I've been reading a collection of short stories from "Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick". I've read several of his books before, but had never touched his short stories until now. In fact, it's been quite a while since I've read any short stories and reminds how much I enjoy shorter narratives like this.

I used to pick up the newest release of "The Year's Best Science Fiction", edited by Gardner Dozois, every year which is a great collection of the best short science fiction stories of the year. At least, the best according to Mr. Dozois. I always thought he did a good job. I'm not sure why I stopped buying these. Perhaps my stack of ten years worth at home was starting to take up a bit too much shelf space. I may try to pick up the ones I'm missing as these were among the few books that I've held on to through my wife's numerous "old junk" removal sweeps.

Anyway, the point in bringing this up is that I'm increasingly struck with the contradictions in the futurecasting that these older science fiction works contain. It's not just in Mr. Dick's stories. I've been noticing this a lot lately as I've been reading other older works.

One example is the story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale", which is of course the short story that loosely inspired the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie "Total Recall". In this story, Dick imagines the main character conversing with and riding around in robot driven cabs and having fake memories implanted, but at one point he's anticipating a letter he is going to write at home on his typewriter complete with carbon paper.

Carbon paper!?! It amazes me that he was easily able to imagine such improvements to transportation as robots that could drive and converse with humans, but apparently the crowning achievment in written communication had already been achieved in the form of the typewriter and carbon paper.

Of course, I'm critiquing his work decades later with quite a bit of hindsight available, but these things really stick out like a sore thumb. It's not that he was totally wrong in his vision of the future that bothers me, but that he didn't even try to imagine any advancements in that area. It's the little details that always get me.

Still, these are great stories and I'd encourage anyone to check the book out. I'm enjoying it.