Philip K Dick Books in Order

A small collection built around "The Defenders" and three additional early stories, showcasing Dick’s themes of war, automation, and the gap between official narratives and messy reality.

In this classic early story, a starship crew buys a huge pig-like alien for food, only to discover it can speak and may be far more than livestock, testing their humanity and appetite.

Explorers land on an apparently dead planet and find their ship trapped by an automated defense gun still faithfully protecting a war-time secret, forcing them into a dangerous attempt to disarm it.

A time traveler is sent to the past with only a mysterious skull and orders to kill its owner before he founds a subversive religion, only to discover his own role in that history.

To outwit alien mines, scientists build a warship controlled by a human brain, but the mind inside the craft has its own ideas about peace, war, and where it wants to travel.

Humans shelter in underground bunkers while robot "defenders" fight a devastating surface war—until evidence suggests the machines may have ended the conflict long ago and are hiding the truth.

Returning from work, a TV repairman is horrified to see a body hanging in the town square while everyone else seems unconcerned, leading him to a chilling discovery about invasion and conformity.

A jealous husband buys his wife a cuckoo clock, then grows convinced the bird hates him. The clock’s behavior after their marriage collapses leaves the question of malice chillingly open.

A frustrated map-maker obsessively builds a detailed model of his town, then discovers that changes to the miniature landscape may be reshaping the real community—and the people in it.

As a passenger ship flees war-tense Mars for Earth, security men hunt saboteurs believed to have destroyed a key Martian city, while three nervous travelers harbor an impossible secret.

In a supposedly anarchist future without formal government, a hidden enclave still serves an aging artificial intelligence, raising the question of whether humanity can function without any rulers at all.

Dick’s first hardcover collection gathers early stories in which bureaucrats, robots, and ordinary workers stumble into alternate realities, dangerous technologies, and unsettling glimpses of the near future.

When a cold, abusive official returns from a mission suddenly kind and loving, his wife suspects he’s been replaced by an alien—and must decide which version of him is truly "human".

In a cold-war future ruled by probability, the world’s leader is chosen by a deadly random lottery. Clerk Ted Benteley is pulled into conspiracies and assassination plots surrounding the new Quizmaster.

A mysterious old soldier appears in a veterans’ hospital claiming to have fought in a future war, and his story may be part of a psychological weapon—or a warning of battles still to come.

Years after a limited nuclear war, ad executive Allen Purcell lives under a repressive moral regime until he drunkenly decapitates a public statue, setting off political intrigue and questions about rebellion and responsibility.

Police commissioner John Anderton runs a Precrime unit that arrests people before they offend—until the system predicts he himself will commit murder, forcing him to question the infallibility of foreknowledge.

In a post-war relativist society that outlaws absolute belief, a mutant precog named Floyd Jones can see one year ahead and builds a dangerous movement that may doom humanity even as it promises salvation.

Eight people caught in an accident at a particle accelerator awaken in a series of bizarre alternate realities, each shaped by one person’s fears and beliefs, and must figure out whose mind they’re trapped in.

Returning to his Virginia hometown, Ted Barton finds the town transformed, his own childhood erased from the records, and an invisible war between ancient cosmic powers playing out in its streets.

Investigators hunt a rogue self-propelled weapon disguised as everyday objects, probing how a forgotten war machine can survive and adapt inside the civilian world it was built to defend.

A mid-career collection featuring tales like "The Variable Man," "Second Variety," and "The Minority Report," showcasing Dick’s early explorations of precognition, killer machines, and slippery futures.

Ragle Gumm lives a quiet 1950s small-town life solving a newspaper puzzle—until ordinary objects dissolve into labels and clues suggest his world is an elaborate construct built around him.

Doctor Jim Parsons is flung into a distant future where euthanasia is law and births are tightly controlled, then recruited into a time-travel plot to alter history and save a persecuted group.

After a devastating world war, Earth is governed by a series of vast computers called Vulcan, while a resistance movement known as the Healers fights to free humanity from its technocratic rule.

Set in an America divided between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, this novel follows traders, spies, and ordinary people whose lives intersect around a banned book that imagines the Allies winning World War II.

In a depopulated future ruled by alien vugs, Earth’s remaining landowners gamble for cities and spouses in an elaborate game, only to uncover telepaths, conspiracies, and a chance to challenge their overlords.

An earlier title for The Crack in Space, this edition centers on a future Earth wrestling with overpopulation, suspended-animation "bibs," and a mysterious transit breakthrough that opens the way to another world.

On a former psychiatric colony world, rival settlements are organized around different mental illnesses. When Earth tries to retake the moon, its eccentric "clans" must decide whether they can defend the strange society they’ve built.

