Sometimes you read something and you really have to let it digest before you decide whether you enjoyed it or not, Beyond Lies the Wub was just that for me.
Again a short story from the nights of our camping trip, but it required two readings. Not because it is confusing, but because I had to see if I missed something deeper than what it appeared. No, it was what I read, every word of it.
The Wub is basically a pig, a large lazy philosophical space pig who joins the crew of a space liner on a journey of inner enlightenment. The story never gets exciting, or high paced, it is the slow-moving grandfather on his way to renew his license that he shouldn’t even have at 108 years of age.
In retrospect the book could have been written no better, the story is what it is and Philip K. Dick wrote the story as well as any one could, but does the story hold up on its merit, I still don’t know. Maybe it is the concept of a pig that may have written the Nicomachean Ethics: Space Swine Edition, or maybe it was the fact that my mind is having difficulty wrapping around the more broad concept that even masters of writing can write a flub, maybe that is The Wub.
Check it out for yourself, FREE: http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Lies-the-Wub-ebook/dp/B004UJU5W0/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1342562409&sr=1-1&keywords=beyond+lies+the+wub
For Peter Cawdron and other Out of the States Readers: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28554
P.S. Project Gutenberg is a great resource for free public domain books.
88 mph to Roswell 
July 17th, 2012 at 9:23 pm
Thanks for the link to Gutenberg link… there’s a whole host of great books on there. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=philip+dick
Beyond the Wub is one of the classics of science fiction. I had this story very much in mind when I wrote Trixie & Me, so when you get to the end of that section in Galactic Exploration, let me know what you think of the twist.
Cheers,
Peter
July 18th, 2012 at 6:22 am
PG is a great source for free material, I read off my PC from there a lot because of the ease of access. Cyber-Library.
Thanks for reading!
August 9th, 2012 at 5:08 pm
loved it! Classic, I read it back in college and it was still old then!