Beyond Lies the Wub (Collected Stories ∙ Volume 1)

Some impressions on reading this book in 1991. Some spoilers follow.

"Preface" -- This is an interesting piece by Dick on what he valued in sf. Dick makes the valid point that all fiction involves dislocation from the reader's world but that sf involves a major conceptual dislocation. Dick eloquently speaks of the joy in reading sf coming from the "chain reaction of ideas" set off in the mind while reading good sf. What is good sf to Dick? New ideas or new variations of old ideas. He quite clearly says it isn't just the future or advanced technology. I disagree with assigning a functional and not a descriptive definition to sf.

"Foreword" by Steven Owen Godersky -- Godersky makes the valid observation that cosmic struggles between good and evil, death and life, order and entropy, callousness versus empathy often take place in out of the way corners in a muted, hidden way between rather small, ordinary figures. The everyday, the mundane can have cosmic significance in Dick's work.

"Introduction" by Roger Zelazny. Zelazny gives his personal reminisces about Dick. In his statements on what he likes about Dick, he mentions some of the things I like best about Dick: his humor, his mixing of the everyday with the strange and horrifying, his everyman characters who are often engaged in desperate, but unobvious, cosmic struggles.

"Stability" -- A justly unpublished story. It is a mood piece (whose ending seems to owe much to the image of ranked rows of workers marching to tend their monstrous machine masters in the film Metropolis) that uneasily combines a fantasy feel (the evil city imprisoned and watched by a mysterious guardian in another time/dimension) with an sf feel. Dick, with his tale of time travel, introduces the elements of reality distortion and temporal dislocation which went on to become characteristic of his works.

"Roog" -- This unpretensious little story has, at first glance, merely a charming notion to recommend it: a dog guarding his master against the aliens. But Dick's notes to this story have a lot to say about Dick's fiction and fiction in general. Dick stories are written in an unpretensious style, very naturalistic and not overblown but still conveying much emotion. Yet, because Dick does not write in a bloated, obviously symbol laden "literary" style the significance of the issues and themes is not always obvious. In fact, I missed most until I read Dick's notes. As Dick points out, this story is about an obscure menace and the loyalty of a dog trying to warn his uncomprehending master and being bitterly frustrated. Besides the familiar Dick themes of love/friendship and loyalty, there is the quintessential Dick theme of reality's nature and the differing perceptions of sentient minds. Dick based the story's dog on his own dog who barked at garbagemen on Friday mornings -- convinced they were there out steal the master's treasure. Dick placed himself into the mind of a crazy dog. Others speak of Dick's empathy, his questioning of reality, his spiritual concerns but for me these are all contained in one of the things I admire most in his writing: his characterization, as the Wall Street Journal blurb says, put you in other people's minds and all his emotion and philosophical speculation contribute towards that. Important themes as he said, but, indoctrinated with a sense of false worth for flashy metaphor-soaked, symbol-laden, wordy "literary" prose we don't see it at first and his powerful themes are not readily apparent.

"The Little Movement" -- Like "Roog", this is another Dick story with a cosmic struggle played out in a seemingly trivial venue and manner. Dick, always concerned with authority and the oppressed, gives us a child manipulated and ordered about by another authoritarian figure in his life: a literal tin soldier.

"Beyond Lies the Wub" -- It was interesting to read Dick's first published story. It shows some of Dick's delightful, strange humor in the wub conversing with his would-be devourers. This story has quite obvious references with the Eucharist. Captain Franco is possessed by the wub's personality after he eats his flesh. The wub is with him always in spirit and, in some ways, flesh. The character of Captain Franco is an earthman devoted to talk of, the wub says, killing and cutting. The wub speaks to us and him in another Dick attempt to tell us of the brotherhood of sentience.

"The Gun" -- This is one of those stories that chastises man for being such a suspicious, warlike animal (standard theme for '50s sf). An (evidently) alien exploration crew finds a desolate planet, the victim of that rare event -- interspecies war --, which seems to be Earth. A treasure trove of cultural artifacts for this dead race is guarded by a huge gun that knocks out approaching spacecraft. The explorers manage to disable the gun and take back some rotting artificats. One of the crew remarks it would serve the race right for being so suspicious if no one rescued their cultural artifacts. However, when the aliens leave the forces of thanatos triumph (as always, symbolized by the mechanical in Dick's works -- here in a matter like his "Second Variety"). Man's memory will not be saved and, Dick says, it serves we paranoid, hostiles right.

