Best Philip K. Dick Books Ranked
Philip K. Dick was a prolific science fiction writer who wrote 44 science fiction novels and 121 short stories. Most of them appeared in numerous science fiction magazines throughout his lifetime. When he died in 1982 at the age of 53 from complications associated with a stroke, he left behind a legacy of some of the most profound and mind-tripping science fiction ever written. His influence continues to be felt even today as many of his works have been recently developed into films and tv shows.
In the list below we rank 43 of Philip K. Dick’s most highly regarded novels so you can experience the full breadth of this sci-fi master’s work.
43. Gather Yourselves Together
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.05 | 2.79 | 2.90 |
Overview
While not exactly a work of science fiction, this book shows the breadth of PKD’s talent as a writer. In the novel, an American company leaves China to set up shop elsewhere but leaves three employees behind to oversee some aspects of the company. Two of them, Barbara and Carl, become involved and have an odd relationship.
Favorite Quote
“No two things were the same ever. No two stones, mice, drops of water, snowflakes. What did they call it? Nominalism. Perhaps it applied to people, to the same person at different times. There was no same person.”
42. Lies, Inc.
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.17 | 3.03 | 3.10 |
Overview
This novel is the final version of the novella The Unteleported Man. It tells of a paranoid vision of the future complete with conspiracies, life in a security state, overpopulation, and the blurred lines between fantasy and reality.
Favorite Quote
“If you are wise, Matson said to himself grimly, you never take one-way trips. Anywhere. Even to Boise, Idaho...even across the street. Be certain, when you start, that you can scramble back.”
41. The Ganymede Takeover
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.31 | 3.20 | 3.26 |
Overview
When a strange alien force takes over Earth, a vital weapon falls into the wrong hands. Now, control of Earth lies in the balance, with no one able to predict what will happen next.
40. Voices From the Street
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.30 | 3.31 | 3.31 |
Overview
This is the story of Stuart Hadley, who has what others see as a great life but who still feels unfulfilled at home and at work. He tries different things to make himself happy, and in the end, he returns to the life he loves with a new appreciation for it.
Favorite Quote
“Every time I see a picture of Stalin I look him square in the eye and I say: You're a meat eater, Joseph.”
39. Dr. Futurity
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.47 | 3.15 | 3.31 |
Overview
Jim Parsons is a medical doctor who is good at what he does. But when he is transported into the future where it is illegal to save lives, he has to learn what he should do next in this brand-new world of his.
38. Deus Irae
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.45 | 3.23 | 3.34 |
Overview
After World War III, the church has become very powerful. When it asks a local artist to develop a mural honoring the Deus Irae, the artist sets out to find out all he can about this god.
37. The Crack in Space
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.47 | 3.21 | 3.34 |
Overview
Filled with many interesting characters, the book tells the story of a man who discovers a parallel world that is overpopulated and filled with both regular humans and mutants who compete for control.
Favorite Quote
“You stupid bastard, does what you’re fighting for look so real now? Skin pigment. What a laugh! Why not eye color? Too bad nobody ever thought of that. It cuts it a little finer, but basically it’s the same thing.”
36. The Zap Gun
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.42 | 3.27 | 3.35 |
Overview
In the arms race, two groups are developing new, more powerful weapons. They do not work together until an alien force invades Earth, then they try to work together to save the planet.
35. The Cosmic Puppets
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.46 | 3.23 | 3.35 |
Overview
When Ted Barton goes to Millgate, Virginia, to visit his hometown, he discovers that Ted Barton actually died when he was just nine years old. So who is he? He decides to stay and find out what the answer is.
34. Solar Lottery
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.48 | 3.34 | 3.41 |
Overview
In this world, positions of power are determined by a lottery, and the winner becomes a part of the assassination game. But when the system develops a hitch in 2203, the rules of the game suddenly seem a little different.
Favorite Quote
“It isn't a brute instinct that keeps us restless and dissatisfied. I'll tell you what it is: it's the highest goal of man - the need to grow and advance ... to find new things ... to expand. To spread out, reach areas, experiences, comprehend and live in an evolving fashion. To push aside routine and repetition, to break out of mindless monotony and thrust forward. To keep moving on ...”
33. Vulcan’s Hammer
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.52 | 3.33 | 3.43 |
Overview
The Vulcan 3 is a computer that makes policy that is best for everyone until it starts to lose control of a religious movement and the mysterious forces behind that movement.
Favorite Quote
“The dissatisfaction of the masses is not based on economic deprivation but on a sense of ineffectually. Not an increased standard of living, but more social power, is their fundamental goal, because of their emotional orientation, they arise and act when a powerful leader-figure can coordinate them into a functioning unit rather than a chaotic mass of unformed elements.
