From Philip K. Dick's first sale of a story entitled "Roog" to Anthony Boucher of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1952 and his first published story, "Beyond Lies the Wub" in Planet Stories in the same year (both collected in The Best of Philip K. Dick, 1977), his publishing career has followed a curious course. Of his some one hundred and ten short stories, twenty-eight were published in 1953 and another twenty-eight in 1954, but beginning with the appearance of Solar Lottery in 1955 he turned primarily to the novel. Although his Hugo Award-winning The Man in the High Castle was published in 1962, his peak period for novels was perhaps 1964 to 1969, during which time sixteen volumes were published. Although it is not uncommon for a writer to progress from shorter forms to longer ones and although there was a scattering of stories from 1963 to 1967, Dick's career has sometimes proceeded intermittently...