Repairman Jack Bohlen, union boss Arnie Kott, and autistic psychic boy Manfred Steiner cross paths on a struggling Mars colony, where time may not run straight and land speculation hides deeper ruin.

Most of humanity toils in underground bunkers, believing World War III still rages above. When a tank colony leader reaches the surface, he finds a lush world hoarded by a ruling elite built on lies.

In a merged US-European superstate, a permanent First Lady fronts a fraudulent government run by hidden elites and android presidents, while ordinary citizens, psionics, and performers get caught up in coups and civil war.

On bleak off-world colonies, desperate settlers use an illegal drug to escape into shared fantasies, until mysterious industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from deep space with a rival hallucinogen that may carry a terrifying godlike presence.

In a future where millions emigrate one-way by teleport to a supposedly idyllic colony world, bankrupt shipowner Rachmael ben Applebaum chooses the long starship voyage instead and discovers there may be something sinister behind the sales pitch.

After nuclear catastrophe, scattered survivors—among them a guilt-ridden physicist, a limbless mechanic with terrifying powers, and a girl carrying her twin inside her—try to rebuild life in Northern California’s ruins.

Organ-transplant surgeon Eric Sweetscent is drawn into a galactic war and a marriage in crisis when he and his wife encounter a time-bending drug that may show the future—or trap them in it.

In an overcrowded future Earth, a malfunctioning teleport device opens a rift to a parallel world, promising salvation for frozen "bibs" in suspended animation, but also awakening another civilization that may not welcome human settlers.

This tie-in volume presents the story of a man who buys artificial memories of a secret agent’s life on Mars and finds reality upended when those memories may be true, plus related material from the film adaptations.

In a world where time runs backward and the dead claw their way from graves to "old-birth," a resurrected religious leader becomes the focus of competing churches, politicians, and a library that literally eats books.

Earth has fallen to worm-like aliens from Ganymede, but human resistance fighters, telepaths, and mad scientists wield reality-warping weapons that can turn thoughts into dangerous illusions and possibly destroy both sides.

Cold War blocs secretly convert their superweapons into useless consumer gadgets while staging an arms race for show—until real aliens invade and washed-out weapons designer Lars Powderdry must somehow create a weapon that actually works.

In a post-war, depopulated San Francisco, bounty hunter Rick Deckard hunts advanced androids while longing for a real animal, forcing him to confront what empathy, humanity, and authenticity mean in a synthetic world.

Depressed pot-repairer Joe Fernwright is recruited by a godlike alien called Glimmung to raise a sunken cathedral on a distant world, joining a motley team in a quest that may be glorious, doomed, or both.

After a corporate mission on the Moon goes wrong, technician Joe Chip finds his reality sliding backward in time, haunted by a dead boss and a ubiquitous product called Ubik that may be their only protection.

A small organ-making firm pivots to building android replicas of historical figures, but as a simulacrum of Abraham Lincoln struggles to cope with modern life, its creator Louis Rosen spirals into obsession and mental breakdown.

Fourteen colonists on the remote world Delmak-O receive cryptic instructions and encounter strange machines, shifting buildings, and an invented religion, as they’re picked off one by one and forced to question what’s real.

In a future where super-intelligent "New Men" and psychic "Unusuals" rule over ordinary people, disillusioned worker Nick Appleton joins a resistance leader returning to Earth with an alien ally from Frolix 8.

An anthology of shorter works that samples different phases of Dick’s career, giving readers compact introductions to his favorite themes of fractured realities, political paranoia, and stubbornly ordinary people.

Celebrity talk-show host Jason Taverner wakes up in a police-state America where no one remembers him and his ID records don’t exist, sending him on a desperate run through a world ruled by checkpoints and informers.

Eccentric collector and conspiracy believer Jack Isidore moves in with his sister and her husband on a rural California farm, chronicling their collapsing marriage and his own delusions in deadpan detail.

In a post-nuclear wasteland, a limbless artist is sent on a hazardous pilgrimage to find and paint Carleton Lufteufel, the man worshipped as the God of Wrath for unleashing the doomsday weapons.

An undercover narcotics agent in near-future California becomes addicted to the drug he’s supposed to stop, watching his identity fracture as he spies on his own friends through high-tech surveillance.

Set in a future that hunts dangerous mutants, this collection’s title story follows a golden-skinned precog whose animal instincts and ability to see the future make him impossible to contain.

Centuries in the future, exiled God-figure "Yah" returns to Earth by incarnating through a child, drawing ordinary people into a struggle against a corrupt, tyrannical cosmic power.

Blending memoir and fiction, this novel follows Horselover Fat—Philip K. Dick’s alter ego—as he tries to interpret a pink beam of information he believes came from God, unraveling conspiracy, madness, and gnostic theology in 1970s California.

