Philip K. Dick 54 min read

Unable to build a weapon to match the enemy's living defenses, humanity tries a desperate gambit: install a dying man's brain as the mind of a warship, and Mr. Spaceship is born.

Philip K. Dick's 1953 story is an early, prescient AI-and-space-opera tale of a human brain fused with a ship. Sharp, unsettling, characteristically Dickian. Read it for an early gem from a master, where the line between man and machine, and the will to live, take a strange new turn.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

54 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).