Philip Kindred Dick (1928–1982) was a US writer of science fiction, especially surreal science fiction, who started out as a cult author and became a dominant influence throughout pulp culture because of the films based on his work, including Blade Runner and Total Recall. But Dick was highly respected and influential within the sphere of science fiction before popular success found him late in his life. Dick received the Hugo Award in 1963 for his novel The Man in the High Castle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1975 for his novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Early on, Dick tried to enter the mainstream literary world with his fiction, but his work was rejected and his mainstream novels appeared only after his death.
Strongly interested in theology and philosophy, Dick explored political and metaphysical themes in novels in which individuals, sometimes in altered states of being, confront or flee dysfunctional corporations or fascistic governments. These altered states of being often manifest in Dick’s fiction, including A Scanner Darkly (1977) and VALIS (1981), through drug use, conspiracy theories, transcendent moments of epiphany, and mental illness. Published after his death, Dick’s The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick explored these ideas in nonfiction form. His Ubik (1969)—on Time magazine’s 2005 list of the top one hundred English-language novels since 1923—bears some resemblance to Stepan Chapman’s later novel The Troika (1997) in how it manipulates different levels of reality in a unique way. The posthumous legitimizing of Dick became complete in 2007 when he was included in the Library of America series.
Although they did not know each other at the time, Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin graduated in the same high school class (Berkeley High School, class of 1947). Le Guin would later famously admonish Dick for perceived misogyny in his work, but in taking her criticism to heart some critics feel he may have lost, in his late-era novels, some underlying existential element or purely misanthropic impulse that energized his fiction on a subconscious level.
“Beyond Lies the Wub,” included here, was Dick’s first published story, appearing in Planet Stories (1952). Dick recalled in notes for a reprint of the story in the short story anthology First Voyages that Planet Stories was “the most lurid of all pulp magazines on the stands at the time…As I carried four copies into the record store where I worked, a customer gazed at me and them, with dismay, and said, ‘Phil, you read that kind of stuff?’ I had to admit I not only read it, I wrote it.”
“Beyond Lies the Wub” is interesting for several reasons, not just in that it is an excellent example of an impulse in science fiction to explore humankind’s relationship to animal species, whether terrestrial or alien. The wub makes another appearance in Dick’s fiction in the story “Not by Its Cover,” considered a sequel. Others point to “Beyond Lies the Wub” as the precursor to Dick’s interest in exploring metaphysics in his later stories. The wub not only explores the idea of individuation but deals with the question of how what we eat affects our brains long before it became an important area of inquiry in the sciences.