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 an 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?
Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) was born in Chicago but lived in California for most of his life. His edgy, dark future visions are even more relevant now. His novels have inspired many other writers and been used as the basis for films such as the classic Blade Runner the blockbuster Minority Report and the indie 'cartoon' A Scanner Darkly.
Since his untimely death at age 53, there has been an extraordinary growth of interest in his writings, which during his lifetime were largely ignored by serious mainstream critics and readers. Such is no longer the case, and the novels of Philip K. Dick frequently appear on university curricula devoted to modern American literature.
From age fifteen to his early twenties, Dick was employed in two Berkeley shops, University Radio and Art Music, owned by Herb Hollis, a salt-of-the-earth American small businessman who became a kind of father-figure for Dick and served as an inspiration for a number of his later fictional characters, most notably Leo Bulero in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. In the early 1950s, with the helpful mentorship of SF editor and Berkeley resident Anthony Boucher, Dick began to publish stories in the SF pulps of the era at an astonishing rate - seven of his stories appeared in June 1953 alone. He soon gave up his employment in the Hollis shops to pursue the economically insecure career of an SF writer.
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