Second Variety
"Second Variety" is an influential short story by Philip K. Dick first published in Space Science Fiction magazine, in May 1953. A nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the West has reduced much of the world to a barren wasteland. The war continues however among the scattered remains of humanity. The Western forces have recently developed "claws", which are autonomous self-replicating robots to fight on their side. It is one of Dick's many stories in which nuclear war has rendered the Earth's surface uninhabitable.
The short story "Jon's World" (1954) revisited the claw-infested world of "Second Variety". The story was adapted to the movie Screamers in 1995.
Read more about Second Variety: Plot Summary, Critical Analysis, Publication History, Adaptations
Famous quotes containing the word variety:
“To invent without scruple a new principle to every new phenomenon, instead of adapting it to the old; to overload our hypothesis with a variety of this kind, are certain proofs that none of these principles is the just one, and that we only desire, by a number of falsehoods, to cover our ignorance of the truth.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)