32. Our Friends from Frolix 8
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.58 | 3.33 | 3.46 |
Overview
In this book set in a strange future, two opposite men fall in love with the same woman. Then, the leader returns to complicate things because he is hell-bent on creating a brand-new world.
Favorite Quote
“God is dead,' Nick said. 'They found his carcass in 2019. Floating in space near Alpha.' 'They found the remains of an organism advanced several thousand times over what we are,' Charley said. 'And evidently could create habitable worlds and populate them with living organisms, derived from itself. But that doesn't prove it was God.”
31. Counter-Clock World
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.55 | 3.37 | 3.46 |
Overview
A theologically probing story, it tells of a god who has returned to life in a world where everything centers around opposites, including the dead coming back to life.
Favorite Quote
“This is a snowflake that was once a flame—the flame was once the fragment of a star.”
30. We Can Build You
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.57 | 3.36 | 3.47 |
Overview
In a world where companies sell people such as Abraham Lincoln, the companies that do this find that selling people is not always what it’s cracked up to be, especially when a particular buyer wants more than they feel they should deliver.
Favorite Quote
“We live in a society where detachment is almost essential.”
29. The Man Who Japed
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.59 | 3.37 | 3.48 |
Overview
In a post-holocaust world, nanobots control the people and punish their transgressions severely. Allen Purcell is then put in charge to change things, but he has to deal with the head in his closet first.
Favorite Quote
“Odd that the brain could function on its own, without acquainting him with its purposes, its reasons. But the brain was an organ, like the spleen, heart, kidneys. And they went about their private activities. So why not the brain?”
28. The World Jones Made
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.63 | 3.46 | 3.55 |
Overview
Floyd Jones goes from being a fortune-teller to controlling a universe, but his most significant gift is making people dream again in a world where dreaming has been made illegal.
27. The Game-Players of Titan
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.65 | 3.48 | 3.57 |
Overview
In this world, the game of Bluff is what people use to get their next job, their next spouse, and so much more. The problem is that they are often playing against opponents with not-so-great intentions.
26. Galactic Pot-Healer
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.61 | 3.55 | 3.58 |
Overview
This is the story of an omnipotent omnipresence that asks a ceramics repairer for a favor. They’ve asked other beings and entities to the mix as well.
Favorite Quote
“No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.”
25. The Simulacra
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.62 | 3.58 | 3.60 |
Overview
In the mid-21st century, the president of the U.S. is an android, and the entire country is a fraud. Dr. Superb is the last remaining psychoanalyst trying to save as many people as possible in this strange world.
Favorite Quote
“Do you know what the true basis of political power is? Not guns or troops but the ability to get others to do what you want them to do. By whatever means are appropriate.”
24. Confessions of a Crap Artist
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.69 | 3.55 | 3.62 |
Overview
Jack, the crap artist, is so consumed by conspiracy theories that his sister and brother-in-law are trying to rescue him. But when you look closely, all three seem to be detached from reality.
Favorite Quote
“There is certainly no hope left of getting away. And it isn't even terrible; it's possibly funny, if even that. It's embarrassing. That's all. A little embarrassing to realize that I no longer control my life, that the major decisions have already been made, long before I was conscious that any change was occurring.”
23. Dr. Bloodmoney
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.68 | 3.59 | 3.64 |
Overview
In a post-nuclear-holocaust world, all of Dick’s most famous characters come together, and each has their own plans for the future.
Favorite Quote
“I'm tired and I want to rest; I want to get out of this and go lie down somewhere, off where it's dark and no one speaks. Forever.”
22. The Variable Man
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.80 | 3.50 | 3.65 |
Overview
The world is in the middle of a perpetual standstill between two empires, so when Thomas Cole is dragged from the past to help, everyone thinks that he may be able to break the standoff. But will he?
Favorite Quote
“It’s—it’s a variable.” Kaplan was shaking, white-lipped and pale. “Something from which no inference can be made. The man from the past. The machines can’t deal with him. The variable man!”
21. The Man in High Castle
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.62 | 3.68 | 3.65 |
Overview
This novel tells the story of an alternative history in which the allies lost WWII. In this telling, the world is now occupied by Japan and Nazi Germany. Slavery is once again legal, and Jews are forced to remain in hiding. This is a harrowing account of what might have happened.
Favorite Quote
“A weird time in which we are alive. We can travel anywhere we want, even to other planets. And for what? To sit day after day, declining in morale and hope.”
20. Eye in the Sky
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.74 | 3.57 | 3.66 |
Overview
Regaining consciousness from a lab accident, Jack Hamilton and seven others discover that they’re in an Old Testament-like world complete with plagues and backward morality, and they try to escape.
Favorite Quote
“Anti-cat is one jump away from anti-Semitism.”
19. The Penultimate Truth
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.78 | 3.54 | 3.66 |
Overview
Millions of people are held captive in their underground bunkers as World War III rages on around them. They are fed regular newscasts describing nuclear destruction. What they don’t know is that this is all a lie, and the world is really at peace.
