Second Variety, by Philip K. Dick (1953)
15 comments
·July 9, 2025sonofhans
martey
While I think some details of your anecdote might be wrong (Dick died in early March 1982, which is probably too early for Reed College's commencement), I think it is clear that LeGuin had a lot of admiration for Dick.
She talked extensively about him in a 2012 interview with Wired (https://www.wired.com/2012/07/geeks-guide-ursula-k-le-guin/) and in the introduction to the Folio Society's edition of The Man in the High Castle (included in her essay collection Words are My Matter). In both, she mentioned the Phildickian anecdote that they were both students at the same large high school in Berkeley at the same time, but that none of her friends or acquaintances remember Dick.
pyuser583
I was in a SF bookstore and came across a book of poetry by LeGuin. It was absolutely beautiful. One of my most prized possessions.
quadhome
Screamers (1995) is one of my favourite sci-fi movies and it's more or less The Secondary Variety in film form.
Beware: low ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, "frustrating close to being great."
thijson
I liked the idea of Screamers, how the robots started self replicating and took over. Also liked Total Recall, I was never sure if the whole second part of the movie was real or in his head.
justsomehnguy
Ah, this one.
Yes, it's close to be great, but lacks to be it. Mostly because it's not another Hollywood sugar story about the good guys killing all the bad ones.
But I would recommend it to anyone who like a serious SF.
joshka
This is also available[1] in a bit more processed form as a standard ebook.
[1]: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/philip-k-dick/short-fictio...
nathan_douglas
Neat story. I hadn't read it before; thanks for sharing.
dsq
Dick is one of the writers that accompanied me in my youth, along with the Golden Agers (IA, RAH, AC etc.). His books are the base for many SF tv/movies. Total Recall, The Man in the High Castle, and others. This story, written in the fifties, is eerily evocative of todays drone warfare.
danielschreber
Terminator evoked Second Variety for me more than anything else ever has.
Never understood why Harlan Ellison insisted it was ripping off his work instead.
jhbadger
The part that Ellison claimed was ripping off his work was the Terminator traveling back in time to kill someone in the present day, which was similar to his Outer Limits episode "Soldier". There are a lot of things that may or may not have inspired Terminator, from "Soldier" to "Second Variety" to "Colossus: The Forbin Project" (a 1970 movie which featured a military computer taking over the world similar to Skynet).
ChrisMarshallNY
Actually, when it came out, Fred Saberhagen's Brother Assassin came to mind.
Trasmatta
I always have to comment whenever I see a PKD thread. He's my favorite author, and nobody else has impacted the way I see reality as much as he has.
> What struck me was the oddity of a lunatic discounting his hallucinations in this sophisticated manner; Fat had intellectually dealt himself out of the game of madness while still enjoying its sights and sounds.
- VALIS
nathan_douglas
I felt like he was a kind of kindred spirit, especially after I read _A Scanner Darkly_. I feel like there's a neighborhood where I would be at home, and his house would be on one of the streets. I don't know many people who would live there. I don't know if anyone would ever live there long. I don't know if we'd ever speak.
justusthane
> nobody else has impacted the way I see reality as much as he has.
I would be interested in hearing more about this, if you are willing to expand on it.
Anecdote, but I’ve never read this anywhere —
The day after he died Ursula LeGuin was supposed to give the commencement address at Reed College, in Portland. She started by saying, “Yesterday the greatest science fiction author of all time, and the greatest living author in English, died. So I’m going to talk about Philip K Dick instead of give this speech I wrote.”
(Source: I took SF classes at Portland State University with Tony Wolk, a good friend of Ursula LeGuin. He’d often have her come and talk to a class.)
Now, many people I respect would still say LeGuin herself is still the literary pinnacle in SF, and I agree. That she, the most human of writers, saw such humanity in PKD — that’s always struck me.