Exhibit Piece by Philip K. Dick Episode #107

Philip K. Dick | September 30, 2023

Exhibit Piece by Philip K. Dick Episode #107
Philip K. Dick

EXHIBIT PIECE

Episode #107 · Written by Philip K. Dick · Narrated by Scott Miller

A historian obsessed with the past suddenly finds himself living inside the very world he was only meant to study. But when the line between exhibit and reality begins to blur, he faces a terrifying question—has he stepped into history, or has history swallowed him whole?

Exhibit Piece is one of Philip K. Dick’s most fascinating explorations of identity, memory, and the fragile nature of reality. In a future where history is preserved through full-scale reconstructions, George Miller is a historian so dedicated to the mid-20th century that he dresses like a man from the 1950s, carries a vintage briefcase, and speaks in outdated slang. But when something impossible happens—when voices and movement are heard inside the sealed exhibit—Miller steps across the boundary between observation and immersion. Suddenly he is no longer a historian studying the past. He is living in it… with a wife, children, coworkers, and a life that feels more real than the futuristic society he came from. Is he trapped in an exhibit? Hallucinating? Or has time folded in on itself?

The more Miller tries to understand what has happened, the more the world around him insists it is real. His family knows him, his job awaits him, and the breakfast on the table tastes undeniably like bacon and coffee. Yet the memories of his “real” life—his research department, his critic Fleming, the History Agency—haven’t vanished. He remembers both lives at once, and the confusion pushes him to the brink. Dick builds the tension slowly, tightening the boundaries between eras until they collide, leaving Miller—and the reader—questioning whether the future was ever real at all.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) is one of the most influential voices in speculative fiction, the mind behind stories that became Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle. Known for his reality-bending plots, questions of identity, and paranoid psychological twists, Dick wasn’t just writing science fiction—he was dissecting the nature of existence. His work asks what is real, who decides, and whether free will survives in a world shaped by systems, technology, or illusion. Though often dismissed during his lifetime, Dick is now regarded as a visionary whose ideas predicted virtual reality, surveillance culture, and the fragmentation of truth in the modern world.

If you enjoy reality glitches, retro-futurism, and the unsettling moment when a character realizes the world around them may not be the world at all, Exhibit Piece is a perfect entry into the Philip K. Dick experience—strange, layered, and deeply human.