The Father-Thing by Philip K Dick
This is the third out of five volumes of PKD’s collected short stories. The 25 stories written in the period somewhat over a year before the author’s first published novel.
My favourite in the collection would have to be ‘The Hanging Stranger‘, in which a man on his way to work notices a corpse handing in plain view. His disturbance at the sight of the body is seconded only to his disturbance at the fact that the body doesn’t seem to bother anyone else.
There’s a body hanging from the lamppost,” Loyce said. “I’m going to call the cops.”
“They must know about it,” Potter said. “Or otherwise it wouldn’t be there. (p14)
In another story, ‘The Golden Man‘, a society that systematically kills mutants seems to have met its match. The surprise in this story comes in terms of the mutant?s ability. Mankind had always expected to be bettered eventually, but they’ve always had a rigid view of what they’d be bettered at exactly. Anyway…
…we’ll know homo superior when he comes – by definition he’ll be the one we wont be able to euth. (p44)
You know, this game has one real advantage over selling people cars and TV sets. With something like this we have to buy. It isn’t a luxury, something big and flashy to impress the neighbours, something we could do without. If we don?t buy this we die. They always said the way to sell something was create anxiety in people. Create a sense of insecurity – tell them they smell bad or look funny. But this makes a joke out of deodorant and hair oil. You can’t escape this. If you don’t buy, they kill you. The perfect sales pitch. Buy or die – the new slogan. Have a shiny new General Electronics H-bomb shelter in your back yard or be slaughtered (p233)
