A great series of short Sci fi stories by Philip K Dick. This collection are all stories that were filmed for the Channel Four TV series Electric Dreams and features an introduction to each story by the various people who adapted the stories for TV. I never saw the series (apparently some are very loose adaptions) but this collection of stories is wonderful.

Although written a good number of years ago the stories are still fresh today. They are engrossing, many dealing with alternate realities but they speak about issues that are still relevant today and what it means to be human. The stories have a habit of hitting you with their strange worlds. "The Hanging Stranger" is a great example of that hitting the ground running with it's unsettling setup.

Many are similar in ways to episodes from The Twilight Zone. I really enjoyed this collection, although the final story in the collection did drag slightly, apart from that I loved this volume of stories. PKD is a writer who still had a lot to say even today. Great thought provoking read.

Nice, light reading. Some interesting and currently relevant topics covered. Very interesting to see the differences between the TV adaptations and the originals.

K. Dick's stories are great 'cos they're grounded in an "everyman" view where the people involved, usually bewildered and scrambling, aren't quite fully petty nor wholly heroic. I think that's what I love most about them.

Each story being introduced by some folks who made a filmed adaptation of said story was a fun framing, a way back in to exploring some more of this stuff I was entranced and creeped out by as a kid. And it was fun to watch the filmed versions after and compare (I've tended to like the written version more in all but one occasion - "Real Life").

Oh, and man... "Horizon: Zero Dawn" owes *a lot* to Autofac I think.

I just couldn't get into this short story collection. A lot of these stories were predictable, obvious and dull. I enjoyed 'Sales Pitch', 'The Hood Maker', 'Foster, You're Dead' and 'Human Is' because they had something a little more interesting to their plots, but the other six stories felt like a waste of time. Overall, I was just disappointed by this collection.

I'm really curious now to read more by PKD. I'm shocked.

PKD's Electric Dreams is a collection of the ten short stories that inspired the TV series of the same name. Each story also comes with a brief introduction from the writer who adapted it for the series which explains their thought process behind any changes they made. I haven't watched any of the TV series. I also haven't read many PKD short stories, so only three of the ten were familiar to me.

It is a decent collection of his stories. PKD expertise is not needed here. Enjoyment is available for sci-fi fans, PKD fans, and short story fans. Some of these stories fall more into the macabre/horror genre with a distinct Twilight Zone vibe than into science fiction. There is so much crammed into these short stories, aliens, telepaths, dystopian futures, space travel, body snatchers, and more.

I have only recently started reading PKD after a 20-year break. One of the first things I realized or remembered was that no matter how fantastical the story, or setting was, PKD wrote stories about the world as it actually is, and about people as they actually are.

This is a quote from the introduction by Kalen Egan and Travis Sentell to Foster, You're Dead.

"Phillip K. Dick's will always be relevant, because he saw the world and the people around him so clearly. He thought and wrote about humanity with extraordinary precision, and though the external circumstances are constantly shifting, these fundamental human attributes remain terrifyingly, beautifully stagnant. The cynicism holds up, but so does the empathy, and in the world of PKD, these two attributes go hand in hand, supporting and combating each other in equal measure.

Of course, he snuck all this in under the guise of pulp science fiction, baiting us into believing that maybe this is all just fantasy. Only once the story is over, and we take another look at the world around us, do we realize: It's all completely true."