The Father Thing by Philip K. Dick Episode #355
Philip K. Dick | April 2, 2025-
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The Father Thing by Philip K. Dick Episode #355
Philip K. Dick
THE FATHER THING
Episode #355 · Written by Philip K. Dick · Narrated by Scott Miller
A young boy realizes something terrifying has replaced his father. What happens next threatens not just his family, but the very nature of humanity itself.
Dinner is ready—but the man who walks in from the garage isn’t quite the same. His smile looks right. His voice sounds right. Yet something behind those eyes has changed. When young Charles Walton insists that there are two of his father, no one believes him—until it’s too late.
“The Father Thing” is one of Philip K. Dick’s most unnerving and memorable short stories, originally appearing in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine in 1954. What starts as an eerie domestic mystery transforms into a nightmarish confrontation between innocence and invasion. Beneath its creature-feature exterior, Dick explores profound questions: What defines a person? Can something perfectly imitate love, memory, and humanity itself?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
This story bridges two of Dick’s favorite territories—the paranoia of suburban life and the cosmic terror of forces beyond human understanding. Readers will recognize themes that echo through later works like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. The setting may be small—a family home, a dark backyard—but the implications reach across the stars.
Philip K. Dick’s writing career spanned more than three decades, producing over 120 short stories and 44 novels. His explorations of altered states, parallel worlds, and counterfeit realities influenced generations of filmmakers, writers, and philosophers. In “The Father Thing,” he channels that vision into pure, visceral fear: the horror of seeing the familiar become the alien, of realizing that safety can be the most dangerous illusion of all.
LISTEN TO THE STORY
Listen to The Father Thing by Philip K. Dick — a vintage science fiction tale of invasion, identity, and fear within the family. A classic sci-fi masterpiece reborn.
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
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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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