"The Skull" -- This is a variant of that very common time travel theme of going back in time to kill someone. Here a society wants to strangle a religion of civil resistance and pacifism (war and reactions to it were an understandably large part of 1950's sf) in the cradle by killing its founder before he can make his one speech that starts the movement; however, no one knows the man's identity. I liked the moment when the would-be assassin realizes (as I'm sure most readers did) he is the founder. Dick does a very nice job of showing the emotion of a man contemplating his future, dead skull. I liked the delicious joke (and playful variant of the story of Christ's death and resurrection) of the assassin starting a religion by uttering joking, "death-bed" riddles. His seemingly moral statements are descriptions of the future (and his past life), desperate attempts by a dying man to be remembered through paradoxes: a religion of non-resistance, empathy is started by a violent man who despises it.

"Mr. Spaceship" -- A cyborg spaceship plays God to an Adam and Eve like couple in this anti-war tale with the characteristic Dickian point that you have to try to overcome evil even if your effort is futile and/or doomed.

"Piper in the Woods -- This is one of those obviously 1950 sf stories with that indefinable, but characteristic style of the period. Our protagonist is a military psychologist -- not exactly the every day white collar worker of that period's sf but close enough. Dick makes little use of scientific realism here (or any other story) -- people careen between the asteroids (fantastically like little pastoral worlds) as easily as Packards negotiated suburbian streets. The story is filled with psychological concepts and jargon (usually Freudian) like a lot of fifties sf (though Dick and Bester probably made the heaviest use of ideas deriving from psychology). The best part of the story (which is something of a mild, if ambivalent beatnik/dropout satire on goal oriented fifties society) is the humorous dialogue of the men who have turned into vegetable svia mental identification/empathy.

"The Infinites" -- This is one of those typical mutant superman stories. Dick throws in the touch of having the radiation induce an evolutionary process which is not random but directed toward a goal. As usual, Dick's sympathies are with the individual. Power-crazed (or, more accurately, paternalistic) Harrison Blake is seen as evil (though Dick often underplays his "evil" characters -- they seem bland or relatively normal) in his desire to dominate his fellow Terrans. The other characters suffer emotionally from their mutation. I liked the twist of having mutated hamsters -- who are superior to even the human mutations -- help our heroes back to normalcy.

"The Preserving Machine" -- This is a strange, charming, slightly disconcerting story. There is a poignancy here about trying to preserve the beauties of civilization -- here music -- from destruction. Doc Labrynith experiences the pain of a creator whose creations -- imbued with independence, adaptibility, and the will to survive of necessity -- change to something not beautiful like the original. Doc despairs but keeps the hope that something will work. Dick's characters often carry on in the face of despair and defeat -- they keep the faith in the value of the struggle for good though it may prove futile . Perhaps the stately Beethoven beetle at story's end is a sign that Doc's faith is justified.

"Expendable", -- A fun, if absurd, and paranoid story about a man who discovers the truth about the ancient war between invader man and native Terran insect and man's created ally, the spider. I liked the blackly funny twist at the end where the spiders apologize for making the man think he will be saved. They were referring to the human race as a whole.

"The Variable Man" -- This is a very '50s sf story: a tale of war, social engineering along mathematical lines, and satire. Dick gives us an Earth society locked in combat with an encircling, corrupt Centauran Empire. This story reminds me of Dick's Solar Lottery. I liked the satirical element of two societies waging war via competing design program, never actually shifting to production until they are sure they have a large enough edge. In this age of chaos science, it's interesting to note that the incalculable effects the Variable Man's presence yields is sort of a premonition of that. Of course, there are problems in the logic of this: if the Centaurans have the odds advantage why don't they attack, could spies really know all the relevant information (chaos science says no, plot necessity says yes)? There is also Dick's usual sloppiness in logic and science: ftl travel is the outcome of the story but the movement of Terran space forces makes it sound as if it's already a reality. Dick's description of the military conflict between Reinhart and Sheikov is competently done if not real exciting. Thomas Cole, the Variable Man, is a familiar Dick figure: the handyman (here also a symbol of earlier times when men intuitively knew machines and did not worship them the way Reinhart does his SRB machines) who is a hero, and, ultimately, the technological (and, possibly, political) savior of man -- or, at least, a decent man trying to do his best in the world. (

"The Indefatigable Frog" -- This was a good natured, if light weight, story, an amusing tale of two stubborn, sometimes mean-spirited, college professors dedicated to getting a conclusive answer to an old logic puzzle first proposed by the Greek Zeno.

