The Days of Perky Pat

by Philip K. Dick

Paperback, 1991

Status

Available

Call number

813.54

Library's review

Indeholder "Autofac", "Service Call", "Captive Market", "The Mold of Yancy", "The Minority Report", "Recall Mechanism", "The Unreconstructed M", "Explorers We", "War Game", "If There Were No Benny Cemoli", "Novelty Act", "Waterspider", "What the Dead Men Say", "Orpheus With Clay Feet", "The Days Of
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Perky Pat", "Stand-By", "What'll We Do With Ragland Park?", "Oh, To Be A Blobel!".

"Autofac" handler om autonome fabrikker i krig med hinanden om resourcer efter en atomkrig.
"Service Call" handler om at en mand dukker op for at reparere David Courtlands swibble men der er over 10 år til de bliver opfundet - og det går op for Courtland at en swibble er en mareridtsmaskine.
"Captive Market" handler om en gammel kone, der for at tjene penge knuser menneskehedens sidste chance for overlevelse.
"The Mold of Yancy" handler om ???
"The Minority Report" handler om ???
"Recall Mechanism" handler om ???
"The Unreconstructed M" handler om ???
"Explorers We" handler om astronauter fra Mars der vender tilbage igen og igen.
"War Game" handler om at Ganymedes eksporterer legetøj til Jorden blandt andet nogle legetøjssoldater og et brætspil som man vinder ved at tabe.
"If There Were No Benny Cemoli" handler om at for at undgå retsforfølgelse opfinder de ansvarlige for krigen en syndebuk.
"Novelty Act" handler om ???
"Waterspider" handler om ???
"What the Dead Men Say" handler om ???
"Orpheus With Clay Feet" handler om ???
"The Days Of Perky Pat" handler om at efter atomkrigen får de få heldige overlevende - flukes - nødhjælp fra marsboerne men det bruger de til at lave rollespil med en barbie og ken-agtig Perky Pat og Leonard eller Connie Companion og Paul dukkefamilie.
"Stand-By" handler om at præsidenjobbet blot er som backup for den computer der styrer landet og jobbet besættes via fagforeningen men en dag bliver computeren sat ud af driff.
"What'll We Do With Ragland Park?" handler om en sanger hvis sange bliver til virkelighed - farligt når man lever i et slags diktatur.
"Oh, To Be A Blobel!" handler om George og Vivian der var spioner for hver sin side i krigen og derfor er begge menneske noget af tiden og blobel i resten - til sidst bliver de skilt og George bliver blobel og Vivian menneske.

Fremragende novelle
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Publication

Grafton (1991), Edition: New Ed, Paperback

Description

A collection of eighteen science fiction short stories features "The Minority Report," in which Commissioner John Anderton's clever use of "precogs," people who can identify criminals before they can do any harm, turns against him when they identify him as the next criminal.

User reviews

LibraryThing member heidilove
If you like PKD's novels, his stories are the ultimate next step. I love taking them with me on a plane ride. There's something about airports that is the ultimate setting to read PKD's short fiction.
LibraryThing member grunin
18 stories, mostly from 1954 and 1963. The subgenres are time-travel, post-WW3, and precognition, sometimes in combination.

From 1954-8:

Autofac - post-WW3, men attempt to retake control of the means of production from the automated factories.

Service Call - appliance serviceman from the future shows
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up at the door.

Captive Market - a precog from the 1950s visits post-WW3 desolation

The Mold of Yancy - suggests that the 50s culture of conformity could breed fascism.

The Minority Report - builds from precogs to pre-crime, but doesn't do much with it.

Recall Mechanism - precogs again; One of the weaker items here.

The Unreconstructed M - PKD's idea of a detective story (pretty good, too).

Explorers We - the shortest (10 pages) & creepiest story here. Like a good Twilight Zone episode.

War Game - This one's really excellent; and without time-travel, WW3, or precogs. Can't say more without giving it away.

The 1963 stories:

If There Were No Benny Cemoli - post-WW3, with a couple of good political observations.

Novelty Act - the most powerful person on earth is the first lady, Nicole...

Waterspider - a satire on time-travel SF which doesn't get good until the middle, but then has some very good momements.

