Philip K Dick's "The Father-Thing"

It is remarkable how effective three young boys, two preteen and one early teen, were able to destroy the father-thing and the charles-thing. i feel that the ease came from the fact that they identified one of the alien life forms as a metallic millipede and the other alien life forms as mushrooms and cocoons. Because the aliens looked just like things they were already familiar with, these boys seemed to already know the way to rid of them, "We Daniels always used kerosene on our mosquitoes, back in Virginia" (110). This is significant because if the aliens did not look like anything they have seen before, the kids would not know what to do at all. it is this familiarity that empowered these kids to take charge and take care of business without the help of adults. This is the "what if?" of the sci-fi genre. what if the aliens took on an appearance that was ghastly, something out of the ordinary, something they cannot categorize? their bb guns and matches would seem useless at that point. without identifying their enemy, they cannot find a means to bring it down. at the same time, these alien life forms, when matured, take on an appearance of exact resemblance to certain humans. it is dehumanizing to see that a human form can be derived from a pest one might find in a garden. Dick continues to play with the idea of humanizing non-human life forms, and in a sense, juxtaposing qualities that each version possess and express. it is eerie that the father thing was learning how to fill the role of charles' father, and charles acknowledged the alien's acclimation on pages 104 and 105. it is eerie in that human behavior can be "learned" and reenacted as easily as the original human being could be discarded. it takes the value of a human life and obliterates it so that all there is left is a body, a tool controlled by something other than the soul that was once there.