"The Crystal Crypt" -- This is an action packed story of Terran sabotage against a Martian city. The twist ending of the Terran turning out to be a Martian agent was predictable. The only new idea here was taking an entire Martian city (by shrinking it) as hostage.

"The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford" -- I enjoyed this whimsical, gently humorous story of Oxfords and high heel shoes coming to life. The Doc Labrynith stories prove Dick did have a definite talent for what's called "light fantasy" (I'd argue it's sf). Is there a deeper philosophical significance here? Perhaps it's Dick's old concern for the relationship of the animate and inanimate. Dick, if you want to give this story a philosophical/religious significance, seems to taken an animistic stance: even inanimate objects have the potential for life if sufficiently irritated.

"The Builder" -- This story, predictably, turns out to be a retelling of the Noah story. (First printed, oddly enough, in Amazing.) The emotion of the ark builder and his son is effectively portrayed, but it's mainly notable for its attack on fifties' society as bigoted, nosy, intrusive, and conformist.

"Paycheck" -- A fast-moving, paranoid tale of a man, Jennings, who has been mysteriously employed for the past two years. The ruthless Security Police want to know what he's been doing. The problem is he doesn't know -- the knowledge was removed from his brain as part of his employment contract. To further worsen matters, his pre-amnesiac self has elected to take a bagful of trinkets in lieu of money. But, in one of the most intriguing aspects of this story (and the genesis of the story according to Dick's notes), those trinkets prove to be quite valuable as they unfailing help as he finds himself (in the story's political aspect) caught between the Scylla and Charybdris of governmental and economic forces. In this future, it is not a conflict, as in medieaval times, between the Church and State but between State and Corporation with individuals (always Dick's concern is with freedom and the individual) as hapless pawns. With the aid of time-viewing and "scoop" equipment, Jennings' past, pre-amnesiac self takes on the aura of an omniscient, pre-determing god who unfailingly guides Jennings as he manages to blackmail his way into a revolutionary organization whose long-term goal is to overthrow the government and the corporations. I liked this story a lot. Yes, a movie was eventually made from this.

"The Great C" -- According to the notes for this story, it was partly used for Dick and Roger Zelazny's collaboration Dies Irae in my favorite part of that novel: the encounter with the old, surly, senile computer. This story uses the plot of the primitive tribe (here survivors of an atomic war) sacrificing to a god to make a symbolic point. Here the god is a symbol of the mechanical, thanotos force of war. The Great C caused the war and now literally eats people to remain alive.

"Out in the Garden" -- This short, rather horrifying tale is a modern retelling of the Zeus-Leda story. A man finds that son is the product of a liasion between his wife and Zeus in duck form.

"Colony" -- This is a delightfully paranoid story along the lines of John Carpenter's The Thing (and its inspiration, John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?") but with a heightened twist: here the mimicking life-forms impersonate inanimate objects. This story ends with the absurd, horrifying image of the men and women of the survey team heading naked into the mouth of an alien lifeform disguised as a spaceship.

"Prize Shop -- This story has little to recommend it. It seems to be Dick's ode to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. The story does, in its talk of launch cradles and other scientific and technological jargon, provide an interesting example of sf rationalizing and extrapolation via nomenclature. The ending wasn't predictable, but it wasn't very interesting either, and I did suspect the involvement of time travel.

"Nanny" -- This story, with its children and passages of pastoral description (the most, I think, in any Dick story I've read) reminded me a great deal of Ray Bradbury's work. Bradbury would have had a warmer relationship between the children and Nanny, but the touch of arming the robot nannies and having them fight is an odd, unsettling, uniquely Dickian touch. The story seemed to be a bizarre, satiricial twist on planned obsolescence. Here the obsolescence is vigorously enforced in Darwinian struggle between competing products -- a struggle which results in increasingly better products. But these products increasingly taken on the sinister air of weapons and not loving nannies -- there lies the story's odd tension. But the story seems -- perhaps unintentionaly -- to also be a commentary on males' fascination with observing and causing violence. ( )