What the Dead Men Say - the longest story here, this is the jumping-off point for his later novel 'Ubik.'

Orpheus With Clay Feet - a satire on time-traveller SF. Similar to 'Waterspider' but not as accomplished.

The Days Of Perky Pat - post-WW3, a board game featuring Barbie & Ken is the center of community life.

Stand-By - the President is a computer, and nobody cares about the 'standby' human, until one day...

What'll We Do With Ragland Park? - continuation of 'Stand-By', with a precog added to the mix.

Oh, To Be A Blobel - "To defeat your enemy you must become like them, alas." Discuss.
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LibraryThing member tgraettinger
Lots of good reading here. My favorite was "Perky Pat", with "The Mold of Yancy" not far behind.
LibraryThing member burningtodd
Fantastic. Phillip K. Dick writes engaging characters who happen to live in a science fiction setting, the focus is not on the science but on the people and that is what makes it so enjoyable to read.

In Dick's world the people have jobs, they have lives and they deal with problems. They behave like
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people you know doing things that you recognize. Often times the character is fighting against huge odds and he may not win. The important part is the struggle and the story.
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LibraryThing member LamontCranston
Familiar PKD tropes abound: paranoia, warped perceptions, altering reality. The stand out story was The Mold of Yancy.

One thing that was unexpected was the unrelenting misogyny. Men hate their wives and women in general; Women are of little value beyond domestic help and gratification, they are
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helpless, their intellect is inferior. The one exception to all this doesn't count for much as she is a paranoid schizophrenic. This is all played entirely straight with no attempt to subvert or send up or disprove such archaic sterotypes.
Also manages to work in some union bashing in a couple stories.
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LibraryThing member RandyStafford
It's tempting to say that these stories from 1954, 1955, 1958, and 1963 represent great periods of prolific creativity for Dick and the working out of themes and ideas that later found their way into his more famous novels. But Dick was more often than not prolific and frequently recycled motifs
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and themes and even character names from stories into novels. What the Dick scholar will find here is a growing emphasis, at least in the short story format, on illusion and fakery, the seeds of some of Dick's novels, and, for the first time, stories which convey the frequent despair and desperation of those novels.

But the Dick fan and scholar is going to read this collection as a matter of course. What does it offer for those just discovering Dick or his casual readers?

Of course, there is the famous title story. However, with it, Dick seems more interested in posing a logic puzzle based on the implications of precognition than making a serious political statement even though the story features much more political intrigue than the movie based on it. Indeed, with it and several Dick stories here, one gets the sense that the political struggles between various government agencies owe a lot to a study of the Soviet Union or, more probably, the Third Reich. There are other minor stories: "Stand-By" and a rare sequel, "What'll We Do With Ragland Park?". Their main attraction is Dick's weird speculation on future media -- prophecies which don't seem far from the mark 40 years later. The "news clown" of these stories doesn't seem, apart from his makeup, that different from our late night comedy hosts in America. But then the listings in _TV Guide_ often remind me of Dick. They also show Dick's fondness for theorizing odd mutations of American government. Here the President has been replaced by computer.

In "Novelty Act", the nation is ruled by a permanent First Lady who inflicts her cultural tastes on America via public tv. She's mistress, wife, and mother to the nation, many of whom long to audition their talents at the White House. Later incorporated into the novel _The Simulacra_, it is the first story of Dick's that doesn't just mention the despair and desperation of its hero but induces them in the reader as effectively as many of his novels do.

There's also some political fakery afoot in the story and that theme is echoed in "The Mold of Yancy" (reworked for _The Penultimate Truth_), which features a culture built around a doggedly anodyne Eisenhowerish everyman, and "If There Were No Benny Cemoli". The latter is one of the book's highlights and, against a background of searching for war criminals on a devastated Earth, built around the proposition that reality is what the _New York Times_ says it is. The spirit of a dead businessman haunts the mediasphere and a political convention in "What the Dead Man Say". It reminded me of some of the loas in early William Gibson.

Fakery of a forensic sort is the idea of "The Unreconstructed M". The idea of a robot built to leave clues designed to frame someone for murder was intriguing. However, because the story goes on too long and into unnecessary tangents, this is also minor Dick.

