First published 1955. Panther paperback, 1966, pp 186, c.63,000 words.
Darkness is an appropriate title for this collection of stories. Most have dark themes, if not true horror. Surprisingly for a collection of SF stories of this date, there is no acknowledgement that these stories had been previously published in magazines, although according to the Wikipedia description of the book they all did.
The first story, Colony, sets the tone. A group of scientists are exploring a recently discovered planet. It seems like Eden with ‘rolling forests and hills, green slopes alive with flowers…’ [p7]. It even seems to have a benign effect on the visiting scientists, perhaps because it’s ‘so damn pure. Unsullied.’ [p7]. However, something menacing lurks out there. Dick is a master of this kind of creepy story and has an impressively fertile imagination.
Many of the classic SF dystopias of the period are explored in this collection: apart from the danger of exploring previously unvisited planets, there is interstellar war, post-nuclear Earth, exploring the time dimension and its implications for religious belief, robots take over bringing up human children, be careful what you wish for, don’t mess with the spirit world, and the old sucking youth from the young. It is a collection of nightmares and fears about the future. None of it is really grizzly, but it does contain plenty of unpleasantness, spine-tingling shivers and creeps.
While SF writers as good as Dick were brilliant at imagining strange worlds and unholy creatures, what they couldn’t escape from was their present. All the human characters here are 1950s Americans. Men go out to work in jacket and tie, smoking their pipes or cigarettes. Women generally stay at home, cook meals and look after the children. Smoking is allowed on the maternity ward, with tobacco lit by a sulphur match; documents are signed with fountain pens; research is done using ‘spools’ which are very like microfilm. Part of the fun of reading these old stories is spotting these anachronisms amongst the robot driven cars, personal space transport, and faster-than-light travel and communications.
Dick’s prose is solid. It is not literary flashy but easily digestible. Each story bowls along fluently on its own internal logic. In a couple of cases the stories end rather abruptly, and I was left wanting more; they could have been developed into full-length novels.
This is a fine collection of disturbing tales from a highly imaginative and competent writer.
Wikipedia biography of Dick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick
Wikipedia description of the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Handful_of_Darkness
Others’ reviews of the book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/498140.A_Handful_of_Darkness?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_23
© William John Graham, October 2023