The Skull

By: Philip K. Dick

Narrated by: Mike Vendetti

A man is given the chance to get out of jail, but he must travel back in time and kill a man who has changed the world. His only clue to the identity of this individual is a skull. The man's skull is 200 years old. What if?

Public Domain (P)2013 Audio Books by Mike Vendetti

Great short story

With a surprise. I always like a surprise. Philip Dick never disappoints! The reading of this story is great as well!

Philip Dick

Narrator did great job of this short story. It was my second listen to this book. A permanent keeper.

Great pulp fiction.

I miss writers being able to put out these shorter, thought provoking stories. Nowadays there is such a small market for fiction in general that isn't YA or Romace or Fantasy, so I like to go back and read these older stories to remind myself of what was lost. Now Dick's writing isn't incredible or anything and the 16 year old being described the way she was was creepy, but it is very of its time I guess.

Great old-school sci-fi short story

I enjoyed the story. It was great fun and a quick read. I was torn about how to rate this production, though.

I was thrilled to find this kind of old-school sci-fi available through Audible. And, like I said the story was great. When it started though, I recognised the narrator's voice from the Librivox's production of "Red Badge of Courage". In that audiobook, he mispronounced a word I felt he really should have known (or looked up). It irked me because it yanked me out my immersion in the story. But it was Librivox and free, so it was no biggie.

Just a short way into this Audible book, though, he pronounces “Martian”, “martin”. Add to this the fact that his reading style doesn’t do much for me, and hopefully you will understand why I felt I could only give the narration two stars.

The key reason I switched from free audiobooks on Librivox to paid ones on Audible is quality of the narration. If the quality is not there, I’m left feeling a bit disappointed. Mind you, this story is probably not available on Librivox and also, this story was not very expensive. So, maybe I should just chill a bit...

In the final analysis, I do NOT want to discourage Audible from making these sorts of obscure and/or short classics available. I want to encourage it. That said, someone at Audible should be carefully reviewing these cottage-industry readings to at least check the pronunciation.

(I say “cottage industry” as I see from his website that this narrator has gone into the business of encouraging others to narrate fringe classics in the public domain. In fact, the very next story I listened to, Isaac Asimov's "Living Space" was a result of this effort. Again, the general idea of making these great old stories available is a great one.)

Great old-school short story

I never heard of this PKD story before, It was a super surprise, actually a great old-school short story (I don't want too say to much about the gist of it). Only problem here is a mediocre production, where it seems they skipped a few continuity sentences or paragraphs somehow. The reader's voice is OK for the most part but not great, could be the recording.