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Featured in our reading guide: Where to Start with Philip K. Dick
by Philip K. Dick
A masterpiece ahead of its time, a prescient rendering of a dark future, and the inspiration for the blockbuster film Blade Runner
One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
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.
Born in Chicago in 1928, Philip K. Dick would go on to become one of the most celebrated science fiction authors of all time. The author of 44 published novels and 120 short stories, Dick won a Hugo Award in 1963, and a John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1975, and was nominated five separate times for the Nebula Award. Eleven of his works have been turned into films, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly. He died in 1982.
The most consistently brilliant science fiction writer in the world.
John Brunner
A kind of pulp-fiction Kafka, a prophet.
The New York Times
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New guides and a few books from each. Occasional, never noisy.