"What is authentically human? What is the nature of the alien elements that are threatening and vitiating living, intelligent human beings? These questions are deeply rooted in Philip K. Dick's work, and to them he has provided a bizarre variety of answers, answers that are constantly being pushed aside and replaced by new possibilities." -Patricia S. Warrick "The Labyrinthine Process of the Artificial: Philip K. Dick's Androids and Mechanical Constructs"

Novels

• Vulcan's Hammer (1960)
  A supercomputer--Vulcan 3--is built to run a world government after a devastating global war. Humans become the computer's enemies after as it gains its own intelligence and becomes paranoid and irrational. It uses human political factions as its pawns for its destruction of humanity.
  
• Martian Time Slip (1964)
  Robots are built as "teaching machines" for children that simulate historical figures such as Thomas Edison and Abraham Lincoln.
  
• The Simulacra (1964)
  A group of nine tyrannical rulers build androids to be used as presidential figureheads. The common people believe they are electing real humans as leaders, but they are actually electing the puppets of these hidden rulers.
  
• The Penultimate Truth (1964)
  A dictator gives his subjects the illusion of democracy by creating a android simulacrum that acts as president.
• Dr. Bloodmoney (1965)
  A mad scientist android and mutant human vie for power over a post-holocaust Earth.

  
  

• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1965)
  

  
  

• We Can Build You (1972)

Short Stories

 
• "The Preserving Machine" (1953)
  A Scientist creates a machine that generates artificial animals intended to preserve musical scores; each animal contains the instructions for one score. Instead of preserving the precious music, the animals corrupt and change it.
• "Imposter" (1953)
  The Outspacers, an alien race, build an android programmed to explode and destroy the Earth. The humanlike android is suspected of being an imposter, but he claims he is an innocent human because he is ignorant of his real nature. He eventually explodes and takes the Earth with him.
• "Second Variety" (1953)
  The UN and the Russians create robots to fight alongside humans in a global war that ravages the Earth. After the Earth is reduced to rubble and a few Russian and UN soldiers, the robots keep fighting because they know nothing else, and are programmed to kill humans. The remaining humans wonder if the robots, which exactly resemble humans, will become the new species on Earth.
• "The Defenders" (1953)
  Robots are created to continue a war on a decimated Earth while the humans live safely underground. The humans believe that the robots are still fighting, but they have actually rebuilt the Earth and live in peace. They send false messages the humans to trick them into believing the robots are still fighting.
• "Autofac" (1955)
  An automated factory keeps producing human goods even after all humans are destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. The factory becomes a living thing, showing survival instincts: after nearly being destroyed it spawns hundreds of little factories at the end of the story.
• "If There Were No Benny Cemoli" (1963)
  An automatic homepape (electronic newspaper) writer writes stories about nonexistant revolutionary political events. Eventually, the fiction the computer writes starts to become reality.
• "The Electric Ant" (1969)
  Considered one of Dick's best short stories and believed by some to be the best short story about an android. The main character wakes up in a hospital after an automobile accident and discovers, much to his dismay, that he is actually an android under his humanlike skin. The experience changes his whole perception of himself, and he wonders whether he ever had free will:

  "Programmed. In me somewhere, he thought, there is a matrix fitted in place, a grid screen that cuts me off from certain thoughts, certain actions. And forces me into others. I am not free. I never was, but now I know it; that makes it different."

Essays

 
• "The Android and the Human" (1972) from The Dark Haired Girl (1988)
  A brilliant but rambling essay about humans and androids, what it means to be human, what it means to have a soul, and other philosophic musings.
  
  "I have, in some of my stories and novels, written about androids or robots or simulacra--the name doesn't matter; what is meant is artificial constructs masquerading as humans. Usually with a sinister purpose in mind. . . The constructs do not mimic humans; they are, in many deep ways, actually human already. They are not trying to fool us, for a purpose of any sort; they merely follow the lines we follow. . . "
  
  "Someday a human being, named perhaps Fred White, may shoot a robot named Pete Something-or-other, which has come out of a General Electrics factory, and to his surpise see it weep and bleed. And the dying robot may shoot back and, to its surprise, see a wisp of gray smoke arise from the electric pump that it supposed was Mr. White's beating heart. It would be rather a great moment of truth for both of them."
• "Man, Android, and Machine" (1975) from The Dark Haired Girl (1988)
  Another strange and interesting essay with some thoughts on humans and machines, but mostly contains thoughts about ontology and issues surrounding the "layers" and "masks" of reality that permeate Dick's work.

   

   

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