An excellent collection of Dick's early stories. They're as intelligent and well-written as you'd think, with more of a sense of humour in some of them than I'd expected (I tend to think of Dick as so very *serious*, but I see I've done him an injustice). Unsurprisingly, they have a very 50s flavour, but without feeling too terribly dated. ( )

Great stuff I was rather enamoured with Beyond lies the Wub, The Indefatigable Frog and Prize ship. The latter had you thinking about Gullivers travels, then he hits you with the idea of an expanding universe. Interestingly another book in my library The Final Theory written by Mark Mccutcheon puts forward the idea the whole universe and everything in it is expanding and that gravity does not exist, what we think of as gravity is the force of expansion. Synchronicity, maybe. ( )

All PK Dick stories from the 50's. The best was Nanny. Each story deserves to be savored.

Vintage mid-century SF at its finest. It's filled with lots of intriguing scenarios, a few optimistic and several horrific. Some of my favorite stories in this collection were The Variable Man, Paycheck, Beyond Lies the Wub, and Roog. ( )

There's the beginnings of a great SF writer here, though the stories are mostly pretty typical '50s SF fare. ( )

The first book of a series.

The author talks about what is science fiction and what isn't - adventure stories aren't, according to him, but stories with psionics can be, so he is a bit generalising and wobbly as far as that goes - although it is an impossible type task.

Further "I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an sf story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is good sf the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all, it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader's mind so that that mind, like the author's, begins to create. Thus sf is creative and inspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by-and-large does not do. We who read sf (I am speaking as a reader now, not a writer) read it because we love to experience this chain-reaction of ideas being set off in our minds by something we read, something with a new idea in it; hence the very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create -- and enjoy doing it: joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness."

Roger Zelazny writes an introduction, including part of a letter that Dick sent him at one stage.

Definitely good stuff, consistent quality on display here, which, for a complete stories selection is impressive, coming out at 3.44.

Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : STABILITY - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : ROOG - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : THE LITTLE MOVEMENT - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : BEYOND LIES THE WUB - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : THE GUN - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : THE SKULL - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : THE DEFENDERS - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : MR. SPACESHIP - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : PIPER IN THE WOODS - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : THE INFINITES - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : THE PRESERVING MACHINE - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : EXPENDABLE - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : THE VARIABLE MAN - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : THE INDEFATIGABLE FROG - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : THE CRYSTAL CRYPT - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : THE SHORT HAPPY LIFE OF THE BROWN OXFORD - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : The Builder - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : MEDDLER - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : Paycheck - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : The Great C - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : OUT IN THE GARDEN - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : THE KING OF THE ELVES - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : COLONY - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : PRIZE SHIP - Philip K. Dick
Complete Stories Of Philip K. Dick 1 : NANNY - Philip K. Dick

Out of ideas this time.

3.5 out of 5

Barking Guardians are annoying.

3.5 out of 5

Toy soldier orders.

3.5 out of 5

You might be what you eat.

4 out of 5

Not enough space veggies.

3.5 out of 5

Dead man kill mission - me?

4 out of 5

Robots reckon war is illogical human stupid stuff.

3.5 out of 5

Needs brains to avoid space mines.

3.5 out of 5

I'm a recent crop, boss.

3.5 out of 5

"Tiny prospecting ships led a hazardous life, threading their way through the rubble-strewn periphery of the system, avoiding meteor swarms, clouds of hull-eating bacteria, space pirates, peanut-size empires on remote artificial planetoids --"

No-one said anything about being turned into mutant freaks though.

3.5 out of 5

Music birds tricky.

2.5 out of 5

You human newbies.

3 out of 5

Defense lag ftl bomb random effects expansion.

4 out of 5

Zeno even immune to amphibian Atom.

3.5 out of 5

Martian City destroyer hunt.

3.5 out of 5

Shoes beyond us now.

3 out of 5

Not much of a boat.

2.5 out of 5

Future lucky Dip is buggy.

3 out of 5

Leaving myself bits and pieces of a future.

4 out of 5

Smashed by those answers.

4 out of 5

Secret party, duck you.

3 out of 5

Do I look like one, short round?

3.5 out of 5

Object violence.

3.5 out of 5

Ganymede getaway fairy story.

3.5 out of 5

Jetsons homelife breakdown.

3 out of 5

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2008/07/short-happy-life-of-brown-oxford-philip_23...
( )

Terrific bunch of short stories which would make a good introduction to anyone unfamiliar with PKD's work. ( )