One of the finest Science Fiction audiobooks on LibriVox, the novel that was the subject of SFFaudio Podcast #056, here it is …. The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley on YouTube.
A man awakes with amnesia. He is aboard a spaceship. He is a prisoner. He is gnorant of his crime and his name. His destination is the planet Omega. It is a prison planet from which there is no escape.
If you give it a five minutes, it’ll take you into the full five hours and you’ll know the truth of The Status Civilization!
I made this infographic for myself for while researching the Philip K. Dick stories published in the years 1954 and 1955.
I find it rather stunning to look at.
The data in BLACK all comes from the form filed on November 22, 1983 and submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office under Registration Number RE0000190631 (SEE THE ACTUAL SCANS HERE).
The RED and YELLOW highlights are my own notations.
As you can see the copyright claimants “Laura Coelho, Christopher Dick & Isa Dick” claimed 37 stories were published in 1955. This is false. Only the 12 stories were published in 1955. The remainder, all 25 of them (highlighted in RED), were actually published in 1954 in other magazines, books, or issues. The 12 stories that were genuinely eligible for renewal are correctly noted, the 25 submitted that were not eligible are false.
What do you make of that?
To me it looks like 25 cases of deliberate fraud. To me it looks like the public has been denied its rights to these stories for nearly three decades.
Maybe there’s a math whiz out there could tell us what the chances of making 25 honest clerical errors only in the 25 cases where the clerk’s client benefits, without, at the same time, making any similar mistakes in the 12 cases where a typo doesn’t accrue a benefit to the clerk’s client (namely in those cases where a story was actually eligible for a legal renewal).
I guess I’m starting on another Dick kick. I’ve been thinking, and reading a lot of his short stories lately. Thanks in part to the two Blackstone Audio audiobook collections entitled The Selected Stories Of Philip K. Dick.
I’ve read Colony maybe a half dozen times over the years, I still find it utterly readable.
First published in the June 1953 issue of Galaxy magazine, Colony is a cleverly plotted one-note tale of paranoia and identity.
Robert Silverberg’s wonderful 1987 essay on it, entitled Colony: I Trusted The Rug Completely, points out how very far ahead of the reader Dick is. Dick indulges our expectations, teases us with a foreshadowing doom and still pulls off the unexpected twist ending. The story is also notable for inventing a couple of minor tropes; namely the Robot Door and the Robot Psyche Tester (both with emotive personalities rivaling that of their fellow human protagonists).
This is one of the few PKD tales given the old radio drama treatment.
Unfortunately, there were a few detrimental changes made to the 1956 X-Minus One adaptation. Maybe it’s the audio drama format that neutralizes much of the humor in Colony. It certainly pacifies some of the absurdities. And the 1950s script adds in an unnecessary bit of sexual harassment that’s absent from the original 1950s text (perhaps so as to have it better fit into the decade). On the whole, however, X-Minus One’s adaptation is still well worth listening to. It retains much of the dialogue and the anti-consumerism message, and it also retains the excellent and story-making ending.
Dick wrote, in regards to this story:
The ultimate paranoia is not when everyone is against you, it’s when everything is against you. Instead of “My boss is plotting against me”, it would be “My boss’ phone is plotting against me”.
Here’s the play:
X-Minus One – Colony
Based on the story by Philip K. Dick; Performed by a full cast
1 |MP3| – Approx. 29 Minutes [RADIO DRAMA]
Broadcaster: NBC
Broadcast: October 10, 1956 Colony tells the story of an advance research team scouting the planet Blue in the Aldebaran star system to assess what may be required to render this newly discovered planet habitable. Strange occurrences soon plague members of the scout team, as they are attacked by inanimate objects with the unmistakable intent to kill. It is soon discovered that some force, or entities unknown, have the power to mimic any conceivable object, rendering even seemingly benign items such as a belt, a bath towel, or even a weapon such as a blaster, instruments of murder.
Here are the original illustrations from Galaxy:
And here are the images and the audio combined into a YouTube video:
First published in the magazine Orbit, No. 2, (which was published in 1953), this story did not have it’s copyright renewed. HERE is the copyright renewal form showing same.
X-Minus One – Colony
