Early Stories of PKD - My Reflection

"The Golden Man"

Setting out to read these stories at first felt like a daunting task. To make my workload more accessible, I copied each story from the webpage provided into a word document. On the positive side, this made it much easier for me to keep my place and cope with being without internet for the duration of my reading. The downside of this was that I was able to see how many 'pages' the single spaced stories took up in word, the longest of which being roughly 60 pages. I managed to unintentionally psych myself out. I broke down each story into a day of the week and read in the order listed on the assignment page. Once my initial fear wore away, I found the stories flew by and left me wanting the words to continue.

Each story presented a rich and thought provoking universe, some in as few as 1,500 words. As I read more and more of Philip K. Dick, this is the one fact that keeps on amazing me: each work of fiction contain its own universe, independent of the others. Each universe welcomes you into it in the way that the reader never feels "spoon fed" the information. Every world is believable, aside from containing futuristic lifestyles nothing like our own. That is the biggest emotion PKD has left me with: awe.