This contains Dick's short fiction originally published from 1952 to 1954, sorted in order of original composition. The Gollancz edition titles this volume Beyond Lies the Wub, but (mostly) the same set of stories have been released by other publishers under the titles The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford, Paycheck, and The King of the Elves. (It's not at all confusing.)

There's a lot in here: twenty-five stories across almost four hundred pages in not very large print. If you've read Philip K. Dick before, you have some idea of what to expect, but this material isn't consistently like the weirdness of his 1960s novels. It's not atypical 1950s science fiction: weird ideas explored, but too often the weird idea itself seems to be the point, and the story doesn't have much of interest to say. The very first story, "Stability," is a good example of this. On the other hand, I think the stories—once you get past the first few, which are perhaps a little on the bumpy side—are always fairly well told, in Dick's typical sharp but matter-of-fact prose style that pulls you in. "The Crystal Crypt" is one of these: it's a kind of Campbellian/Asimovian puzzle story, but it's a good one. Or, say, "The Preserving Machine": a weird idea explained, then undermined at the last moment. Some might make you roll your eyes a bit, like the twist endings of "The Builder" or "Prize Ship," but you know, Dick can still make it work. I did have good fun with "The Indefatigable Frog," where a group of scientists test Zeno's paradox by shrinking themselves smaller and smaller as they try to cross through a tube.

There's a lot more people zipping around interstellar space on starships than you would expect from Dick's most famous novels, which tend to be his Earthbound (or at least solar systembound) ones. "Mr. Spaceship," about living spaceships trying to find an end to war, is like this. "The Infinities," about hyper-evolving humans is a cheeseball example of an idea that doesn't really make any scientific sense. But at its best, the interstellar backdrop is just a backstory, largely irrelevant, for whatever weird story Dick wants to tell in the foreground, such as in "Colony," about people going paranoid as their objects are seemingly plotting against them.

Though there are occasional glimpses of it, we don't get much of what Dick's best novels reveal as his strength: people dealing with the bullshit and the weirdness of seemingly ordinary life. But there are fragments of this theme in stories like "The Little Movement" (about living toys) and "The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford" (about living shoes). I liked "Nanny," about mechanical nannies who fight each other, and the only choice you have as a parent is just to buy a bigger and stronger mechanical nanny than the other families, so that yours can win any fights! I also liked "The King of the Elves" a lot, about an ordinary guy who becomes just what the title promises.

There's a lot of time travel here, often dealing with predestination paradoxes or some other kind of twist, the kind of stuff that these days you perhaps can't move without running into, especially post–Steven Moffat's Doctor Who, but in those days must have been much more original. "Meddler," where people go into the future to find out why humanity is doomed and thus doom humanity, is a good example of this, and so is "The Skull," about a man who travels back in time to kill a dissident but discovers something unexpected about him, but the best of them is surely "Paycheck," where a man quits his job, loses his memory, and then receives the exact seven items he needs to carry out a plan he doesn't remember devising; all of the items seem like worthless junk, but each one proves handy at the exact right moment.

There are a number of stories about apocalypses, on both Earth and elsewhere: "The Great C," "The Gun," and so on. The one that stuck out to me the most, though, was "The Defenders," about people living in underground bunkers because the surface of the Earth has been rendered uninhabitable... only there's a bit of a twist that will be familiar to anyone who's ever seen the 1967-68 Doctor Who serial The Enemy of the World! Dick expanded "The Defenders" into the novel The Penultimate Truth in 1964, and I have to imagine David Whittaker had read it. Hopefully whoever does the Doctor Who Magazine "Fact of Fiction" for Enemy of the World doesn't miss this.

Dick at his best is both dark and humorous; I enjoyed "Beyond Lies the Wub," about a space crew who brings an animal on board to eat... only to discover that it's sapient, and even more besides.

I really enjoyed these short stories - some were funny (especially "The Eyes Have It"), some were a bit creepy ("Beyond Lies the Wub", "The Hanging Stranger" in particular). "The Skull" was a great time-travel story. ( )

I couldn't say I was a Dick fan boy, but perfectly decent thought provoking stuff that's well worth a read. ( )

Good thing I gave up meat in December. A talking pig that convinces you not to eat it, very short, and to the point. Good read. ( )

The Wub is a telepathic creature sold as food. But when the crew of a spaceship bought one, they did not realize that the Wub could also talk. This casts doubt among the crew whether the Wub should be eaten. This short tale questions where we draw the line about eating animals. ( )