Philip K. Dick Chronological Order?

I was looking at one of my books today and noticed it had been put as part of a series. That series was Philip K. Dick Chronological Order. This is just a list of all Philip K. Dick's novels supposedly in the order he wrote them although that is difficult to establish for some books that were effectively reworked before publication. To my eye this is obviously no way a series and I have left a polite PM for the user (who isn't a member of this group) and I will delete the series information in a couple of days time if there is no overwhelming support for it.

I must admit it's rather nice, but having read a decent number, there is no "series" quality to PKD's books.

I think the chronological confusion may come from two things -

#1 The whole Narnia thing. I think the chronicle vs. actual order is something you really only know if you've cared to seek out additional information.

#2 The general mess that is most author pages when they've written more than, oh, six books. There really isn't a nice, neat place to go and just view the titles once you get into the messes that are DVDs, strangely named omnibuses/collections, editions that defy combining and folks who have grabbed short stories in an anthology and called a single author the writer (instead of the editor). PKD's page suffers from all of these problems.

I see what he wanted to do, but I definitely don't agree it's a series.

That is not a series. For a chronological series, I would use the date of publication, rather than an ordinal.

PKD's books are not strictly a series, but what harm does it do to treat it as such? It is interesting to have the chronological order, insofar as it can be established, easily available. For my own use, I put dates in my Comments.

I agree with Noisy that the date, rather than an ordinal, would be better. Whether publication date or (supposed) writing date should be indicated in the series description.

I would have voted to keep the series, with improvements, but I'm too late, it's gone.

When Tim first unrolled series, a few list-type series were entered. Tim came out quite hard against; even those that felt the Penguin Classics could be considered a series wondered, "why not?"

As I understand it, future developments will allow list-type items that will be separate from series. If it's any conciliation, I did enter the series of short story collections for PKD. ;-)

http://www.librarything.com/series/The+Collected+Stories+of+Philip+K.+Dick

These were a legitimate series.

#5

Yep - the collected short stories is a legitimate series however it may not be as simple as you have it (or there hasn't been enough combining)

The collected short stories that I am familiar with are Beyond Lies the Wub (1), Second Variety (2), The Father-Thing (3), The Days of Perky Pat (4), The Little Black Box (5) which was first issued by Underwood-Miller as a set and then republished by Gollancz.

I think the contents of Beyond Lies The Wub and The Short Happy Life Of The Brown Oxford match. But obviously the further volumes probably do not as the short story Second Variety is obviously in different volumes.

OK, this is really confusing. ISFDB agrees with Andy, but the way that the books are recorded in LT seem to contradict this. I have a Millenium (Orbit imprint) edition of We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, which is "Volume five of the collected stories". ISFDB claims this is the same as The Little Black Box and The Eye of the Sibyl. What to do ...what to do.

I do promise my personal copy of The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford has the series notations for the all over the cover.

My version is US - is yours? Maybe they highlighted different ones?

I did notice that the covers I have are not winning in all cases (in fact, only said copy of "shoe" does have the style cover that all 5 volumes I personally have.

Did you add the 2nd series with the notations of the titles? I'm not adverse to it at all; we should simply remove my series at that point because it offers nothing new. I thought we really weren't supposed to put titles in the series, though...just add to the canonical titles...

I am desperately curious as to the origins of your volume 1 edition - even on amazon a search to find the collected short story volumes reveals the Brown Oxford:

Amazon link to PKD Search using Vol. in search

I can find the Wub, but only from an Amazon Seller:

http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Lies-Collected-Stories-Philip/dp/0586207643/ref=sr_...

And when I blow up the cover, I see the volume 1 notation...

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Here's my other take on the whole thing. It appears the Wub may have been a series started in 1990 by Voyager. The series I have beginning with Brown Oxford started in the mid-80s with Citadel press (and reprinted with the black & blue covers about 15 years later).

Maybe they were doing a different series with Voyager? I say this only because I can also find a Volume 3 that's subtitled "The Father Thing." It also appears that these are UK.

In which case, we have some de-comboing to do!

Foolishly, I decided to try and tidy things up. I regret it now. Various publishers have issued the series, but have changed the titles to take advantage of cinema audiences who have wanted to see the stories on which the screenplays were based. In particular, Citadel have messed things up by moving stories and titles around. I did loads of separating and combining, and things ended up pretty much where they started. Volume 1 and volume 4 are pretty stable, but 2, 3 and 5 are in conflict because of the title changes. I know that people will go in and combine 2 and 3 ("Second Variety" is the common title) and/or 2 and 5 ("We can remember it for you wholesale" is the common title) but there's nothing to be done!

Oh, and I added series description blurb to try (!) and clarify things. the pkdickbooks link seemed best.

I read somewhere that the problems with PKD collected stories get even more complicated when you consider the German volumes.

No - I have the Gollancz British issues (for some of the books at least).

The Philip K. Dick site shows the collected works being published as a 5 volume set in 1987 (by Underwood Miller). The Philip K. Dick bookshelf gives 1990 as the first Citadel edition but I have seen other comments to 1987 Citadel editions.

Gollancz and Millennium didn't join forces until 1998 when Orion bought up VGSF as far as I can remember. VG first started to publish the collected editions in the UK in 1988. The 5th volume was The Little Black Box in hardback (1990) but by the time the Grafton paperback was issued the next year the title had changed to "We can remember it for you wholesale". By the time the Millennium editions (2000) were published the 4th volume had changed title to "Minority Report".

If we can establish whether the Citadel volumes have the same contents as the Underwood-Miller / VGSF / Millennium versions we can combine them up properly and have one series. If someone who has the Citadel volumes (esp. volumes 2, 3 and 5) can check the contents against http://www.philipkdick.com/works_collections.html it would be good. If they match then that is good as the VGSF ones I have checked match.

11>

Andy, as I said earlier and explained in the Series description sections, the best resource seems to be http://www.pkdickbooks.com which has pages listing the U.S. and UK editions (linked to from the two series descriptions) and their contents. The link you give picks up half-way through the story, and doesn't explain the migrating titles.

#11: If we can establish whether the Citadel volumes have the same contents as the Underwood-Miller / VGSF / Millennium versions we can combine them up properly and have one series. If someone who has the Citadel volumes (esp. volumes 2, 3 and 5) can check the contents against http://www.philipkdick.com/works_collections.html it would be good. If they match then that is good as the VGSF ones I have checked match.

I have the Citadel series: #1 & #4 agree will the Paul Williams list, the other three have minor variations from William's listings. So the Citadel collections exist in varying versions themselves.

I've updated the series description for the parallel series that I created, to be (a bit) more explicit. I'll maybe do the other one later.

However, I've just discovered that Paycheck and Minority Report have been used for collections unrelated to the 5-volume Underwood-Miller set. There's more separating to do, but the sad thing is that none of this is going to stick with the way LT is set up to allow things to be separated and combined willy-nilly.

I've posted a disambiguation notice for "Beyond Lies the Wub", in all its incarnations.