Progeny by Philip K. Dick Episode #120

Philip K. Dick | October 14, 2023

Progeny by Philip K. Dick Episode #120
Philip K. Dick

PROGENY

Episode #120 · Written by Philip K. Dick · Narrated by Scott Miller

A proud father returns from deep-space work to finally meet the son he’s been waiting nine years to see—only to discover that parenthood has changed in ways he never imagined. When a society trusts machines to raise its children, what does it mean to still be human?

Progeny is Philip K. Dick at his sharpest—blending domestic anxiety, social satire, and quietly chilling futurism into a story that feels more relevant with every passing decade. Ed Doyle has spent years working on the colonies, dreaming of the day he can finally hold his newborn son. But when he returns to Earth, he discovers a society that no longer trusts parents to raise their own children. In this world, robots now handle child-rearing from birth to adulthood, with science dictating emotional development, career assignment, and even where love is allowed to exist. Ed only wants to be a father. The system only wants efficiency. And somewhere in the middle, a child is being shaped into something that may not even recognize the person who gave him life.

Dick turns a seemingly personal conflict into a powerful social critique—one that asks uncomfortable questions about automation, authority, and the cost of trading human imperfections for engineered perfection. As Ed fights for time with his son, Progeny becomes a story not just about a family, but about what happens when society decides that parenting, emotion, and even free will are too messy to be trusted to humans.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) was a visionary of speculative fiction, known for exploring identity, surveillance, reality breakdown, and the terrifying logic of systems that reshape mankind. His work inspired films like Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and The Adjustment Bureau. During his lifetime he published more than 120 short stories and 44 novels, many originally appearing in the same mid-century magazines that now make up the “vintage” era of science fiction celebrated on this podcast.

What makes Dick timeless isn’t the technology—it’s the emotional truth beneath it. He didn’t just predict the future. He worried about it. Progeny is one of his most unsettling warnings: the danger isn’t when machines replace us. It’s when we willingly surrender what makes us human.

LISTEN TO THE STORY

Listen to Progeny by Philip K. Dick — a chilling look at robot-raised children and a father fighting for his son. Vintage sci-fi meets classic science fiction.

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PHILIP K. DICK SHORT STORIES

No writer has shaped The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast more profoundly than Philip K. Dick.

From the very beginning, Dick’s uneasy visions have pulsed at the heart of this show. Episode 1 featured The Hanging Stranger, a chilling tale of a corpse swaying in a public square while ordinary citizens hurry past as if nothing is wrong. That opening story set the tone for everything that followed — paranoia in broad daylight, reality bending at the edges, and the quiet suspicion that the world you trust has already been replaced.

Dick’s genius was not in rockets or distant galaxies alone. He brought the strange into living rooms, offices, schoolyards, and suburban streets. In The Father Thing, a young boy becomes convinced his father has been replaced by something wearing his face. Human Is asks whether a man who returns from space truly is the same person — or whether “better” might mean something far more unsettling. Adjustment Team reveals unseen bureaucrats pausing and resetting reality itself while one man accidentally slips between the cracks.

Some stories strike with dark humor. The Eyes Have It turns casual figures of speech into proof of alien invasion. Sales Pitch unleashes a relentless robotic salesman that refuses to take no for an answer. Others cut deeper. Foster, You’re Dead! exposes the fear-driven consumerism of the Cold War era. Breakfast at Twilight drops an unsuspecting family into the aftermath of atomic catastrophe.

Across more than thirty narrated stories, we’ve traveled through Dick’s shifting realities: the eerie colonization of Mars in Tony and the Beetles, the strange evolutionary leap in The Golden Man, the quiet dread of Beyond the Door, the aching nostalgia of Exhibit Piece, and the philosophical unease of The Turning Wheel. Whether he’s writing about android prejudice in James P. Crow, divine intrusion in Upon the Dull Earth, or time paradoxes in The Skull, Dick always returns to one question: what does it mean to be real?

No other author appears more often in our catalog. No other writer has unsettled us so consistently. Explore the stories below and step into the shifting, unstable, unforgettable worlds of Philip K. Dick — the writer who launched this podcast and continues to haunt it.

ABOUT THE LOST SCI-FI PODCAST

The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast is the most listened-to vintage science fiction podcast in the world. Ranked the #1 Science Fiction Podcast in 43 countries and heard in more than 190 countries, the show has surpassed 4.2 million listens.

Each episode features carefully selected stories from the Golden Age of science fiction, professionally narrated. Timeless storytelling the way it was meant to be heard.

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★★★★★ “Simply the Best. Scott your work is outstanding. I love sci-fi now and am especially hooked on these vintage short stories. Quick and easy and so full of character and action. Your narration is pure perfection. Thank you.”
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Vintage science fiction. Professionally narrated. Carefully curated.