At this point in the short story part of his career, Dick seems to be less interested in mutants and berserk machines than before. Still, we get an automated command and control economy that needs reprogramming in "Autofac", and "Recall Mechanism" explores the link between precognitive mutants and certain psychological tics.

The science fiction story device used most often here is time travel. "Service Call" has some engineers getting a disturbing glimpse at the future of conformity machinery. Or, as the ad says, "Why be half loyal?". "Captive Market" has a miserly shopkeeper who only sees a profit where others see a horrifying future.

Time travel gets mixed with meta-science fiction in a couple of uncharacteristic Dick stories. In "Waterspider", time travelers come back to snatch Dick's friend Poul Anderson because, you see, all science fiction writers are unconscious precognitives, and they need his help on an experimental space project. This story drops plenty of famous names and even mentions Dick's inspiration, A. E. van Vogt. "Orpheus with Clay Feet" works a witty variation on the idea of time travelers meeting famous artists of the past. Here uncreative people like our protagonist can take solace in inspiring great works of art if not creating them. At least, that's how it's supposed to work. Here the artist is the greatest science fiction writer of all time, Jack Dowland.

"Explorers We", somewhere in the middle range of quality, strikes one as a _Twilight Zone_ episode about aliens' failure to communicate. "Oh, To Be a Blobel!" is a story probably more famous then it deserves to be. Judging from Dick's notes as to his intentions, it's mostly a failure to illustrate the Nietzsche maxim about becoming a dragon when battling dragons. However, it works on other levels.

Along with "If There Were No Benny Cemoli", the gem of the collection is "The Days of Perky Pat". While children roam a landscape blighted by nuclear war and engage in useful pursuits like hunting and making knives, their parents are underground and expending their energy on making elaborate layouts for their Barbie-like Perky Pat dolls. Their infantile obsession with recreating the minutia of a vanished world is enabled by handy care packages dropped by benovelent Martians. Dick has some weirdly plausible things to say about play and the role of toys in our lives and mental health. This story also inspired Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

In some ways, the variety of themes here dilutes the power of Dick's typical obsessions, especially the metaphor of machine as an anti-life force. There are also fewer really exceptional stories here than in the earlier volumes of this series. However, it is still as good an introduction to Dick as some of the collections he edited himself.
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LibraryThing member TysonAdams
Only the third Philip K Dick I've read. This was interesting more than engaging, but that was the idea: question your perceptions of reality.
LibraryThing member Stahl-Ricco
This is the third collection of short stories I've read by Dick in the last couple of months, and I remain impressed at how good most of them are! I've described them before as "Twilight Zone" sci-fi, and that's how these roll out, especially "Explorers We"! And I love all of the themes/issues that
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are dealt with on these pages - post war stories, propaganda, time travel, anti-government, anti-war, etc.. The story "Autofac" makes me think of what Amazon.com might be headed toward! And, of course, I really enjoyed (again!) "The Minority Report"! Also, as a Bay Area resident, I loved the mention of so many local towns and locations, especially the city directly to my north, Petaluma! The longest story in here, "What The Dead Men Say" was my least favorite, and four of the last six in the collection didn't really do much for me. But the last story, "Oh, To Be A Blobel!" ended the book on a high, high note! Still, I do want to know, what is a swibble?
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LibraryThing member expatscot
I appreciate that Dick is building a world here and exploring it in the same way as Asimov does with his robots, but many of the stories felt a little same-y. However, one has to remember that this was written a long time ago and the concepts Dick was creating here have begun to become part of our
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real world, either in fact or accepted possibilities and that maybe just robs the book of it's "shock and awe" factor a little.
All of that said, plenty of good material in here and well worth a read.
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Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

1954 - 1963 (short stories)
1987-05

Physical description

496 p.; 19.4 cm

ISBN

0586207686 / 9780586207680

Local notes

Omslag: Chris Moore
Omslaget viser en futuristisk by og på himlen ses en planet tæt på, Jorden måske?
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, bind 4

Similar in this library

Pages

496

Library's rating

Rating

½ (443 ratings; 3.9)

DDC/MDS

813.54
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