War Veteran

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War Veteran is a science fiction short story by Philip K. Dick. First published in If magazine in March 1955.

The plot concerns an old man who appears to have travelled back in time from a future in which Earth has lost a devastating war to its own Martian and Venusian colonies. The man turns out to be a synthetic human, designed to trick the Earth people into believing they could never win the war, forcing them to make peace. The android of the story is a forerunner of the kind (named replicant in the film Blade Runner) that appears in Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

This story shows how pent up racial tension is a dangerous tool. And as always with Dick, not everything is what it seems to be.

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