's true for all these stories).  That's where the movie was an improvement.  However, the movie aims for a redemption that the story doesn't give.

I don't have the dates for the stories in front of me, but I wonder if they are post-Bradbury's Mars.  I guess that they have to be.  There are a number of stories set on Mars with Earth colonists.  The Earth colonists also have a running battle with an alien race from Proxima and there are a number of stories about that clash.  The "approximations", an Earth slur PKD tells us, can appear to look like humans and in one story they want to investigate our religiosity.    They save the mind of human who died in an accident, call in their Earth counterparts.  Apparently the rule about rescuing people lost at sea is universal.  The mind of the rescued astronaut is isolated and begins to hallucinate the image of Christ.  The Prox scientists and the Earth scientists have a very different reaction.

In this collection, the stories become more and more like the type of Philip K Dick stories that I've read about.  The characters are unsure of reality.  In some cases, we know that the narrator is unreliable, but there are no other narrators in the story to choose.  A few of the characters are non-white.  Which was a surprise to me until I remembered that this is also the man who wrote "The Man in the High Castle".  I'd definitely recommend the book for people curious about Dick's actual stories.