"time travel, extrasensory powers, tentacled aliens, ray guns"

"[Philip K.] Dick's great accomplishment, on view in the twenty-one stories collected here, was to turn the materials of American pulp-style science fiction into a vocabulary for a remarkably personal vision of paranoia and dislocation.  It's a vision of yearning and anxious as Kafka's, if considerably more homely.  It's also as funny.  Dick is a kitchen-sink surrealist, gaining energy and invention for a mad piling of pulp SF tropes -- and clichés -- into his fiction: time travel, extrasensory powers, tentacled aliens, ray guns, androids and robots.  He loves fakes and simulacra as much as he fears them; illusory worlds, bogus religions, placebo drugs, impersonated police, cyborgs.  Tyrannical world governments and ruined dystopian cities are default settings here -- not only have Orwell and Huxley been taken as givens in Dick's worlds, so have Old Masters of genre SF like Clifford Simak, and Robert Heinlein and A. E. Van Vogt.  American SF by the mid-1950s was a kind of jazz, stories built by riffing on stories.  The conversation they formed might be forbiddingly hermetic, if it hadn't quickly been incorporated by Rod Serling and Marvel Comics and Steven Spielberg (among many others), and become one of the prime vocabularies of our age."

-- Jonathan Lethem, "High Priest of the Paranoids"