Although he died when he was only 53 years old, Philip K. Dick (1928 – 1982) published 44 novels and 121 short stories during his lifetime and solidified his position as arguably the most literary of science fiction writers. His novel Ubik appears on TIME magazine’s list of the 100 best English-language novels, and Dick is the only science fiction writer to get honored in the prestigious Library of America series, a kind of pantheon of American literature.

If you’re not intimately familiar with his novels, then you assuredly know major films based on Dick’s work – Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly and Minority Report. Today, we bring you another way to get acquainted with his writing. We’re presenting a selection of Dick’s stories available for free on the web. Below we have culled together 11 short stories from our collection of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books. And, just as an fyi, you could always snag one of Dick’s novels (in audio) by signing up for Audible.com’s no-strings-attached Free Trial program. Get details here.

eTexts (find download instructions here)

• “Beyond the Door” – Multiple formats – iTunes
  • First published in 1954, the text is not usually found in collections of Dick’s writings.
• “Beyond Lies the Wub” – Multiple formats – iTunes
  • Dick’s first published story. Originally appeared in Planet Stories in July, 1952.
• “Mr. Spaceship” – Multiple Formats
  • Appeared first in Imagination in 1953, and later in The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick.
• “Piper in the Woods” – Multiple Formats
  • First published in 1953 in the fantasy and science fiction magazine, Imagination.
• “Second Variety” – Multiple Formats
  • Influential short story first published in Space Science Fiction Magazine in May 1953.
• “The Crystal Crypt” – Multiple Formats
  • Sci-fi story published in the January 1952 edition of Planet Stories.
• “The Defenders” – Multiple Formats – iTunes
  • A 1953 sci-fi story that laid the foundation for Dick’s 1964 novel The Penultimate Truth.
• “The Eyes Have It” – Multiple Formats – iTunes
  • One of the shortest, if not the shortest, of all of Philip K. Dick’s many short stories.
• “The Gun” – Multiple Formats – iTunes
  • A 1952 sci-fi story that later appeared in The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick.
• “The Skull” – Multiple Formats – iTunes
  • Same as right above.
• “The Variable Man” – Multiple Formats
  • A 1953 novella written/sold by Philip K. Dick before he had an agent.

Audio

• “Beyond Lies the Wub” – Free MP3
• “Beyond the Door” – Free MP3
• “Second Variety” – Free MP3 Zip File – Stream Online
• “The Defenders” - Free MP3
• “The Variable Man” – Free MP3 Zip File – Stream Online

P.S. Don’t miss the film Philip K. Dick: A Day in the Afterlife (1994), a documentary appearing in our collection of Free Movies Online.

Related Content:

Neil Gaiman’s Free Short Stories and New Year’s Wishes

The Ware Tetralogy: Free SciFi Download

Today is the birthday of J.R.R. (John Ronald Reuel) Tolkien, author of the fantasy novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He was born on January 3, 1892 to British parents in Bloemfontein, South Africa. His father died when he was 3 years old, and he moved with his mother to England. The young boy took an early liking to stories of magic and myth. In his 1947 book On Fairy Stories, Tolkien wrote:

I had very little desire to look for buried treasure or fight pirates, and Treasure Island left me cool. Red Indians were better: there were bows and arrows (I had and have a wholly unsatisfied desire to shoot well with a bow), and strange languages, and glimpses of an archaic mode of life, and above all, forests in such stories. But the land of Merlin and Arthur were better than these, and best of all the nameless North of Sigurd and the Volsungs, and the prince of all dragons. Such lands were pre-eminently desirable.

The urge to compose his own tales came early, but Tolkien became sidetracked by an interest in the subtleties of language. In a letter to W.H. Auden in 1955 he wrote:

I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say “A green great dragon,” but had to say “a great green dragon.” I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language.

Tolkien became a philologist. He studied English Language and Literature at Exeter College, Oxford and–after a harrowing experience in the trenches of World War I–embarked on an academic career. He became an expert on Anglo Saxon and Norse mythology.

But the misty forests of Tolkien’s childhood imagination never left him. One day in the early 1930s, he was at home grading a large stack of student papers when his mind began to wander. On a blank sheet in one of the papers, the professor found himself writing, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” He didn’t know what a hobbit was, but soon found himself spinning a tale, which he told to his young children. In 1937 it was published as The Hobbit.

