PIPER IN THE WOODS

Number	Writing Date	Pub. Date	Previous	Next	Notes
13	<Feb 1953	Feb 1953	Mr. Spaceship	The Infinites

"Piper In The Woods" is fantasy masquerading as science fiction and tells the tale of a survey crew on an uninhabited planetoid who, for some unknown reason, start thinking they’re plants. Other than its publication in Imagination in the Feb 1953 issue, its only other appearance was in THE COLLECTED STORIES. However, in the issue of Imagination in which "Piper In The Woods" appeared, Philip K. Dick had a self-written autobiographical blurb printed on the inside of the front cover, one of Imagination’s ongoing "Introducing The Author" profiles. The profile is accompanied by a small photo of PKD. Here’s what Dick had to say about science fiction and his life at that time:

Once when I was very young, I came across a magazine directly below the comic books called Stirring Science Stories. I bought it, finally, and carried it home, reading it along the way. Here were ideas, vital and imaginative. Men moving across the universe, down into sub-atomic particles, into time; there was no limit. One society, one given environment was transcended. Stf was Faustian: it carried a person up and beyond.
I was twelve years old, then. But I saw in stf the same thing I see now: a medium in which the full play of human imagination can operate, ordered, of course, by reason and consistent development. Over the years stf has grown, matured toward greater social awareness and responsibility.
I became interested in writing stf when I saw it emerge from the ray gun stage into studies of man in various types and complexities of society.
I enjoy writing stf: it is essentially communication between myself and others as interested as I in knowing where present forces are taking us. My wife and my cat Magnificat, are a little worried about my preoccupation with stf. Like most stf readers I have files and stacks of magazines, boxes of notes and data, parts of unfinished stories, a huge desk full of related material in various stages. The neighbors say I seem to "read and write a lot." But I think we will see our devotion pay off. We may yet live to be present when the public libraries begin to carry the stf magazines, and someday, perhaps, even the school libraries. -- Philip K. Dick

Gregg Rickman has published an interview he conducted with Philip K. Dick on Audiocassette. It is called Piper In The Woods (1987) and published by Fragments West, Long Beach, CA. Parts of this interview were excerpted in Argosy magazine in Nov 1990.

1969		OTHER WORLDS, OTHER TIMES, McFadden, pb, 1969, ?, $0.75, (?) {Ed. Moskowitz, Elwood}
1987		THE COLLECTED STORIES OF PHILIP K. DICK,