Review of The Variable Man (1952)
Philip K. Dick (writer).
Read in 2025.
This story, and especially the scene of Thomas Cole’s escape, reminds me of “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1936). When Lovecraft briefly got conventional, he was very good. When Dick was conventional, at the beginning of his career, he was so conventional that his stand-in everyman super-genius fish-out-of-water character, with a biblical name, pulls a Jesus and then saves democracy. The premise of reusing a failed FTL technology for war is interesting, but Dick doesn’t have his vertiginous paranoia yet, just his narcissism. On the positive side, he barely creeps on the one woman character.
References here: “Unspecialist” (1960).