Bent Northrop Memorial Library

In Second Variety, UN forces have retreated to a moon base in the aftermath of early Soviet victories in a nuclear conflict. In response, the UN forces developed special robots, called Claws, which feature spinning blades and rudimentary artificial intelligence. Six years later, the Soviet leadership asks for negotiations to end the war. A UN officer travels back to earth to discover that not only have the Claws learned to replicate themselves, they...

In The Skull, a convict is offered his freedom if he agrees to travel back in time and kill someone. He learns that the assassination target was the founder of a religious sect that grew in strength and influence from its inception in 1960. Carrying his target's skull so he can identify the religious leader, the convict comes to learn a terrible secret about why he was chosen to find its owner.

In The Variable Man, Earth (The Terran System) is in a cold war with the older, corrupt Centaurian System, suppresses Terra from exploring space and expanding its borders. When a devastating new weapon called Icarus is developed by Terra, everyone expects the odds to tip in Terra's favor. But the computers calculating these odds find an unknown variable that throws off the odds. A time traveler from 1913, known as Thomas Cole has arrived. Can this...

In The Crystal Crypt, Earth and Mars are poised on the verge of war. On the last spaceship to leave Mars for Earth, law enforcement officials are looking for three fugitives who somehow made a great Martian city disappear. Unable to find the perpetrators, the officials allow the ship to disembark for Earth. A businessman named Thacher strikes up a conversation with a young woman and two men who reveal a very interesting secret to him about the mysterious...

In Beyond Lies the Wub, the crew of a spaceship buys a wub, a large pig-like animal from a native Martian to eat on the way home. The Wub turns out to be a sentient being capable of intelligent conversation, empathy, and possibly telepathy and mind control. When a crew member converses with the remarkable Wub, the captain makes a rash and violent decision that could put the return mission in danger.

In a 1977 speech, Phillip K. Dick said "Once in a great while, [a novelist] happens by chance onto a thoroughly stunning idea new to him that he hopes will turn out to be new to everyone else." In this collection of five stories, all first published in the 1950s, Dick explores a number of truly interesting ideas. In "Small Town" a man creates a perfect scale model of his own town, as a means of escaping his unbearable reality. In "Human Is" the

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When asked by an interviewer 'Why is there Science Fiction?' Phillip K. Dick responded 'There is SF because the human brain craves sensory and intellectual stimulation before anything else, and the eccentric view provides unlimited stimulation, the eccentric view and the invented world.... The function of SF psychologically is to cut the reader loose from the actual world that he inhabits...' And cut us loose he does. But never disappoints. This

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