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Human Is? by Philip K. Dick
01/08/2007 . Source: Sue Davies 
pub: Gollancz. 375 page enlarged paperback. Price: £ 7.99 (UK only). ISBN: 978-0-575-08034-8. Buy Human Is in the USA - or Buy Human Is in the UK  check out website: www.orionbooks.co.uk
This collection of short stories, published in the 25th year since the death of the prolific SF writer Philip K. Dick features his most popular and perhaps most familiar stories previously published in different volumes. Many of these stories have been used to create films of variable success including 'Impostor', 'Paycheck' and 'We Can Remember It For You Wholesale' (aka 'Total Recall'). The sparkling originality of these stories may be lost today due to them being so well plundered by an industry desperate for ideas.
Standout short stories include the aforementioned 'Impostor'. Spence Olham is arrested one morning and told by the authorities that he is an android bomb sent by the extraterrestrial enemy to blow up a strategic factory. He knows this cannot be true and seeks out the crash-site where the android came down. As he gets closer to the truth, he releases he doesn't really want to know it after all.
A story I hadn't come across before, 'Adjustment Team', is a variation on Dick's obsession with reality. One morning, an adjustment of reality is scheduled but one element, Eddie Fletcher, is in the wrong place at the wrong time. He sees too many things he just shouldn't have seen. When men in white robes are chasing and reality has crumbled around him, Eddie wishes he had got to work on time.
None of the stories is overly long and they all address fundamental ideas that get the reader to think. Its sobering stuff occasionally lightened by humour but always with intense thought. These stories can be scary, too. 'The Father Thing' is a variation on the body-snatchers theme and its great quality is creating a heart-in-mouth breathlessness as you read.
The stories reflect the re-occurring preoccupations of Dick as he lurched through a periods of drug dependence and co-dependent relationships. A man with a big brain, he needed to get his ideas down on paper. If he could have mainlined to the movie industry, think how much it would have gained. His thoughts amount to a philosophy of sorts that he chose to put into fiction. One can imagine conversations with Dick as being mainly one-sided but nevertheless intensely interesting and occasionally insane.
This is a good collection of some of his most well-known stories and if read in conjunction with this longer novels fleshes out our understanding of where Philip Dick was trying to go with his body of work.
Sue Davies
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