The Skull: Restored Classics to Go Edition

Philip K. Dick

Oct 2026 · Otbebookpublishing

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About this ebook

Conger, a hardened hunter and black-market trader, is offered freedom from prison if he will carry out an assassination unlike any other: he must kill a man who has already been dead for two centuries. Taken to the forbidden First Church, he learns that the only clue to his target is a preserved skull and skeleton, and that the mission carries grave political and moral stakes. In a future ruled by fear of the Church's nonviolent Founder, Conger is launched through time in a crystal cage, armed with a strange weapon and a warning that one mistake could alter history forever. Arriving in 1961 Colorado, he struggles to blend in while searching newspapers and records for the Founder's appearance. A tiny notice about an arrest in Cooper Creek finally points him to the crucial date, but his strange clothes and wary manner soon attract suspicion. As he moves through the town, meeting the intriguing Lora and clashing with the jealous Bill, Conger reveals both his outsider's status and his hidden danger. With the Founder's capture only hours away, police close in, and Conger faces a final confrontation in the winter fields, torn between ideology, survival, and the terrible consequences of changing the past. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.

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About the author

Philip K. Dick was an American novelist and short story writer whose restless imagination helped redefine modern science fiction. Born in 1928 and shaped by a life marked by financial hardship, personal loss, and recurring struggles with mental health, he wrote with unusual urgency about the fragility of reality and the pressures of a rapidly changing world. Over a prolific career, he produced a remarkable body of work that earned him lasting recognition as one of the genre's most original voices, and his fiction has influenced literature, film, television, and popular culture far beyond the boundaries of science fiction. Dick's central concerns—identity, perception, paranoia, authoritarian control, artificial intelligence, and the uneasy line between the human and the manufactured—feel even more relevant today in an age of surveillance, disinformation, and technological acceleration. What makes his work endure is not only its inventive premises but its emotional honesty: beneath the strange worlds and destabilized realities lies a deep anxiety about what it means to be real, free, and human. His legacy is that of a writer who anticipated the dilemmas of contemporary life with eerie precision, while also giving readers stories that are provocative, unsettling, and deeply humane. Readers who enjoy philosophical science fiction, psychological suspense, and fiction that challenges certainty will find Philip K. Dick especially rewarding.

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