
Second Variety
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Narrated by:
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Mike Vendetti
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By:
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Philip K. Dick
About this listen
A short story by Philip K. Dick, first published in Space Science Fiction Magazine, in May 1953. A nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the West has reduced much of the world to a barren wasteland. The war continues, however, among the scattered remains of humanity. The Western forces have recently developed "claws", which are autonomous self-replicating robots, to fight on their side. It is one of Dick's many stories in which nuclear war has rendered the Earth's surface uninhabitable.
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A Scanner Darkly
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Bob Arctor is a dealer of the lethally addictive drug Substance D. Fred is the police agent assigned to tail and eventually bust him. To do so, Fred takes on the identity of a drug dealer named Bob Arctor. And since Substance D, which Arctor takes in massive doses, gradually splits the user's brain into two distinct, combative entities, Fred doesn't realize he is narcing on himself.
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Drugs are bad
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Fantastic stories!
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In Radio Free Albemuth, his last novel, Philip K. Dick morphed and recombined themes that had informed his fiction from A Scanner Darkly to VALIS and produced a wild, impassioned work that sounds like a visionary alternate history of the United States. Agonizingly suspenseful, darkly hilarious, and filled with enough conspiracy theories to thrill the most hardened paranoid, Radio Free Albemuth is proof of Dick's stature as our century's greatest science fiction writer.
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What is VALIS? This question is at the heart of Philip K. Dick's groundbreaking novel, the first book in his defining trilogy. When a beam of pink light begins giving a schizophrenic man named Horselover Fat (who just might also be known as Philip K. Dick) visions of an alternate Earth where the Roman Empire still reigns, he must decide whether he is crazy or whether a godlike entity is showing him the true nature of the world.
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Life changing
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Ubik
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Glen Runciter runs a lucrative business - deploying his teams of anti-psychics to corporate clients who want privacy and security from psychic spies. But when he and his top team are ambushed by a rival, he is gravely injured and placed in "half-life," a dreamlike state of suspended animation. Soon, though, the surviving members of the team begin experiencing some strange phenomena, such as Runciter's face appearing on coins and the world seeming to move backward in time.
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Holy sh*t
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By: Philip K. Dick
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In I Am Legend, a plague has decimated the world, and those unfortunate enough to survive are transformed into blood-thirsty creatures of the night. Robert Neville is the last living man on earth. Everyone else has become a vampire, and they are all hungry for Neville's blood. By day, he stalks the sleeping undead, by night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for the dawn.
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Superb!
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From early work like "Rescue Party" and "The Lion of Comarre", through classic stories including "The Star", "Earthlight", "The Nine Billion Names of God", and "The Sentinel" (kernel of the later novel and movie 2001: A Space Odyssey), all the way to later work like "A Meeting with Medusa" and "The Hammer of God", this comprehensive short story collection encapsulates one of the great science fiction careers of all time.
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List of stories from
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At last, one of the world’s greatest works of science fiction is available - just as author Stanislaw Lem intended it. To mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Solaris, Audible, in cooperation with the Lem Estate, has commissioned a brand-new translation - complete for the first time, and the first ever directly from the original Polish to English. Beautifully narrated by Alessandro Juliani ( Battlestar Galactica), Lem’s provocative novel comes alive for a new generation.
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A comment on negative reviews
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In what is considered one of Heinlein's most hair-raising, thought-provoking, and outrageous adventures, the master of modern science fiction tells the strange story of an even stranger world. It is 21st-century Luna, a harsh penal colony where a revolt is plotted between a bashful computer and a ragtag collection of maverick humans, a revolt that goes beautifully until the inevitable happens. But that's the problem with the inevitable: it always happens.
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Heinlein's Masterpiece
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This classic science fiction masterwork by Isaac Asimov weaves stories about robots, humanity, and the deep questions of existence into a novel of shocking intelligence and heart.
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Thank you
- By Fredrik on 06-11-04
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What listeners say about Second Variety
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Nils J. Rasmussen
- 05-31-15
Really Fun Story -BUT- You Can See The End Coming
Any additional comments?
As you can see from the title of my review, the twist ending become pretty obvious about halfway through the story.
That might ruin the experience for a lot of people, but I enjoyed the short story nonetheless. Philip K Dick is, for the MOST part, a pretty reliable author. You know what to expect from him before you start. He has absolutely amazing ideas behind nearly all of his writings, which I think is his main appeal. PKD isn't as much an author that really does a ton of character development. People read his work because of the totally original and strange places and scenarios that he brings his readers.
I still enjoyed this story a lot. :)
8.12 / 10.00
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Overall
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Performance
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- Aaron
- 12-16-13
Not Bad. Not bad at all.
Terminator - 1st generation (second edition?).
I always appreciate seeing where a successful idea originated.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall
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Performance
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- Robert A. Lime
- 05-25-14
Classic Philip K Dick
What was one of the most memorable moments of Second Variety?
Nice surprise ending
Any additional comments?
Better than most PKD short stories. Another well done vision of a dystopiac, post-nuclear holocaust world. The ending was slightly predictable, but good nonetheless.
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Overall
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Performance
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- Justin G
- 02-27-25
Interesting Premise, Awful Narration
The title basically says everything. The premise wasn’t bad, not PKDs best not his worst. But the narrator, good god man… I don’t know where to begin in describing how bad this guy is, he’s bad all over lol. Why does he whisper 50% of book for no reason? Stuff like that. Just my opinion though, take with a large grain of salt, or many grains of salt, whichever you prefer : )
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