REVIEW: A World of Talent and Other Stories by Philip K Dick

A World of Talent and Other Stories is the second thing that I have ever read (it is an audiobook) that is written by Author Philip K Dick. I've read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep so many times (but probably not enough times!) and every time I pick it up, I complete the book in one sitting. Therefore, that book is a short story as far as I am concerned.

Topical, because A World of Talent and Other Stories is a collection of actual, proper short stories, as opposed to my fixation on a brilliant book. I also need to rescind a half truth I wrote in the first paragraph - I have been reading Ubik by the same author, and I'm trying to limit myself to a chapter a night - to make it last, but that is a struggle.

So, with that lengthy introduction over, let's take a look at this particular anthology written by PKD.

Opening with a tale called Small Town, it describes a man who hates his job. Basically, an everyman - I guess. When he gets home from work every night, he plays with his trains, and a model of a town he's been building in the basement. Then one day, he decides to quit his job. He works on his "small town" ceaselessly, entirely obsessed by it, to the point that he ignores his wife's burgeoning infidelity with the doctor sent to help him snap out of his obsession.

The Small Town becomes something greater and something more. It makes me think of the time I was obssesed with the likes of Sim City and Cities: Skylines, playing it for hours and hours without break, trying to optimise and modify until it was perfect. I vanished into those games, much like this man vanishes into the world of his creation. It's an interesting story - but it is very much a product of its time, which feels like it was a 1950-1960 piece. It remains trapped there - it isn't a timeless story.

Then the next tale is called Human Is, which is the story of a man returning to Earth from a mission far beyond. Only, he is a completely different man, so far as his personality goes. This exploration of his transformed personality occurs mostly from the perspective of his domestic life, and there's, well - there's a twist that I will not spoil, but it is entertaining.

My favourite story from the Anthology is Foster, You're Dead. This feels the closest to contemporary life, because well - the world is a consumerist hellscape of products vying for attention, and one on the precipice of all out war. This story takes the military industrial complex and lets it trickle down to consumers, in the form of survival shelters. But as weapon technology gets better and better, the survival shelters must be upgraded to counter the latest advances in killing machines.

What follows is the narrative of a boy who really, just wants to live, and his father's reluctance to shell out for a survival shelter for the family. The boy is vulnerable to the advertising, and like true capitalistic fashion, the nag-factor wins, and he gets what he wants - but that is when the screws start to turn - more and more upgrades for the shelter, and an unrelenting cycle of enhancements and threats keep people working for longer and longer, in a bid to escape the threat of death - when ultimately, death is inevitable.

Foster, You're Dead is a brilliant story because it looks at mortality through the eyes of a child, but also in the ceaseless hunger of corporations to maximise profits and extract more and more of their customer's money with each season, each year, playing upon any anxiety that can be described in advertising. I really loved this story, because it reflects the world we find ourselves in today.

Then, in The Hanging Stranger, which I did not really get into, I saw the shades of the inspiration for the start of the brilliant video game, Disco Elysium. In short, this is a story about a corpse hanging in the middle of a town that no one else seems to see. He wonders why he is the only one who can see it, and if I say more, I'd be spoiling the story.

Finally, the collection closes with the titular A World of Talent. As the time of writing this, I have only read about fifty pages of Ubik, but A World of Talent very much feels like it was the proving ground for many of the themes that have been explored in this scant few pages of PKD's later work.

In A World of Talent, psychic powers are a part of everyday life, and anti-psychic powers exist too. They're presented as threats, as useful boons, and as things that complicate the fabric of human reality further. It's a nice side-dish to Ubik, which I will continue to pick away with until I finish it.

All in all, this collection of short stories is well written, interesting and displays that Philip K Dick can write on a variety of subjects. Every tale presented is indeed speculative fiction, and most of it is entirely foundational - there's no truly epic scale here, but there is enough to keep yourself entertained for a little while, and to reflect on the what might be that makes speculative fiction such a compelling genre.