The popularity of The Hobbit, not only with children but with adults, led to requests for a sequel, and in 1954 and 1955 Tolkien’s epic trilogy, The Lord of the Rings was published. It went on to become one of the most popular works of fiction of the 20th century, with over 150 million copies sold worldwide–and counting.

In celebration of Tolkien’s 120th birthday, we present a fascinating film on the author from the BBC series In Their Own Words: British Novelists. The 27-minute film was first broadcast in March of 1968, when Tolkien was 76 years old, and includes interviews and footage of the old man at his haunts in Oxford. H/T The Writer’s Almanac.

Related Content:

Free Audio: Download the Complete Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis

Last week we gave you John Cage performing his avant-garde composition Water Walk on the CBS game show “I’ve Got a Secret” in 1960. Now, this week, we’re following up with a nice complement — Frank Zappa bringing his own brand of offbeat music to the American airwaves in 1963. Only 22 years old and not yet famous, Zappa appeared on The Steve Allen Show and made music with some drumsticks, a bass bow, and two garden-variety bicycles — and nothing more.

The video above gives you mostly the prelude to the actual music. Then, in the first video below, Zappa gives a demo of the instruments. Next comes the Concerto for Two Bicycles, which features the show’s house orchestra joining the cacophonous fun. The clips run a good 15 minutes.

Scientific discovery is an engine of economic and military power, and America has long prided itself on its leadership in research. But as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson points out in this video, there are some dark clouds on the horizon.

When you look at the trendline, Tyson says, scientific research in America is clearly in a state of decline compared to other regions, like Asia and Western Europe. “As everyone else understands the value of innovative investments in science and technology in ways that we do not,” says Tyson, “we slowly fade.”

The maps Tyson uses are from Worldmapper.org. The one that he says represents change from “2000 to 2010″ actually depicts growth in scientific research from 1990 to 2001. Danny Dorling, professor of  Human Geography at the University of Sheffield and part of the team that created Worldmapper, confirmed Tyson’s error but said, “I think Neil’s got it roughly right. He should just have said ‘this is the trend to 2001 and it is not just likely it has continued, but it has probably accelerated.’”

Tyson’s comments are from a talk he gave in May at the University of Washington entitled, “Adventures of an Astrophysicist.” For a closer look at the maps he uses, see below.

The color-coded world map above can be used for reference when studying the maps below.

The map above represents territory sizes in proportion to the number of papers published in 2001 that were written by scientists living there. The number of scientific papers published by researchers living in America was more than three times greater than the number published in the second-highest-publishing country, Japan. For more information, including per capita data, see Worldmapper’s PDF poster.

The map above represents the growth in scientific research between 1990 and 2001. Territory sizes are proportional to the increase in scientific papers by authors working in those countries in 2001 compared to 1990. If there was no increase during that period, the country has no area on the map.

Despite the fact that the United States had the most published research in 2001 and a net increase in research betwen 1990 and 2001, its size is smaller on the map because of a significantly greater growth rate by countries like Japan, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, China and Germany. Although the data behind the maps are now a decade old, Dorling suggests that a current map might look similar. “If I had to guess,” he said, “it would look worse for the USA given the massive cuts in funding in California to some of the major state Universities there.”

You can find more on this map, including a printable PDF poster with per capita data by country, along with information on the sources and methodology behind its creation, by visiting Worldmapper.

Maps © Copyright SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan)

Before we rush headlong into a new year, it’s worth pausing, ever so briefly, to consider the ground we covered in 2011. What topics resonated with you … and jazzed us? Today, we’re highlighting 10 thematic areas (and 46 posts) that captured the imagination. Chances are you missed a few gems here. So please join us on our brief journey back into time. Tomorrow, we start looking forward again.

1) Universities Offer More Free Courses, Then Start Pushing Toward Certificates: The year started well enough. Yale released another 10 stellar open courses. (Find them on our list of 400 Free Courses). Then other universities started pushing the envelope on the open course format. This fall, Stanford launched a series of free courses that combined video lectures with more dynamic resources – short quizzes; the ability to pose questions to Stanford instructors; feedback on your overall performance; a statement of accomplishment from the instructor, etc. A new round of free courses will start in January and February. (Get the full list and enroll here.) Finally, keep your eyes peeled for this: In 2012, MIT will offer similar courses, but with one big difference. Students will get an official certificate at the end of the course, all at a very minimal charge. More details here.

