Human Is by Philip K. Dick Episode #29

Philip K. Dick | August 9, 2022

Human Is by Philip K. Dick Episode #29
Philip K. Dick

HUMAN IS

Episode #29 · Written by Philip K. Dick · Narrated by Scott Miller

A cold, emotionless scientist returns from a distant planet as a completely different man—warm, kind, and strangely human. But when the government arrives to expose the truth, his wife must decide which version of her husband deserves to live.

What if the person you loved finally became everything you ever wished they could be—only after their original self was gone forever? Human Is is one of Philip K. Dick’s most quietly devastating stories, a science-fiction tale built not on futuristic machines or alien warfare, but on something far more universal: the question of what it truly means to be human.

Jill Herrick has lived for years with a husband who cares more about data than people—a brilliant toxicologist whose cold logic has replaced compassion, warmth, or love. But when Lester returns from a research mission to the distant world of Rexor IV, something has changed. He laughs. He plays. He cooks. He embraces the boy he once rejected and the wife he once ignored. He has become, in every meaningful way, the man she always hoped he could be. But there is a problem: the government insists he is no longer Lester Herrick at all.

As Federal Clearance Agents close in, Jill faces an impossible truth. If the alien mind inhabiting her husband’s body is more human than the original ever was—does that make it the enemy, or a miracle worth protecting?

Published in Startling Stories, December 1955, Human Is shows Dick doing what he did best—using science fiction not to escape reality, but to expose it. The story reads like a quiet domestic drama wrapped around a philosophical trapdoor. This is identity horror, emotional sci-fi, and moral suspense distilled into one tight, unforgettable narrative.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) didn’t just write science fiction—he reshaped it. His work wrestles with paranoia, alternate realities, artificial intelligence, surveillance states, and the fragile certainty of self. During the 1950s, long before the awards and film adaptations, Dick built his voice in the pages of pulp magazines, delivering dozens of compact, unsettling stories like The Hanging Stranger, The Golden Man, Second Variety, and Human Is.

Today, Dick is regarded as one of the most important speculative writers of the 20th century, and his ideas have echoed through generations of literature and film. Yet Human Is remains one of his most surprising works—not bleak, not cynical, but quietly hopeful in a way only Philip K. Dick could achieve.

This story will make you question the boundary between the alien and the familiar, the definition of the word “human,” and whether being alive is the same as being kind.