The Philip K. Dick Reader is a short fiction anthology that opens with the story "Fair Game," in which Professor Anthony Douglas, an exhausted academic, returns home to his wife Laura in their small Colorado setting. The opening establishes a quintessentially Dickian domestic scene: a tired middle-class professional in a comfortable suburban environment, with hints of government research ("bright young men in from Washington" with "briefcases and slide rules") and a vague sense that ordinary life conceals extraordinary forces.
The Reader serves as an accessible entry point into Dick's shorter works, gathering stories across different phases of his career. The collection offers a representative sample of his recurring themes: suburban alienation, altered perception, the instability of everyday reality, and the tension between domestic comfort and cosmic upheaval. The "Fair Game" opening is characteristic of Dick's method of beginning with mundane, recognizable scenes before introducing destabilizing elements that reveal the fragility of assumed reality.
This anthology is distinct from the Underwood-Miller Collected Stories and represents a more curated, reader-friendly selection of Dick's short fiction designed for a general audience rather than completist collectors.