I'm a casual fan of Philip K. Dick's work. I very much enjoyed A Scanner Darkly, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and The Man in the High Castle, and I love the movies Blade Runner and Minority Report , so I approached this collection with elevated expectations.

Naturally, I was disappointed. The book doesn't provide any contextual material for the included stories — there is no preface, no appendix, not a single introduction — indeed, there is not even a listing of previous publication dates. So, without doing additional research, we're given no clue where these stories fall in Dick's oeuvre. I suspect that some of these stories are from early on in his career, because they seem a bit juvenile, but I honestly don't care enough to dig up the information myself. Dick's typical themes are present here, including inability to distinguish man from machine, time paradox, exaggeration and juxtaposition of cultures, etc., but they are more fully realized in his novels. Most of the included stories sport twist endings that may have been surprising when these stories were first released, but they are entirely predictable today. A punchline doesn't always work so well when you see it coming.

Philip K. Dick was a writer with wonderful ideas, and he could execute a fairly intricate plot to make a (sometimes) deep philosophical point, but he was not a prose artist by any stretch of the term. I don't remember his novels well enough to make a fair comparison to the stories, but I vaguely remember them being better than this.