The Golden Man (collection)
The Golden Man is a collection of science fiction stories by American writer Philip K. Dick. It was first published by Berkley Books in 1980. The stories had originally appeared in the magazines If, Galaxy Science Fiction, Beyond Fantasy Fiction, Worlds of Tomorrow, Science Fiction Stories, Orbit Science Fiction, Future, Amazing Stories and Fantasy and Science Fiction
 Cover of the first edition | |
| Author | Philip K. Dick |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science fiction |
| Publisher | Berkley Books |
Publication date | 1980 |
| Media type | Print (paperback) |
| Pages | 337 pp |
| ISBN | 0-425-04288-X |
| OCLC | 6687762 |
Contents
- Foreword, by Mark Hurst
- Introduction, by Philip K. Dick
- "The Golden Man" (1954)
- "Return Match" (1967)
- "The King of the Elves" (1953)
- "The Mold of Yancy" (1955)
- "Not By Its Cover" (1968)
- "The Little Black Box" (1964)
- "The Unreconstructed M" (1957)
- "The War with the Fnools" (1964)
- "The Last of the Masters" (1954)
- "Meddler" (1954)
- "A Game of Unchance" (1964)
- "Sales Pitch" (1954)
- "Precious Artifact" (1964)
- "Small Town" (1954)
- "The Pre-persons" (1974)
- Story Notes
- Afterword
Reception
Thomas M. Disch reported that the collection included a wide range of work, from some of Dick's best to outright "turkeys", concluding "Dick is of that stature where even his failures merit publication." [1]
gollark: ... no.
gollark: Thus bad.
gollark: It does NOT allow random access.
gollark: Hmm, so, designoidal idea:- files have the following metadata: filename, last modified time, maybe permissions (I may not actually need this), size, checksum, flags (in case I need this later; probably just compression format?)- each version of a file in an archive has this metadata in front of it- when all the files in some set of data are archived, a header gets written to the end with all the file metadata plus positions- when backup is rerun, the system™️ just checks the last modified time of everything and sees if its local copies are newer, and if so appends them to the end; when it is done a new header is added containing all the files- when a backup needs to be extracted, it just reads the end, finds the latest versions and decompresses stuff at the right offsetThere are some important considerations here: it should be able to deal with damaged/partial files, encryption would be nice to have (it would probably work to just run it through authenticated AES-whatever when writing), adding new files shouldn't require tons of seeking, and it might be necessary to store backups on FAT32 disks so maybe it needs to be able of using multiple files somehow.
gollark: I have been pondering an osmarksarchiveformat™ because I dislike the existing ones somewhat. Specifically for backups and append-only-ish access. Thusly, thoughts on the design (crossposted from old esolangs)?
References
- "Books -- 1979: Fluff and Fizzles", F&SF, July 1980
- "Internet Speculative Fiction Database". Retrieved 2008-01-10.
- Brown, Charles N.; William G. Contento. "The Locus Index to Science Fiction (1984-1998)". Archived from the original on 2008-01-06. Retrieved 2008-01-10.
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