2) Cultural Icons at Occupy Wall Street: OWS was a big national story, and we were always intrigued by its cultural dimension — by the cultural figures who championed the movement. You can revisit performances/speeches by: Philip Glass & Lou Reed; Willie Nelson, Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie; David Crosby and Graham Nash; Joseph Stiglitz and Lawrence Lessig; Noam Chomsky; and Slavoj Zizek. Also check out: 8 Lectures from Occupy Harvard and Artistic Posters From Occupy Wall Street.

3) Books Intelligent People Should Read: Neil deGrasse Tyson’s list “8 (Free) Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read” ended up generating far more conversation and controversy than we would have expected. (Users have left 83 comments at last count.) No matter what you think of his rationale for choosing these texts, the books make for essential reading, and they’re freely available online.

Tyson’s list dovetails fairly nicely with another list of essential texts — The Harvard Classics, a 51 volume set that’s available online. According to Charles W. Eliot, the legendary Harvard president, if you were to spend just 15 minutes a day reading these books, you could give yourself a proper liberal education. And that could partly apply to another list we pulled together: 20 Popular High School Books Available as Free eBooks & Audio Books — the great literary classics taught in classrooms all across America, all free…

4) Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry: Christopher Hitchens left us this past month. And, until his last day, Hitchens was the same old Hitch — prolific, incisive, surly and defiant, especially when asked about whether he’d change his position on religion, spirituality and the afterlife. All of this was on display when he spoke at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles last February. We covered his comments in a post called, No Deathbed Conversion for Me, Thanks, But it was Good of You to Ask. And even from the grave, Hitchens did more of the same, forcing us to question the whole modern meaning of Christmas.

During Hitch’s final days, Stephen Fry emceed a large tribute to his friend in London, an event that brought together Richard Dawkins, Christopher Buckley, Salman Rushdie, Lewis Lapham, Martin Amis, poet James Fenton and actor Sean Penn. It’s well worth a watch. But you also shouldn’t miss some other great videos featuring the wisdom of Mr. Fry — his introduction to the strange world of nanoscience, his animated debate on the virtues (or lack thereof) of the Catholic Church, and his thoughtful reflection, What I Wish I Had Known When I Was 18.

5) Four for the Fab Four: John, Paul, Ringo and George. We sneak them in whenever we can. A sprinkling here and there. This year, we served up an ever-popular post, Guitarist Randy Bachman Demystifies the Opening Chord of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, and a no less popular freebie: Download The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine as a Free, Interactive eBook. Trailing right behind are two other good Beatles picks: All Together Now: Every Beatles Song Played at Once and The Beatles’ Rooftop Concert: The Last Gig.

6) Wisdom from Great Philosophers: Want the chance to take courses from great philosophers? Here’s your opportunity. Our meta post brought together courses/lectures from Bertrand Russell, Michel Foucault, John Searle, Walter Kaufmann, Leo Strauss, Hubert Dreyfus, and Michael Sandel. You could get lost in this for days. Also while you’re at it, you should check out The History of Philosophy … Without Any Gaps, an ongoing podcast created by Peter Adamson (King’s College London) that moves from the Ancients to the Moderns. Plus we’d encourage you to revisit: Noam Chomsky & Michel Foucault Debate Human Nature & Power in 1971.

7) Vintage Film Collections: Scouring the web for vintage films. It’s something we love to do. In 2011, we brought you 22 films by Alfred Hitchcock, 25 Westerns with John Wayne, 32 Film Noir classics, and a series of films by the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. All are listed in our big collection of Free Movies Online.

8) Back to the Future: We had fun going back — way back — and seeing how past generations imagined the future. Arthur C. Clarke Predicted the Future in 1964 … And Pretty Much Nailed It. Before that, American fashion designers looked roughly 70 years into the future and guessed how women might dress in Year 2000. Turns out fashion designers aren’t the best futurists. And, even before that (circa 1922), we get to see the world’s first mobile phone in action. Seriously!

9) Animated Films: 2011 started off on exactly the right note. On January 1, we featured Shel Silverstein’s animated version of The Giving Tree. Then some other gems followed: Destino, the Salvador Dalí – Disney collaboration that started in 1946 and finished in 1999; Spike Jonze’s Auprès de Toi (To Die By Your Side), a short stop motion film set inside the famous Parisian bookstore, Shakespeare and Company; John Turturro narrating an animated version of Italo Calvino’s fairy tale, “The False Grandmother;” and a series of animated films featuring the voice of Orson Welles. Also let’s not forget these splendid animation concepts for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and, just for good measure, Terry Gilliam’s vintage primer on making your own cut-out animation.

