Souvenir by Philip K. Dick Episode #101
Philip K. Dick | September 17, 2023-
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Souvenir by Philip K. Dick Episode #101
Philip K. Dick
SOUVENIR
Episode #101 · Written by Philip K. Dick · Narrated by Scott Miller
When a long-lost human colony is rediscovered, the Galactic Relay expects easy assimilation. But one man’s proud defiance sparks a moral crisis that reaches across the stars.
For centuries, the Galaxy has searched for one lost world—Williamson’s World—the first human colony beyond the Solar System. When it’s finally rediscovered, the Galactic Relay sends Edward Rogers to welcome it back into the fold. But the society he finds is not the backward remnant he expected. Instead, it’s a thriving civilization built on self-sufficiency, artistry, and independence—a culture that has grown apart from the technocratic sameness that rules the rest of mankind.
To Rogers, this refusal to conform is unthinkable. To Gene Williamson and his people, submission would mean the death of their soul. Their quiet world becomes the center of a cosmic argument: is peace worth uniformity, and is survival worth surrendering your identity? The decision made on Williamson’s World—and the devastating order that follows—turns “Souvenir” into one of Philip K. Dick’s most haunting reflections on control, individuality, and the human cost of progress.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Philip K. Dick’s fiction has always lived on the razor’s edge between reality and ideology. From Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to The Minority Report, his stories question what it means to be human in systems that value obedience more than empathy. In “Souvenir,” that question becomes heartbreakingly literal. When peace demands annihilation, Dick shows that even the smallest act of defiance can echo through eternity.
LISTEN TO THE STORY
Listen to Souvenir by Philip K. Dick — a powerful vintage science fiction tale of freedom versus conformity and the terrible cost of preserving galactic peace.
RELATED 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.
- The Father Thing by Philip K. Dick
- James P. Crow by Philip K. Dick
- Upon the Dull Earth by Philip K. Dick
- Beyond the Door by Philip K. Dick
- Survey Team by Philip K. Dick
- Souvenir by Philip K. Dick
- Of Withered Apples by Philip K. Dick
- The Hanging Stranger by Philip K. Dick
- Sales Pitch by Philip K. Dick
- Small Town by Philip K. Dick
- Meddler by Philip K. Dick
- The Skull by Philip K. Dick
- Prominent Author by Philip K. Dick
- The Gun by Philip K. Dick
- The Crawlers by Philip K. Dick
- Adjustment Team by Philip K. Dick
- Progeny by Philip K. Dick
- The Golden Man by Philip K. Dick
- Strange Eden by Philip K. Dick
- Tony and the Beetles by Philip K. Dick
- Breakfast at Twilight by Philip K. Dick
- Beyond Lies the Wub by Philip K. Dick
- Piper in the Woods by Philip K. Dick
- Human Is by Philip K. Dick
- Foster, You're Dead! by Philip K. Dick
- Exhibit Piece by Philip K. Dick
- The Turning Wheel by Philip K. Dick
- The Eyes Have It by Philip K. Dick
- The Black Arts by Philip K. Dick
- Santa's Return by Philip K. Dick
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 34 countries and heard in more than 190 countries, the show has surpassed 3.7 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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Vintage science fiction. Professionally narrated. Carefully curated.
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