By 2021, the World War has killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remain covet any living creature, and for people who can't afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacra: horses, birds, cats, sheep. They've even built humans. Immigrants to Mars receive androids so sophisticated they are indistinguishable from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans can wreak, the government bans them from Earth. Driven into hiding, unauthorized androids live among human beings, undetected. Rick Deckard, an officially sanctioned bounty hunter, is commissioned to find rogue androids and retire them. But when cornered, androids fight back--with lethal force.

Praise for Philip K. Dick

The most consistently brilliant science fiction writer in the world.--John Brunner

A kind of pulp-fiction Kafka, a prophet.--The New York Times

[Philip K. Dick] sees all the sparkling--and terrifying--possibilities . . . that other authors shy away from.--Rolling Stone

Named one of Time's 100 Best Books, Ubik is a mind-bending, classic novel about the perception of reality from Philip K. Dick, the Hugo Award-winning author of The Man in the High Castle. “From the stuff of space opera, Dick spins a deeply unsettling existential horror story, a nightmare you'll never be sure you've woken up from.”--Lev Grossman, Time Glen Runciter runs a lucrative business -- deploying his teams of anti-psychics to corporate clients who want privacy and security from psychic spies. But when he and his top team are ambushed by a rival, he is gravely injured and placed in “half-life,” a dreamlike state of suspended animation. Soon, though, the surviving members of the team begin experiencing some strange phenomena, such as Runciter's face appearing on coins and the world seeming to move backward in time. As consumables deteriorate and technology gets ever more primitive, the group needs to find out what is causing the shifts and what a mysterious product called Ubik has to do with it all. “More brilliant than similar experiments conducted by Pynchon or DeLillo.”--Roberto Bolaño

Praise for Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick] sees all the sparkling--and terrifying--possibilities . . . that other authors shy away from.--Rolling Stone

A kind of pulp-fiction Kafka, a prophet.--The New York Times

A powerful and enigmatic alien recruits humans and aliens to help it restore a sunken cathedral in this touching and hilarious novel.

This Library of America volume brings together four of Dick's most original novels. The Man in the High Castle (1962), which won the Hugo Award, describes an alternate world in which Japan and Germany have won World War II and America is divided into separate occupation zones. The dizzying The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) posits a future in which competing hallucinogens proffer different brands of virtual reality, and an interplanetary drug tycoon can transform himself into a godlike figure transcending even physical death.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), about a bounty hunter in search of escaped androids in a postapocalyptic society where status is measured by the possession of live animals and religious life is focused on a television personality, was the basis for the movie Blade Runner. Ubik (1969), with its future world of psychic espionage agents and cryonically frozen patients inhabiting an illusory half-life, pursues Dick's theme of simulated realities and false perceptions to ever more disturbing conclusions, as time collapses on itself and characters stranded in past eras search desperately for the elusive, constantly shape-shifting panacea Ubik. As with most of Dick's novels, no plot summary can suggest the mesmerizing and constantly surprising texture of these astonishing books.

Posing the questions What is human? and What is real? in a multitude of fascinating ways, Dick produced works--fantastic and weird, yet developed with precise logic, marked by wild humor and soaring flights of religious speculation--that are startlingly prescient imaginative anticipations of twenty-first-century quandaries.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

More than anyone else in the field, Mr. Dick really puts you inside people's minds. --Wall Street Journal

Many thousands of readers consider Philip K. Dick to have been the greatest science fiction writer on any planet. Since his untimely death in 1982, interest in Dick's works has continued to mount and his reputation has been enhanced by a growing body of critical attention. The Philip K. Dick Award is now presented annually to a distinguished work of science fiction, and the Philip K. Dick Society is devoted to the study and promulgation of his works.

This collection includes all of the writer's earliest short and medium-length fiction covering the years 1954-1964, and featuring such fascinating tales as The Minority Report (the inspiration for Steven Spielberg's film), Service Call, Stand-By, The Days of Perky Pat, and many others. Here, readers will find Dick's initial explorations of the themes he so brilliantly brought to life in his later work.

Dick won the prestigious Hugo Award for the best novel of 1963 for The Man in the High Castle. In the last year of his life, the film Blade Runner was made from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

The classic stories of Philip K. Dick offer an intriguing glimpse into the imagination of one of science fiction's most enduring and respected names.

A useful acquisition for any serious SF library or collection. --Kirkus Reviews

Awe-inspiring. --The Washington Post

Countless readers worldwide consider Philip K. Dick to have been the greatest science fiction writer on any planet. Since his untimely death in 1982, interest in Dick's work has continued to mount and his reputation has been enhanced by a growing body of critical attention as well as many films based on his stories and novels.

Featuring the story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, which inspired the major motion picture Total Recall, this collection draws from the writer's earliest fiction, written during the years 1952-55. Also included are fascinating works such as The Adjustment Team (basis of the 2011 movie The Adjustment Bureau), Impostor (basis of the 2001 movie), and many others.

Dick won the prestigious Hugo Award for best novel of 1963 for The Man in the High Castle and in the last year of his life, the now-classic film Blade Runner was made from his novel Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep? More recently, Dick's short story The Minority Report inspired a Steven Spielberg movie as well as a TV series.

The classic stories of Philip K. Dick offer an intriguing glimpse into the early imagination of one of science fiction's most enduring and respected names.

A useful acquisition for any serious SF library or collection. --Kirkus Reviews

More than anyone else in the field, Mr. Dick really puts you inside people's minds. --Wall Street Journal

With an Introduction by Norman Spinrad

More than anyone else in the field, Mr. Dick really puts you inside people's minds. --The Wall Street Journal

The Philip K. Dick Reader

Many thousands of readers consider Philip K. Dick the greatest science fiction mind on any planet. Since his untimely death in 1982, interest in Dick's works has continued to mount, and his reputation has been further enhanced by a growing body of critical attention. The Philip K. Dick Award is now given annually to a distinguished work of science fiction, and the Philip K. Dick Society is devoted to the study and promulgation of his works.

Dick won the prestigious Hugo Award for the best novel of 1963 for The Man in the High Castle. In the last year of his life, the film Blade Runner was made from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

This collection includes some of Dick's earliest short and medium-length fiction, including We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (the story that inspired the motion picture Total Recall), Second Variety (which inspired the motion picture Screamers), Paycheck, The Minority Report, and twenty more.

When a routine tour of a particle accelerator goes awry, Jack Hamilton and the rest of his tour group find themselves in a world ruled by Old Testament morality, where the smallest infraction can bring about a plague of locusts. Escape from that world is not the end, though, as they plunge into a Communist dystopia and a world where everything is an enemy.

Philip K. Dick was aggressively individualistic and no worldview is safe from his acerbic and hilarious take downs. Eye in the Sky blends the thrills and the jokes to craft a startling morality lesson hidden inside a comedy.

Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick contains twenty-one of Dick's most dazzling and resonant stories, which span his entire career and show a world-class writer working at the peak of his powers.

In The Days of Perky Pat, people spend their time playing with dolls who manage to live an idyllic life no longer available to the Earth's real inhabitants. Adjustment Team looks at the fate of a man who by mistake has stepped out of his own time. In Autofac, one community must battle benign machines to take back control of their lives. And in I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon, we follow the story of one man whose very reality may be nothing more than a nightmare. The collection also includes such classic stories as The Minority Report, the basis for the Steven Spielberg movie, and We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, the basis for the film Total Recall. With an introduction by Jonathan Lethem, Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick is a magnificent distillation of one of American literature's most searching imaginations.