Second Variety And Other Stories
By Philip K. Dick; Read by William Coon
WMA, MP3 or Audible Download – Approx. 6 Hours 20 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Eloquent Voice
Published: April 15, 2011
ISBN: 9780983089834
Available through: OverDrive, NetLibrary, Audible, CD Baby This collection of five stories from early in his career casts a spotlight on Dick’s incredible imagination. In Second Variety robot warriors appear to have given one side the advantage in a devastating war. But a small band of soldiers begins to question just what the robots’ endgame truly is. In Beyond Lies The Wub a member of a spaceship’s crew buys a Wub (‘a huge dirty pig!’) for fifty cents, thinking it might be a good source of meat for the long journey home. Then the Wub speaks. In The Eyes Have It a man’s imagination gets the best of him, as he takes the words in a paperback novel a bit too literally. In Piper In The Woods a doctor attempts to unravel the mystery of why workers on an asteroid base begin to behave as if they have become plants. In The Variable Man giant computers indicate earth will likely win an interstellar war that will free it from the limits imposed by an aging Centauran empire. Plans are disrupted, however, when a man from the past arrives and throws off all calculations.
The SFFaudio Podcast #106 – Jesse and Tamahome talk about audiobooks, books, comic books, movies and technology.
Talked about on today’s show:
Scott is away, Warrior Race by Robert Sheckley, the guilt tactic, Robert Sheckley’s The Victim From Space, M. Night Shamylan, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Star Trek: The Next Generation, the limits of sympathy and empathy, Lethal Weapon, civil disobedience, Ghandi, Ahisma, Gregg Margarite, Lauren Bacall, the future of self-published ebooks and curation, SFsignal’s anthology reviews, novels vs short stories, LibriVox, rating systems, Gil T. Wilson, SFSite, Avatar, Coraline, The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman’s narration, William Gibson, Where is the Neuromancer audiobook?, The Matrix, What is noir in film or books?, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Memento, a podcast about noir films (Noircast.net), Limitless aka (The Dark Fields) movie vs book, director Neil Berger, The Illusionist, The Prestige, Christopher Priest, Existenz, WWW: Wake, WWW: Wonder, Robert J. Sawyer, many spoilers in this podcast, Sawyer’s next novel is Triggers, research then write, the Webmind, Jesse doesn’t like series (usually), the ‘talking Dinosaur’ series (the Quintaglio Ascension series), is the WWW series YA?, Cory Doctorow, characters, Golden Fleece is a murder mystery in space, more dino, would anyone make the dinosaur series into a 3D animated film?, Robert J. Sawyer’s Rollback was on CBC Radio One’s Between The Covers podcast, Galileo’s Dream, Red Mars, Michio Kaku, futurism, climate change, Pacific Edge by Kim Stanley Robinson, can a domestic story be thrilling?, Austin Powers, “one million dollars!”, the trap of inflating the stakes, Tim Pratt on Dragon Page podcast (7½ minutes in), the ‘speech thriller’, what’s in the suitcase?, Kiss Me Deadly, “make each sentence do two things”, Midnight Riot (aka Rivers Of London), British lingo, “snog”, series and trends at bookstores, Peter Watts‘s openness, Flashforward TV show, The Gong Show, bring back the hook, Crysis 2: Legion the novel and the game, the economics of hard covers vs ebooks, Kindle openness, the VLC app was removed from the iTunes App store, the Android OS, Embedded, ROM person, the Comics Code Authority repealed!, Mark Millar, Nemesis, The Ultimates, Ex Machina, Chronicles Of Wormwood, Garth Ennis, Howard The Duck, death of superheroes, Superman left America (Action Comics #900), “truth, justice, and the American way”, Superman: Red Son, Battlefields, The Boys, The Punisher with the guy from Hung (Thomas Jane), Warren Ellis wrote a novel (Crooked Little Vein), can we make Peter Watts audiobooks?, synthesized voices on archive.org, Linux for all e-readers, Philip K. Dick, The Electric Ant comic, Tom Merritt, Sword and Laser, TWIT, Munchcast.
