Reviews of “Second Variety” (1953) and related work
- Adaptation: Screamers (1995)
“Second Variety” (1953
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Philip K. Dick (writer).
Read in 2024.
The Americans and the U.N. are on the losing side of the war until they invent killer robots.
Dick never got very good at making his worldbuilding internally coherent, but that was never his goal. In this early work, he gradually transitions from a conventional, superficially plausible SF scenario (NATO–Warsaw nuclear WW3) to the edge of fabulism. At a high level, autonomous artificial general intelligences jockey to exterminate humankind and threaten to turn against one another, which is all still good as science fiction, but the details are conspicuously lazy, mirroring Alex Ebel’s illustrations for the story’s original publication in Space Science Fiction magazine. Despite looking and behaving like people, each variety of robots (“claws”) is exactly duplicated, because Dick was thinking of mass production under human control, not realizing that AGI would be able to vary its design. On the inside, the robots are made of “parts” and “wiring”; Dick knew nothing about such things and couldn’t extrapolate from 1950s computers. He was always more interested in themes, hollowing out and instrumentalizing the entire genre to explore them, and he was already doing it well.
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