10) New Archives & Art on the Web: Last but not least — 2011′s new archival projects that brought great culture to the web.

• Google “Art Project” Brings Great Paintings & Museums to You
• Royal Society Opens Online Archive; Puts 60,000 Papers Online
• Google Puts The Dead Sea Scrolls Online (in Super High Resolution)
• The Smithsonian Launches Wildlife Photo Archive
• Sir Isaac Newton’s Papers & Annotated Principia Go Digital

And now onward into 2012….

Santa left a new Kindle, iPad or other media player under your tree. He did his job. Now we’ll do ours. We’ll tell you how to fill those devices with free intelligent media — great books, movies, courses, and all of the rest. And if you didn’t get a new gadget, fear not. You can access all of these materials on the good old fashioned computer. Here we go:

Free eBooks: You have always wanted to read the great works. And now is your chance. When you dive into our Free eBooks collection you will find 300 great works by some classic writers (Dickens, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and Tolstoy) and contemporary writers (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, and Kurt Vonnegut). The collection also gives you access to the 51-volume Harvard Classics. Read these foundational texts, and you’ll be well on your way to giving yourself a proper liberal education.

If you need help loading files to your eBook reader, Project Gutenberg provides tutorials here, and one of our previous posts explains how to upload files specifically to your Kindle.

Free Audio Books: What better way to spend your free time than listening to some of the greatest books ever written? This page contains a vast number of free audio books, including works by Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Edgar Allan Poe, George Orwell and more recent writers — Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Carver, etc. You can download these classic books straight to your mp3 player, then listen as you go.

[Note: If you're looking for a more recent book, you can download one free audio book from Audible.com. Grab that new Steve Jobs biography, or pretty much any other audio book you want. Find details on Audible's no-strings-attached deal here.]

Free Courses: This list brings together over 400 free courses from leading universities, including Stanford, Yale, MIT, UC Berkeley, Oxford and beyond. These full-fledged courses range across all disciplines – history, physics, philosophy, psychology and beyond. All of these courses are available in audio, and roughly 65% are available in video. You can’t receive credits or certificates for these courses. But the amount of personal enrichment you will derive here is immeasurable.

Free Movies: With a click of a mouse, or a tap of your touch screen, you will have access to 435 great movies. The collection hosts many classics, westerns, indies, documentaries, silent films and film noir favorites. It features work by some of our great directors (Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard and David Lynch) and performances by cinema legends: John Wayne, Jack Nicholson, Audrey Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin, and beyond. On this one page, you will find thousands of hours of cinema bliss.

Free Language Lessons: Perhaps learning a new language is high on your list of 2012 New Year’s resolutions. Well, here is a great way to do it. Take your pick of 40 languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, Mandarin, English, Russian, Dutch, even Finnish, Yiddish and Esperanto. These lessons are all free and ready to download.

Free Textbooks: And one last item for the lifelong learners among you. We have scoured the web and pulled together a list of 150 Free Textbooks. It’s a great resource particularly if you’re looking to learn math, computer science or physics on your own. There might be a diamond in the rough here for you.

Thank Santa, maybe thank us, and enjoy that new device….

Neil Gaiman is one of the handful of writers who has made comics respectable over the past several decades. He has written some classic children’s stories, plus a novel that will be adapted by HBO. A great deal of his output, though, has been in the form of short stories, and we have pulled together some free copies for you today. Some stories are available in audio and video, others in text. (We have them all separately listed in our collections of Free Audio Books and eBooks):

Audio & Video

And, since it’s certainly timely, we leave you with Gaiman’s New Year’s Eve message delivered to a crowd in Boston several years ago:

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art – write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. May your coming year be a wonderful thing in which you dream both dangerously and outrageously.

I hope you will make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and you will be liked and you will have people to love and to like in return. And most importantly, because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now – I hope that you will, when you need to, be wise and that you will always be kind. And I hope that somewhere in the next year you surprise yourself.

Mark Linsenmayer runs the Partially Examined Life philosophy podcast and blog. He also performs with the Madison, WI band New People.

