Rating: 4* of five, rounded down a half-star for a few head-scratchers in the story

Available as a free download on The Internet Archive.

A wonderful indictment of mindless end-stage capitalism, this. The autofacs are destroying the Earth because they're programmed to produce goods for humans while the humans are busy destroying each other, and the autofacs aren't programmed to stop producing until ordinary human-led production is up to capacity to replace their output.

But there aren't enough people left after the war to produce goods. So the autofacs keep producing. And they've ravaged the planet, extracted *all* the resources, and are on the brink of a crisis.

Enter some human chauvinist survivors, people living on the autofacs' deliveries but longing to remake their own means of production. How? First, stop the autofacs from tunneling the Earth into a honeycomb as the automated resource locators locate more resources to make into things. They figure out how to do this by making the machines that control everything stop to figure out what the word "pizzled" means. Machine language skills are dependent upon examples and usages to interpret human wishes, so "pizzled"—a word invented on the spot—is guaranteed to stop the low-level machines in their tracks and get the problem of figuring out what's wrong to the higher-ups.

Bureaucracy/hierarchy is eternal and not species dependent.

This plot succeeds and, using the information they extrapolate from this success, the human chauvinists figure out a way to Stop The Autofacs!! And it WORKS!! But the basic question they've failed to devise an answer for is, "Now what?"

I liked the story, and have spent this much time and effort creating a book report on it, because like most of PKD's work it leaves the reader with more questions than answers. That's why I started reading his stuff long ago, and why I was willing to take up with his ouevre after a decades-long hiatus. Amazon is using some of its ungodly billions to autofac...I mean create...screen-based entertainments rooted in PKD's storytelling. Two of PKD's daughters are exec-producing a show called Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams, and this story is an episode of that series.

The episode refocuses the stakes of the story in a major, major way that I can't discuss without spoilers. The episode also modernizes the manner in which Autofac, transmogrified from a descrptive term for a technological artifact into a corporate name, is hacked and what the consequences of the Big Reveal are constitute the major reorientation of the concerns of society. Consumption is still the problem, though the reasons it's a problem have shifted. For that reason, I'd give the episode an extra half-star over the source material.

I'd buttress that half-star addition with a major change that I like a lot: A woman is the center of the episode's story, and for a very significant reason. Contrast this with the role of the only woman in PKD's story, wife of one of the human chauvinists, who serves coffee and asks Mary Sue questions, which are answered condescendingly by any male around. In one of the story's illustrations in Galaxy Magazine's November 1955 edition, in fact, the woman is depicted lying in the dirt between two men, watching something unfold beneath them, IN. A. SKIRT. that's modestly covering her knees.

Ha. Ha ha. Clearly the artist has never worn a skirt. How the hell would she have gotten down on her belly in the dirt bound up by one of those things? And more to the point, how the hell would she get back up? And WHY would she wear one of those impractical items in a post-apocalyptic world when trousers are vastly more practical?

Also agreeably different in the filmed version is the inclusion of sex. As in, the female lead gets some sex and the focus is on the attractive man sexing her up to her liking. In a radical departure from previous norms, the attractive young man stays naked after the sex scene, is lingered over by the camera, and is emotionally needy of the woman's love and approval in the afterglow. He even says The Big Three to her! First!

I love this. It's about goddamned time. If for no other reason that it points up in a quiet, even positive, way the conventional tropes and their ubiquity without nastiness or negativity. Well done, producers and writers, well played, actors, and say Hallelujah, consumers! We're finally, in small first-steps ways, seeing the positive effects of the unleashed anger of a generation of mad-as-hell women. Don't take it anymore, keep reframing the conversation, and leave more questions than answers. Growth will happen. ( )