Lies, Inc.

The Unteleported Man began as a story written for Fantastic magazine in 1964, commissioned to fit an existing cover painting. Dick delivered around forty thousand words, the maximum the magazine would accept, and the piece appeared in the December 1964 issue. Don Wollheim at Ace Books then asked Dick to expand it into a novel, and Dick produced additional material in 1965. Wollheim rejected the expansion and published only the original shorter version, as one half of an Ace Double, in 1966.

The novel is set in an overpopulated future Earth where a corporation called Trails of Hoffman Limited offers one-way teleportation to a colony world called Whale's Mouth, promoted as a verdant paradise. Some forty million people have already emigrated. Rachmael ben Applebaum, whose interstellar shipping company has been made obsolete by the Telpor technology, suspects the colony is not what it is advertised to be, and sets out on an eighteen-year voyage to find out. What he finds, and what happens to him in the harrowing expanded sections of the novel, involves an LSD-tipped dart, a hundred-page hallucinatory sequence, and a military dictatorship operating behind the colonial façade. The corporate entity responsible for managing public information is called Lies Incorporated, which also serves as the novel's eventual title.

Dick spent years attempting to bring the expanded version into print. In 1979 he retrieved his 1965 manuscript from the California State University Fullerton library, where he had deposited his papers, rewrote the opening chapters, and retitled the book Lies, Inc. He found that four pages were missing from three places in the manuscript and wrote bridging material, but never finished the revisions before his death in 1982.

In 1983, Berkley Books published a posthumous expanded edition under the original title, incorporating the 1965 material but without Dick's 1979 revisions or his new title. The Berkley edition promoted itself as the "uncensored" version, a description Dick himself had encouraged even though it was somewhat misleading.

The following year, Gollancz published the book in Britain as Lies, Inc., incorporating Dick's 1979 revisions and new opening chapters, but the missing manuscript pages remained a problem. Gollancz commissioned science fiction writer John Sladek to write connective material to bridge two of the three gaps. In 1985, Dick's literary executor Paul Williams found the missing pages at Fullerton, filed in a box of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? manuscripts. They were published in the Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter that year. The 2004 Vintage Books edition of Lies, Inc. was the first American publication under that title and the first to incorporate the recovered pages, along with an afterword by Williams recounting the full history.

Each edition represents a distinct stage in a long, complicated process of the book finding its intended form.