"Shell Game" is a

science fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel unive ...

short story by American writer

Philip K. Dick Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928March 2, 1982), often referred to by his initials PKD, was an American science fiction writer. He wrote 44 novels and about 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his l ...

. It was submitted to the Scott Meredith Literary Agency and received by SMLA on December 12, 1953. It was published in ''

Galaxy Science Fiction ''Galaxy Science Fiction'' was an American digest-size science fiction magazine, published in Boston from 1950 to 1980. It was founded by a French-Italian company, World Editions, which was looking to break into the American market. World Editi ...

'' in September 1954Levack, Daniel (1981) ''PKD: A Philip K. Dick Bibliography'', Underwood/Miller, p. 124,

Plot summary

A group of paranoid mental patients, long stranded on an alien planet by the shipwreck of the robot-controlled

hospital A hospital is a health care institution providing patient treatment with specialized health science and auxiliary healthcare staff and medical equipment. The best-known type of hospital is the general hospital, which typically has an emerge ...

spaceship transporting them to a mental hospital, believe themselves to be constantly under attack by aliens or other humans. They discover the damaged ship in a bog, and from recorded tapes they learn of their condition and the circumstances of the shipwreck. Even when they discover this evidence of the truth and attempt to verify or disprove the information on the ship's tapes, they construct sophisticated explanations of why the attacks are real despite contrary evidence. After much internal dispute, and sometimes violent conflict, at the end of the story the survivors of the infighting are still unsure whether they are paranoid or victims of a plot. As one of them states, they are like a group of rulers which are all either 12 or 13 inches long, so they have no basis for comparison. The central question of this story is how would people determine whether their judgments are reasonable or unreasonably paranoid when they agree they have evidence that either all or none of them are, in fact, paranoid. This story was later expanded in the novel '' Clans of the Alphane Moon''.

Collection appearances

"Shell Game" appears in the following Philip K. Dick collections: * '' The Book of Philip K. Dick'' (1973) * '' The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol. 3: The Father-Thing'' (1987) * '' The Philip K. Dick Reader'' (1997)

References

External links

*
Shell Game
at the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

1954 short stories Short stories by Philip K. Dick Works originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction Short stories about mental health {{1950s-sf-story-stub