I'm a big PKD fan - I also recommend reading the 1909 short story 'the machine stops' by em Forster which was incredibly prescient and I suspect informed some of PKD's thinking.
People have often pointed out this piece 'predicted the internet age' while ignoring the dystopian collapse at the end of Forsters pice, which is alarmingly similar to the current collapse of some aspects of western civilization IMO...
I find his short stories to be quite good -- if not a bit repetitive if read in bulk. His paranoia and the bleakness of post nuclear war are overwhelming after a while.
Quite a lot of his stories have been made into movies, for better or worse. They seem to be enough of a chunk to hang a story on, without getting too much in the way of telling a good story.
Minority Report -- much better in the story. We Can Remember it for You Wholesale -- both worked.
Amazing the standard of pulp fiction in that era - we need a big dose of dystopian 'nuclear war will be an apocalypse that will end our lives' right now given how amazingly unaware people appear to be to the grave danger of nuclear war threat we are facing right now
People have often pointed out this piece 'predicted the internet age' while ignoring the dystopian collapse at the end of Forsters pice, which is alarmingly similar to the current collapse of some aspects of western civilization IMO...
https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/...
I have PKD's 'the Defenders' mapped to 'the machine stops' in my mind
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Defenders_(short_story)