Favorite Quote
“If men are too blind to govern themselves, how can they be trusted to govern others?”
18. The Skull
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.69 | 3.66 | 3.68 |
Overview
Conger agreed to assassinate a man, and he knew that he wouldn’t get the wrong man. Why? Because the man’s skull was in Conger’s possession!
Favorite Quote
“What if he could see this, his own skull, yellow and eroded? Two centuries old. Would he still speak? Would he speak, if he could see it, the grinning, aged skull? What would there be for him to say, to tell the people? What message could he bring? What action would not be futile, when a man could look upon his own aged, yellowed skull?”
17. Clans of Alphane Moon
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.74 | 3.63 | 3.69 |
Overview
A couple divorce and find themselves shooting it out on another planet; other unique people are also there.
Favorite Quote
“He was, perhaps like [the depressive] Dino Watters, addicted to gloom. She felt sorry for him if that were so. It was a terrible malady to have. Far worse than the several others.”
16. The Golden Man
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.73 | 3.65 | 3.69 |
Overview
Written in 1954, it is the tale of a man who is irresistible to women and who is living in a futuristic world of chameleon-like aliens, wub fur, and a whole lot more.
Favorite Quote
“Death makes me mad. Human and animal suffering make me mad; whenever one of my cats dies I curse God and I mean it; I feel fury at him. I'd like to get him here where I could interrogate him, tell him that I think the world is screwed up, that man didn't sin and fall but was pushed -- which is bad enough -- but was then sold the lie that he is basically sinful, which I know he is not.”
15. Paycheck
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.97 | 3.41 | 3.69 |
Overview
Jennings can’t remember the last two years of his employment with a construction company and relies on a bag of clues to change that. This bag includes a receipt, a ticket stub, half a poker chip, and a few other things.
14. Minority Report
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.85 | 3.55 | 3.70 |
Overview
John Anderton is why there is no more crime, but his precogs now see him as the next criminal and intend to bring back a world that once was.
13. Martian Time-Slip
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.76 | 3.65 | 3.71 |
Overview
A 10-year-old schizophrenic boy on Mars should be deported and destroyed, but people are trying to save him because they believe that he can make things better for the entire world.
Favorite Quote
"Death upsets everyone, makes them do peculiar things; it sets a radiating process of action and emotion going that works its way out, farther and farther, to embrace more people and things."
12. Radio Free Albemuth
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.80 | 3.62 | 3.71 |
Overview
A paranoid incompetent is now in the White House and throws the country into a terrible war. A struggling science fiction writer and his friend are trying to avoid the casualties of this war.
Favorite Quote
“How undisturbed, the sleep of the foolish.”
11. A Maze of Death
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.79 | 3.69 | 3.74 |
Overview
Fourteen strangers come to a new planet that isn’t what they thought it would be, and they soon learn that God is either absent here or intends to destroy everyone in its path.
Favorite Quote
“Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional year slipped by and had to be recorded, a continually growing sum which he could not reconcile with his self-image. He still saw himself, in his mind's eye, as youthful, and when he caught sight of himself in photographs he usually collapsed ... Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this, he had thought from time to time. Oh well, so it went.”
10. The Divine Invasion
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.82 | 3.74 | 3.78 |
Overview
In this book, the world is asked, what if God was alive but exiled? And what if a second coming is impossible because of modern technology?
Favorite Quote
“What a tragic realm this is, he reflected. Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don't know it; they think they are free because they have never been free, and do not understand what it means.”
9. Time Out of Joint
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.85 | 3.74 | 3.80 |
Overview
In 1998, Ragle Gumm thinks that it’s still 1959, and his disorientation makes it evident that reality and illusion can be quite similar.
Favorite Quote
“Relation of word to object . . . what is a word? Arbitrary sign. But we live in words. Our reality, among words not things. No such thing as thing anyhow; a gestalt in the mind.”
8. Now Wait for Last Year
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.89 | 3.70 | 3.80 |
Overview
A psychiatrist has to deal with an unusual new world and a wife who is addicted to a drug that makes her go back and forth in time, among other things.
Favorite Quote
“If you or I ever really accepted the moral responsibility for what we've done in our lifetime—we'd drop dead or go mad. Living creatures weren't made to understand what they do.”
7. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.91 | 3.79 | 3.85 |
Overview
When a famous TV star awakens and finds that no one knows who he is, he is stunned. But he is also without the ID papers that he needs to proceed to the future.
Favorite Quote
“Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it - grief is the final outcome of love, because it’s love lost. […] It’s the cycle of love completed: to love, to lose, to feel grief, to leave, and then to love again. Grief is the awareness that you will have to be alone, and there is nothing beyond that because being alone is the ultimate final destiny of each individual living creature. That’s what death is, the great loneliness.”
6. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.87 | 3.85 | 3.86 |
Overview
Archer is a bishop dealing with the suicides of his son and mistress, and it pushes him into a deeper search for god.
Favorite Quote
“So books are real to me, too; they link me not just with other minds but with the vision of other minds, what those minds understand and see. I see their worlds as well as I see my own.”
5. VALIS
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
3.93 | 3.94 | 3.94 |
Overview
In one of Dick’s trilogies, the first book is a theological detective story where God is both missing and a perpetrator of the ultimate crime.
Favorite Quote
“It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”
4. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
4.01 | 3.88 | 3.95 |
Overview
The story of an overcrowded world and two drugs — Chew-Z and Can-D — promises to make things better.
Favorite Quote
“I mean, after all, you have to consider we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's sort of a bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me?”
3. A Scanner Darkly
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
4.01 | 3.98 | 4.00 |
Overview
Substance D is inundating L.A. and killing everyone, but Special Agent Bob Arctor is out to find out where it’s coming from and what to do about it.
Favorite Quote
“Everything in life is just for a while.”
2. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
4.08 | 3.96 | 4.02 |
Overview
In 2021, Rick Deckard’s job is to find the androids and kill them, but it’s difficult because they look just the same as humans and don’t want to be found.
Favorite Quote
“You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”
1. Ubik
Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
4.08 | 4.00 | 4.04 |
Overview
Employees think that their boss is dead, but they keep getting messages from him. There was even a funeral, but is he dead, or is everyone else dead?
Favorite Quote
“The past is latent, is submerged, but still there, capable of rising to the surface once the later imprinting unfortunately--and against ordinary experience--vanished. The man contains--not the boy--but earlier men, he thought. History began a long time ago.”
Complete Rankings of Best PKD Novels
Book Title | Goodreads | LibraryThing | Overall |
---|---|---|---|
Ubik | 4.08 | 4.00 | 4.04 |
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? | 4.08 | 3.96 | 4.02 |
A Scanner Darkly | 4.01 | 3.98 | 4.00 |
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch | 4.01 | 3.88 | 3.95 |
Valis | 3.93 | 3.94 | 3.94 |
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer | 3.87 | 3.85 | 3.86 |
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said | 3.91 | 3.79 | 3.85 |
Now Wait for Last Year | 3.89 | 3.70 | 3.80 |
Time Out of Joint | 3.85 | 3.74 | 3.80 |
The Divine Invasion | 3.82 | 3.74 | 3.78 |
A Maze of Death | 3.79 | 3.69 | 3.74 |
Radio Free Albemuth | 3.80 | 3.62 | 3.71 |
Martian Time-Slip | 3.76 | 3.65 | 3.71 |
Minority Report | 3.85 | 3.55 | 3.70 |
Paycheck | 3.97 | 3.41 | 3.69 |
The Golden Man | 3.73 | 3.65 | 3.69 |
Clans of the Alphane Moon | 3.74 | 3.63 | 3.69 |
The Skull | 3.69 | 3.66 | 3.68 |
The Penultimate Truth | 3.78 | 3.54 | 3.66 |
Eye in the Sky | 3.74 | 3.57 | 3.66 |
The Man in High Castle | 3.62 | 3.68 | 3.65 |
The Variable Man | 3.80 | 3.50 | 3.65 |
Dr. Bloodmoney | 3.68 | 3.59 | 3.64 |
Confessions of a Crap Artist | 3.69 | 3.55 | 3.62 |
The Simulcra | 3.62 | 3.58 | 3.60 |
Galactic Pot-Healer | 3.61 | 3.55 | 3.58 |
The Game-Players of Titan | 3.65 | 3.48 | 3.57 |
The World Jones Made | 3.63 | 3.46 | 3.55 |
The Man Who Japed | 3.59 | 3.37 | 3.48 |
We Can Build You | 3.57 | 3.36 | 3.47 |
Counter-Clock World | 3.55 | 3.37 | 3.46 |
Our Friends from Frolix 8 | 3.58 | 3.33 | 3.46 |
Vulcan’s Hammer | 3.52 | 3.33 | 3.43 |
Solar Lottery | 3.48 | 3.34 | 3.41 |
The Cosmic Puppets | 3.46 | 3.23 | 3.35 |
The Zap Gun | 3.42 | 3.27 | 3.35 |
The Crack in Space | 3.47 | 3.21 | 3.34 |
Deus Irae | 3.45 | 3.23 | 3.34 |
Dr. Futurity | 3.47 | 3.15 | 3.31 |
Voices From the Street | 3.30 | 3.31 | 3.31 |
The Ganymede Takeover | 3.31 | 3.20 | 3.26 |
Lies, Inc. | 3.17 | 3.03 | 3.10 |
Gather Yourselves Together | 3.05 | 2.75 | 2.90 |
What’s Your Take?
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