Cuentos completos 1

Sometimes it's hard to review a collection of short stories. Some are great, others usually suck unless it's “the best of...” type of book. In this case, though, I have no issues rating it 2/5.

This is the first of five volumes of PKD's short stories going through his whole career and organized chronologically. So that means these are the earliest and I guess it shows. There wasn't a single great standout. Interestingly, I have a feeling that the quality went down the page count went up instead of other way around. The first bunch of stories were the most interesting. Or at least I wasn't so tired of their predictability and poor characterization.

The only stories that are worth a mention are Beyond Lies the Wub, The Gun and The Infinites.

All stories are from late 40's and early 50's and they really show their age. There's also a novelette hidden in the middle called Variable Man which was looking promising but as the story went on I was losing interest. Major theme of many of these is war. Given the time period they were written it makes sense.
I forced myself to read everything though by the end I was losing interest. PKD is one of my favorite authors and if Electric Sheep TV anthology is something to go by when it comes to his short fiction at least some interesting stories are waiting in the remaining volumes. But this one was just ok.

Philip K Dick is, without doubt, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, in any genre. That he chose Science Fiction to articulate his muse is neither here nor there. These stories, mainly written in the early 50's over a nine month period, show the first blossoming of an extraordinary talent. Sure some of them are dated, but what does shine through are the ideas and the burning intelligence behind those ideas.

The seeds of many Dick tropes are here: the man who has his memory altered and then finds himself on the run from the authorities; the strange intelligence of artificial life forms; the distorting effect of time and space travel.

Not everything here is classic Dick, he was, after all, finding his voice. But there's enough to show that it was the beginnings of a great story teller.