"Precious Artifact" tells the tale of Milt Biskle, a terraforming engineer who has just turned his section of Mars into habitable land for human occupation. But something is nagging him in the back of his mind and he has doubts about the recent war in which Terra defeated the invading Proxmen. On his return to Earth his doubts are confirmed and he finds that beneath the surface of the seemingly normal world there is complete destruction. The Proxmen won the war, not the Terrans... ____ *first published in the October 1964 issue of Galaxy magazine
Author
Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. In 1952, he began writing professionally and proceeded to write numerous novels and short-story collections. He won the Hugo Award for the best novel in 1962 for The Man in the High Castle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year in 1974 for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Philip K. Dick died on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California, of heart failure following a stroke. In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten of his stories have been adapted into popular films since his death, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.
