WHAT HAD ANSWERED MANKIND'S CALL FOR HELP Thors Provoni had gone to the stars to seek help for his fellow men. So far there was no evidence that any other intelligent race existed out there at all, let alone one willing to aid ordinary homo sapiens on in Earth where he had become a second-class citizen. For in the 22nd Century dominance in human affairs had passed to a cabal of genetic freaks - telepaths, precogs, 'New Men' with IQs which went off the scale - and ordinary men didn't have much of a chance. Suddenly a message came from Provoni. He was coming back, miraculously, with friends from Frolix 8 to champion the 'Old Men'. But who, or what, and just how friendly, were these friends?
A matchless display of Philip K. Dick''s quirky, humorous, idiosyncratically philosophical world view. With one exception, all the stories of this volume were written over a nine-month period between 1951 and 1952, when Dick was making his first impact as a writer.
On October 11 the television star Jason Taverner is so famous that 30 million viewers eagerly watch his prime-time show. On October 12 Jason Taverner is not a has-been but a never-was -- a man who has lost not only his audience but all proof of his existence. And in the claustrophobic betrayal state of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, loss of proof is synonyms with loss of life. Taverner races to solve the riddle of his disappearance" , immerses us in a horribly plausible Philip K. Dick United States in which everyone -- from a waiflike forger of identity cards to a surgically altered pleasure -- informs on everyone else, a world in which omniscient police have something to hide. His bleakly beautiful novel bores into the deepest bedrock self and plants a stick of dynamite at its center.
