At the beginning of his career, Philip K. Dick, whose later work won him widespread acclaim as the world's greatest sf writer, wrote a number of short novels which were published as paperback originals back-to-back in dual volumes with works by writers who were then more famous. This book reprints those early titles THE MAN WHO JAPED DR. FUTURITY VULCAN'S HAMMER Considerably more straightforward than his later novels, these stories are nevertheless unmistakably the work of the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik in their quirky exuberance and originality. (Source: back cover)
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.