Though the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a United States copyright law, and hasn’t been adopted by Canada, I suspect that’s not the point of the following email.
The post that Kristina Moore refers to is HERE. It has comments on it that clarify why one of the links is now dead.
But that’s not the end of the story, lets go back a bit and consider why I was contacted at all. Let’s take it as a hypothetical given that, as Kristina Moore’s email is claiming, Adjustment Team is copyrighted.
I don’t believe that to be the case, not from what I read about it being a case of copyfraud. But even so, lets assume Moore’s claim to be true. What then does that have to do with my post? I did not post the story. I linked to it. And from my reading of Chilling Effects FAQ page on linking (and deep linking), that is not a copyright violation under the DMCA. And, even if it were the DMCA is United States law, not a Canadian one.
Now I will admit I did put up, and host, two pictures from the original publication in Orbit Science Fiction’s Sept-Oct. 1954 issue – but that surely can’t be what The Wylie Agency was upset about. The Philip K. Dick estate certainly does not hold the rights to the images. And, yes, though I did link to an audiobook version of Adjustment Team, that file was removed from LibriVox because of a similar DMCA notification to LibriVox.
In case you would like to do your own research on the matter, I point you to the Wikimedia Commons source for Adjustment Team. Where the story is still available HERE. That’s where I got the pictures.
I will leave up my original post until I get a reasonable explanation for why I shouldn’t. In hopes of getting one I have replied to Moore’s email with an invitation to appear as a guest The SFFaudio Podcast.
Meanwhile … over on the Wikipedia talk page for the entry for Philip K. Dick’s Adjustment Team there is a wonderful argument going on. Part of it is over an issue called “copyfraud” (false claims of copyright designed to control works not under copyright). I suspect that it just such awesomeness that is behind so much of the awesomeness that is Wikipedia. Check this response out from a Wikipedia editor named “Refrigerator Heaven”:
Oh, to answer the section’s question. As a long-time fan of Philip K. Dick who is familiar with his main themes and not very interested in the movies based on his writings, I do think the copyright stuff is more interesting and more Dickian than the movie [The Adjustment Bureau]. Perhaps I’ll add a quote or two from him after dinner. For a parting thought I’ll leave this with a quote he used in his Hugo Award winning novel, The Man In The Hight Castle [sic]. “Things are seldom as they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream.”
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Wikipedia is wonderful for its quotes alone. It was there, on the Wikipedia entry, for instance – that I learned that Adjustment Team was public domain. That’s what prompted me to tell my favourite LibriVox narrator that it was PD and that is, in part, why he recorded it for LibriVox. Thank you Gregg Margarite and thank you Wikipedia!
Soon to be collected in LibriVox’s Short Science Fiction Stories Collection #044:
Adjustment Team
By Philip K. Dick; Read by Gregg Margarite
1 |MP3| – Approx. 1 Hour [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: NOT YET COLLECTED! “Something went wrong and Ed Fletcher got mixed up in the biggest thing in his life.” First published in Orbit Science Fiction, Sept-Oct 1954, No.4.
I don’t think Philip K. Dick and Hollywood are writing for the same audience:
The Adjustment Bureau movie trailer: Powerful, handsome bachelor boy meets cute girl -> handsome boy loses beautiful girl -> handsome boy is chased by powerfully fedoraed men -> handsome gets beautiful back again.
The Adjustment Bureau (aka Adjustment Team) audiobook: middle class schnook has quietly comfortable conversation with wife -> gets pushed around by insurance salesman -> weird shit happens -> freaks out -> runs home to his wife. PLUS: talking dog!
The Adjustment Bureau (aka Adjustment Team)
By Philip K. Dick; Read by Phil Gigante
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Published: March 4, 2011
ISBN: 9781441894694
Sample |MP3| The Adjustment Bureau is a major motion picture based on Philip K. Dick’s classic paranoid story, The Adjustment Team. This is the short story, The Adjustment Team, which asks the question – Do we control our destiny, or do unseen forces manipulate us? Ed Fletcher is a real estate agent with a normal life, until one day he leaves the house for work a few minutes later than he should have. He arrives at a terrifying, grey, ash world. Ed rushes home and tells his wife, Ruth, who goes back to the office with him. When they return, everything is normal. But he soon realizes people and objects have subtly changed. Panic-stricken, he runs to a public phone to warn the police, only to have the phone booth ascend heavenward with Fletcher inside…
The SFFaudio Podcast #103 – Scott, Jesse, Eric S. Rabkin and Luke Burrage talk about FOOD in Science Fiction and Fantasy. It is rather unpleasantly like being drunk.