Told by his daughter-in-law, this novel traces an Episcopal bishop’s search for early Christian secrets, strange mushrooms, and genuine faith, as those around him confront grief, madness, and the possibility of survival after death.

Drawn from Philip K. Dick’s final recorded interviews, this volume captures him talking freely about his writing, film adaptations, favorite philosophers, and the visionary experiences that shaped his last novels.

This expanded version of The Unteleported Man plunges deeper into hallucinatory "paraworlds" as Rachmael ben Applebaum and underground agency Lies, Inc. uncover what really awaits emigrants on the far-off colony of Whale’s Mouth.

Set in 1950s Idaho and Oregon, this realist novel follows traveling buyer Bruce Stevens as he pursues a risky typewriter deal, falls for an older woman who once knew him as a boy, and daydreams alternative futures.

In suburban Marin County, real-estate agent Leo Runcible feuds with his neighbor Walt Dombrosio over racism, petty slights, and a supposed Neanderthal skull, exposing class tension, marital cruelty, and the costs of self-righteousness.

A late collection that pairs the title story—about a man trapped conscious during starship hibernation—with essays and short fiction that circle Dick’s obsessions with memory, guilt, and constructed worlds.

In 1950s Los Angeles, TV shop owner Roger Lindahl sabotages his shaky marriage and business through affairs, impulsive decisions, and a disastrous plan to send his son to an elite boarding school.

In an alternate America ruled by a paranoid president, record-store clerk Nick Brady begins receiving messages from a mysterious VALIS entity, drawing him and a thinly disguised Philip K. Dick into a secret resistance.

Ailing garage owner Jim Fergesson considers investing his savings in a flashy new auto plaza, while his tenant Al Miller becomes convinced they’re being conned, tangling working-class lives in suspicion and bad luck.

Young Mary Anne Reynolds rebels against her stifling small-town life through affairs with an older shop owner and a Black jazz singer, confronting racism, desire, and the cost of trying to reinvent herself.

This volume centers on the brutal story of self-replicating killer machines that evolve beyond human control, plus other tales about war, automation, and the unintended consequences of weapons.

A themed collection built around a whimsical tale of a living shoe, alongside other early stories that mix domestic detail, odd technology, and sudden shifts in reality.

Named for the story that inspired Total Recall, this collection brings together memory-twisting adventures and paranoid futures where implanted experiences and corporate plots blur what’s real.

Written for younger readers, this adventure sends boy Nick, his parents, and their cat to Plowman’s Planet, where they meet strange aliens and a powerful being called the Glimmung while trying to make a new home.

San Francisco DJ Jim Briskin and his ex-wife become entangled with a teenage married couple, trading partners and testing their limits in a story about love, immaturity, and second chances in 1950s California.

A personal collection of letters, essays, and reflections addressed to the dark-haired women in Dick’s life, revealing his romantic entanglements, anxieties, and evolving ideas about love and identity.

A compact selection from Dick’s Exegesis and related essays, collecting his notes and reflections on the 1974 "VALIS" experiences, Gnosticism, and the strange overlap between his fiction and his life.

As American factory owners prepare to hand a Chinese plant over to Communist control in 1949, three employees left behind drift through debates about politics, sex, and belief, replaying old affairs and forging uneasy bonds.

Essays, speeches, story outlines, and autobiographical pieces in which Dick reflects on writing science fiction, alternate realities, politics, and the ideas that fed novels like The Man in the High Castle and VALIS.

Collects "Paycheck"—about an engineer who must reconstruct his erased memories from a bag of odd clues—along with other fast-moving stories of corporate espionage, time loops, and dangerous inventions.

Stuart Hadley, a restless TV salesman in early-1950s Oakland, ricochets between his conventional marriage, bohemian lovers, and a charismatic preacher as he spirals toward breakdown in search of meaning.

A later collection that gathers shorter Philip K. Dick pieces in a single volume, offering readers another window into his recurring concerns with perception, technology, and fragile inner lives.

A graphic-novel adaptation of "The Electric Ant," in which Garson Poole discovers he is an organic robot whose subjective reality is fed by a tape he can edit—until his experiments threaten to erase everything.

An edited selection from Dick’s vast private journal, where he tries to interpret his 1974 visionary experience, blending theology, philosophy, autobiography, and notes that fed directly into the VALIS novels.

This short book introduces Philip K Dick’s life and ideas, sketching his career and recurring themes and pointing readers toward some of his landmark novels and stories.

A companion anthology to the TV series, collecting the original short stories behind episodes such as "The Hood Maker," "The Commuter," and "The Impossible Planet," with brief notes on their adaptations.

A slim collection that reprints early stories like "The Eyes Have It," "The Hanging Stranger," and "Beyond Lies the Wub," highlighting Dick’s playful, unsettling twists on everyday situations.