Upon the Dull Earth by Philip K. Dick Episode #112
Philip K. Dick | October 5, 2023-
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Upon the Dull Earth by Philip K. Dick Episode #112
Philip K. Dick
UPON THE DULL EARTH
Episode #112 · Written by Philip K. Dick · Narrated by Scott Miller
A young woman believes she can call down divine beings—but her devotion opens a doorway between worlds that should never be crossed. When love tries to bring her back, reality itself begins to unravel.
Few stories capture the raw intersection of love, death, and transcendence like Philip K. Dick’s Upon the Dull Earth. In a world still bound by flesh, young Silvia believes she’s destined for something higher—chosen by luminous beings that descend from another realm when the scent of blood calls to them. To her, they are angels. To Rick, they are something else entirely. When Silvia’s passion outpaces her caution, the veil between life and the beyond tears open, unleashing consequences that ripple across every living soul.
As the story unfolds, Dick transforms a tale of mystical devotion into an apocalyptic vision of love’s destructive persistence. What happens when resurrection goes wrong—when the desire to bring someone back overturns the natural order itself? In Upon the Dull Earth, reality becomes elastic, identity dissolves, and the universe itself bends under the unbearable weight of human longing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) was a master of the metaphysical and the emotional, an author who blurred the boundaries between science fiction and spiritual inquiry. His more than 100 short stories—including The Hanging Stranger, The Crawlers, and Second Variety—revealed a universe that was never stable, always shifting underfoot. With Upon the Dull Earth, he delivers one of his most poetic and devastating meditations on what it means to love someone so deeply that even death becomes negotiable.
LISTEN TO THE STORY
Listen to Upon the Dull Earth by Philip K. Dick — a vintage science fiction tale where love and faith collide in a surreal struggle between life and the divine.
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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