In 1952, John Cage composed his most controversial piece, 4′33,″ a four-and-a-half minute reflection on the sound of silence. Now fast forward eight years. It’s February, 1960, and we find the composer teaching his famous Experimental Composition courses at The New School in NYC, and paying a visit to the CBS game show “I’ve Got a Secret.” The TV show offered Cage something of a teachable moment, a chance to introduce the broader public to his brand of avant-garde music. Cage’s piece is called Water Walk (1959), and it’s all performed with unconventional instruments, save a grand piano. A water pitcher, iron pipe, goose call, bathtub, rubber duckie, and five unplugged radios — they all make the music. And the audience doesn’t quite know how to react, except with nervous laughter. It wasn’t particularly courteous. But, as one scholar has noted, it’s equally remarkable that prime time TV gave ten minutes of uninterrupted airtime to avant-garde music. You take the good with the bad.

via Biblioklept/WFMU

In 1976 a youthful fan named Stuart sent John Lennon a six-page list of questions. The former Beatle responded with answers, along with a child-like drawing of a lamb standing on a cloud, saying, “Hi Stuart.”

Stuart wanted to know a few things, like what sort of album Lennon was working on. “Until it’s been on tape,” Lennon replied, “I never know what it will be.” He also wondered if the famous musician was writing anything, like perhaps an autobiography. “Yes, I have been writing, but not an autobiography. I’ve noticed that people tend to DIE after writing their life story.”

The young fan included a list of words and names, along with the question: How would you characterize the following figures in one word?

• John: “Great”
• Paul: “Extraordinary”
• George: “Lost”
• Ringo: “Friend”
• Elvis: “Fat”
• Yoko: “Love”
• Howard Cosell: “Hum”

Lennon signed off with, “It was a pleasure, hope ya dig it/John Lennon.”

via Lists of Note

“Civilization begins with distillation,” William Faulkner once said, and like many of the great writers of the 20th century — Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce — the bard of Oxford, Mississippi certainly had a fondness for alcohol.

Unlike many of the others, though, Faulkner liked to drink while he was writing. In 1937 his French translator, Maurice Edgar Coindreau, was trying to decipher one of Faulkner’s idiosyncratically baroque sentences. He showed the passage to the writer, who puzzled over it for a moment and then broke out laughing. “I have absolutely no idea of what I meant,” Faulkner told Coindreau. “You see, I usually write at night. I always keep my whiskey within reach; so many ideas that I can’t remember in the morning pop into my head.”

Every now and then Faulkner would embark on a drunken binge. His publisher, Bennett Cerf, recalled:

The maddening thing about Bill Faulkner was that he’d go off on one of those benders, which were sometimes deliberate, and when he came out of it, he’d come walking into the office clear-eyed, ready for action, as though he hadn’t had a drink in six months. But during those bouts he didn’t know what he was doing. He was helpless. His capacity wasn’t very great; it didn’t take too much to send him off. Occasionally, at a good dinner, with the fine wines and brandy he loved, he would miscalculate. Other times I think he pretended to be drunk to avoid doing something he didn’t want to do.

Wine and brandy were not Faulkner’s favorite spirits. He loved whiskey. His favorite cocktail was the mint julep. Faulkner would make one by mixing whiskey–preferably bourbon–with one teaspoon of sugar, a sprig or two of crushed mint, and ice. He liked to drink his mint julep in a frosty metal cup. (See image above.) The word “julep” first appeared in the late 14th century to describe a syrupy drink used to wash down medicine. Faulkner believed in the medicinal efficacy of alcohol. Lillian Ross once visited the author when he was ailing, and quoted him as saying, “Isn’t anythin’ Ah got whiskey won’t cure.”

On a cold winter night, Faulkner’s medicine of choice was the hot toddy. His niece, Dean Faulkner Wells, described the recipe and ritual for hot toddies favored by her uncle (whom she called “Pappy”) in The Great American Writers’ Cookbook, quoted last week by Maud Newton:

Pappy alone decided when a Hot Toddy was needed, and he administered it to his patient with the best bedside manner of a country doctor.

He prepared it in the kitchen in the following way: Take one heavy glass tumbler. Fill approximately half full with Heaven Hill bourbon (the Jack Daniel’s was reserved for Pappy’s ailments). Add one tablespoon of sugar. Squeeze 1/2 lemon and drop into glass. Stir until sugar dissolves. Fill glass with boiling water. Serve with potholder to protect patient’s hands from the hot glass.

Pappy always made a small ceremony out of serving his Hot Toddy, bringing it upstairs on a silver tray and admonishing his patient to drink it quickly, before it cooled off. It never failed.

h/t The Migrant Book Club

Related Content:

Artists Under the Influence

William Faulkner Audio Archive Goes Online

William Faulkner Reads from As I Lay Dying