The Gun

By: Philip K. Dick

Narrated by: Chris Lutkin

In "The Gun", a group of space explorers are shot down above a deserted planet. While some of the crew work on repairing the ship, the remainder set out to investigate the planet. Otherwise unpopulated, they discover the huge gun that shot them down sitting atop a trove of cultural artifacts from a bygone civilization. What harm could come of dismantling the gun and taking a few of the artifacts home with them?

Public Domain (P)2017 Dreamscape Media, LLC

Good story if you stop immediately after the ship leaves

I'd give the first 95% of this story 4 or even 4.5 stars and the last 5% -1 star. If you'll take my advice, either stop reading immediately after the ship takes off, or declare that everything after that point is not part of the story.

Like I said, this story was pretty cool right up until the very end, when it suddenly veered into hopelessness. PKD's usual "war bad. humans doomed if no stop war" was there, but it was tolerable. Right up until the moment the ship takes off, the story was building to a hopeful and poignant conclusion. Then PKD kept on writing and it all went wrong.

It also had a weird mix of progressive and regressive elements - on the one hand, the vice captain is a woman (a leap forward for the time when this was written, I think). On the other hand, she doesn't want to be in charge and declares one of the men as her mate so he can take over. Not sure why the author even bothered to make the vice captain a woman, unless that was all the progress he thought he could get away with. The fact I've gone on so long about it should tell you how distracting it was.

p.s. the narrator was great