Talked about on today’s show:
Luke’s got a twelve hour hunger, fairy tales, Fantasy, food sharing is coming to know the alien, what food is served in a Canadian restaurant?, Kwakiutl vs. Kwakwaka’wakw, pemmican, voyageurs, THE YELLOW PERIL podcast (The SFFaudio Podcast #051), Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Frankenstein’s creation was a vegetarian, Paradise Lost, Genesis, Cain vs. Abel, Eifelheim by Michael Flynn, the three stages of eating: veggies -> meat -> people, aliens, crazy vs. odd, inedia (fasting), breatharianism, Scott Pilgrim, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, inspired by spirits, Neuromancer, communion, puns, Foods of the Gods: Eating And The Eaten In Fantasy And Science Fiction (Proceedings Of The J. Lloyd Eaton Conference On Science Fiction And Fantasy Lite) edited by Eric S. Rabkin, Gary Westfahl and George Edgar Slusser, more puns, The Futurological Congress by Stanisław Lem, consuming books, The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, Michael Kandel, The War Of The Worlds by H.G. Wells, evolution and food, food in pill form, Tang, Firefly, Science Fiction: prediction of the future vs. sign of the future, jetpacks, capsulized food is symbolic, lembas is super-power bread, energy drinks, food as a representation of our relationships with our bodies, The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells, yet more puns, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, food and pretty dresses, baking and bread have deep roots, Voyage To The Moon by Cyrano de Bergerac, no one ever sees a baker eating, food imagery, the centrality of bread in SFF only matches that of religion, the bread yes – the blood no, Osiris, Egypt, Greece, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams, The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, List of races and species in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the babel fish, “it’s not the babel worm”, fish as a symbol, Pythagoras, professor smackdown, Tower Of Babel, food and sexuality, urban romance, Eat Prey Love, “man does not live by bread alone” vs. “forbidden fruit”, bread as technology, breadfruit, the garden of Eden, the tree of knowledge vs. the tree of immortality vs. the rubber tree, Trantor, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, Coruscant, Star Wars, Sam Parkhill, The Off Season by Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles, the best hot dog stand on Mars, The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus, the national food of America is the hot dog, the hot dog is the symbol of America, Manhattan, “hot dog stands all the way down”, meat paste, man as food, To Serve Man by Damon Knight, Alien, The Logic Of Fantasy by John Huntington, cannibalism, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut, The Genocides by Thomas M. Disch, The Screwfly Solution by James Triptree Jr., Beyond Lies The Wub by Philip K. Dick, further punning, vat grown meat, breeding animals to be less intelligent, a very meaty topic, Caviar by Theodore Sturgeon, vegetarianism, Fallen Dragon by Peter F. Hamilton, Luke is on the wrong side of meat history, being as unnatural as possible is what makes us human, a continuing journey towards humanity (marching on our stomachs?), social animals, mothers make food for you – witches make food of you, choosing not to eat meat vs. choosing to be monogamous, dolphin eating habits (are they porpoiseful eaters?), eating dolphin is out of line (for Luke), exploring the possibilities of empathy, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, empathy vs. compassion, Technovelgy.com’s entry on food, an overly inclusive notion of what constitutes invention, CBC Spark, visiscreens and visiplates, Ralph 124C 41+ by Hugo Gernsback, Minding Tomorrow by Luke Burrage, Technovelgy needs more wiki, Wikipedia is endlessly useful, automated restaurant, The Food Of The Gods by H.G. Wells, food has functions beyond just sustaining our bodies, George Birdseye, Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, coffee, sharing meals via Skype.
Second Variety And Other Stories
Meanwhile … over on the 
