Philip K. Dick’s 1966 novel, Now Wait for Last Year, is set in the United States in the year 2055. Earth has been drawn into a centuries-old war between two alien species, the human-like ‘Starmen and the insect-like reegs. World government has consolidated into a single entity under the United Nations, and the current Secretary General, Gino Molinari, is responsible for managing the world’s war effort.

The war takes place in the background of this story. In the foreground, we follow Dr. Eric Sweetscent, a surgeon who specializes in keeping wealthy men alive using “artiforg,” or artificially forged, organs. Dr. Sweetscent works for Virgil Ackerman, the 120-year-old owner of the Tijuana Fur and Dye company.

Dr. Bloodmoney, published in 1965, takes place in the imagined future of 1980s California. The book opens in Berkeley in 1981, where Stuart McConchie works as a television salesman. McConchie watches a familiar-looking man whose face he can’t place walk into the psychiatric office of Dr. Standstill, across the street.

The patient, we soon learn, is Dr. Bruno Bluthgeld, a former physics professor at Berkeley and researcher at the Livermore lab whom most people blame for an ill-conceived 1972 nuclear test that exposed huge numbers of Americans to toxic radiation. One effect of the radiation is a spike in phocomelia, a condition in which children are born with stunted, fin-like arms and legs. (When Dick wrote the book in 1963, there was an explosion in phocomelic births due to the drug Thalidomide being prescribed as a treatment for morning sickness in pregnant women.)

Martian Time-Slip, published in 1964, takes place on Mars in the late 1990s. The United Nations has begun colonizing the red planet, “reclaiming” desert to serve as farmland and establishing settlements along the great canals. Water is scarce, as are fine foods and luxury goods. Most people subsist on water rations and whatever meager crops they can raise.

Jack Bohlen is a repairman flying from job to job in his Yee Company helicopter. He’s much in demand on a planet where new equipment is hard to get and old equipment must be kept running as long as possible. He can fix just about anything, from industrial refrigeration systems to encrypted cassette recorders to the animatronic teachers at the local public school.

Published in 1969, Philip K. Dick’s Ubik takes place in a fictional future of 1992. The corporate world is plagued by spies from Ray Hollis’ psionic agency. The psionics have various psychic powers including telepathy and precognition. They infiltrate organizations to steal their valuable secrets.

Joe Chip is a tester for Runciter Associates, the world’s leading prudence organization. Prudence organizations find “inertials,” people whose psychic counter-talents can neutralize the talents of Hollis’ psionics. They’re in high demand by companies that have been infiltrated by psionics and are bleeding information.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch opens in New York City in an unnamed year of the twenty-first century. Barney Mayerson, a pre-fash consultant for Perky Pat Layouts, drank too much the night before and slept with his new assistant, Rondinella “Roni” Fugate. Mayerson and Fugate are both precogs, blessed with a talent for seeing into the future.

Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle presents an alternate reality in which the Allies lost World War II and the Axis won. The book was written in, and takes place in, the early 1960’s. Unlike many of today’s dystopian alternate-history novels, which tend to be dark and somber, Dick’s story is darkly humorous.

Instead of focusing merely on how the victors oppress the vanquished, Dick transposes the absurdities and petty quarrels of twentieth century life onto an America colonized by Japan, a world in which two cultures, fundamentally at odds, must coexist without being able to fully understand each other.