Product Description
San Francisco lies under a cloud of radioactive dust. People live in half-deserted apartment buildings, and keep electric animals as pets because so many real animals have died. Most people emigrate to Mars - unless they have a job to do on Earth. Like Rick Deckard - android killer for the police and owner of an electric sheep. This week he has to find, identify, and kill six androids which have escaped from Mars. They're machines, but they look and sound and think like humans - clever, dangerous humans. They will be hard to kill. The filmBlade Runner was based on this famous novel. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (243)

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
America's Galactic Foreign Legion - Book 1: Feeling Lucky

I am a fan of the clasic movie:"Blade Runner."But forget that!Do not read this book expecting to just read a version of the movie.Just read for the enjoyment of great science fiction.

Not bad, but failed to really pull me in
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is one of those rare works where the movie that is based on the book (Blade Runner) is actually better than the book. This book is decent enough, but it never really pulled me in.

The world is in a post-apocalyptic state as a result of a nuclear war. Many animals have become extinct or are rare so just owning one is highly desirable, not just because of the rarity but also because of the emotional attachment. Some humans, like the protagonist Rick Deckard, have problems affording a real animal so they go for an electrical equivalent, but owning one (if you're found out) is frowned upon and worse yet there's no real emotional attachment between the animal and human. Able-humans are encouraged to emigrate off of Earth, though some refuse. The promise if you emigrate is that you will receive an 'andy' or android robot. Some andy's are emigrating back to Earth because they no longer want to serve humans. The problem is they are very hard to tell apart from humans so bounty hunters like Rick Deckard make it a mission to 'retire' them. Deckard is awarded $1,000.00 for each retired andy. The most reliable way to distinguish humans from andys is to administer the 'Voight-Kampff' test, which tests empathy. Since andy's aren't humans their empathetic readings differ. Retiring andy's starts to become a moral issue for Deckard.

This is all a great setup and right in the beginning I was hooked. The problem is that this book starts with a bang, but it quickly fizzles into somewhat weak prose. I never felt attached to any of the characters and many of the moments that were supposed to be exciting, including the climax of the book, just fell flat for me. It was like going to Denny's when you're craving a real steak dinner. Sure, it might be edible and taste fine enough, but it just doesn't 'hit the spot'.

This is a breeze of a book and it's certainly not terrible, it just wasn't wholey satisfying for me. I still recommend checking it out.

Wrong Book
Frankly, I find it freakish that the one version of this novel available on Amazon is not written by Philip K. Dick, though it appears to be.The original is spectacular; however, this re-written version by Andy Hopkins and Joc Potter is a watered down, sanitized, ersatz-version of the original. And by the way--it is extremely hard to tell that this is NOT the original version.Philip K. Dick, however, would probably belch a dark laugh at the irony.

Yech!!!
I absolutely hated this book.It was just a little too weird for my tastes.I'm more of a traditional Heinlein, Asimov, H.G Wells fan and I just didn't get it.I know it is a popular book, I just can't understand why.

Great Ideas, Poor Prose
"On his way to work Rick Deckard, as Lord knew how many other people, stopped briefly to skulk about one of San Francisco's larger pet shops, along animal row."

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a Science Fiction classic, the inspiration for Blade Runner, and sports one of the best written blurbs I've ever read. The good ideas don't stop on the back cover. The book tackles several interesting themes and presents a whole host of unique, and well integrated, ideas. Despite all this, Do Androids... fails to live up to its reputation.

The book's cornerstones are the androids and the concept of empathy. As more and more realistic androids are built, it becomes almost impossible to distinguish them from humans. On almost all levels, intellectual, emotional, etc, they conform perfectly to the norm. The humans still on earth are terrified by this. What if, one day, there is an android so advanced that no test, no matter how intricate, can separate them from people? How will they be hunted down, kept separate and subjugated? More importantly - for the reader, if not for the police organizations of future earth - how can we justify hunting down and killing something that is the same as us save for its manner of birth?

Ironically for a book so focused on empathy, where Do Androids... falls short is the prose's ability to convey emotion. Put simply, the text conveys none at all; everything is conveyed in the same listless monotone. Let's imagine a standard metal song, beginning with an acoustic intro. After a minute or two of the introduction, the electric guitar comes in and the feel of the song completely changes. We go from atmospheric and quiet to loud and aggressive. Do Androids... is the equivalent of the entire song played by the acoustic. Yes, the notes are the same, but the feeling's totally changed; it's no longer dynamic in the slightest.

This fundamental lack of vibrancy, of change, in the text hampers it in many ways. Fight scenes and climaxes are both stripped of their power:

"'Why won't my laser tube fire?' [The Android] said, switching on and off the miniaturized triggering and aiming device which he held in the palm of his hand.

'A sine wave,' Rick said. 'That phases out laser emanation and spreads the beam into ordinary light.'

'Then I'll have to break your pencil neck.' The android dropped the device and, with a snarl, grabbed with both hands for Rick's throat.

As the android's hands sank into his throat, Rick fired his regulation issue old-style pistol from its shoulder holster; the .38 magnum slug struck the android in the head and its brain box burst. The Nexus-6 unit which operated it blew into pieces, a raging, mad wind which carried throughout the car. Bits of it, like the radioactive dust itself, whirled down on Rick. The retired remains of the android rocked back, collided with the car door, bounced off, and struck heavily against him; he found himself struggling to shove the twitching remnants of the android away."

The above is supposed to be a thrilling moment, a betrayal, an abrupt ambush-like action scene, and yet the explanatory dialogue dulls the effect entirely. Deckard's reaction to having a gun pointed at him is to explain the precise mechanics preventing his skull from decorating the car door. In addition, the entire affair is over before it can begin. When, after the lackluster opening ripostes are exchanged, the fight begins in earnest, there's barely a paragraph of the android's execution; there isn't time for even the most involved of readers to detect even the faintest whiff of danger before said danger's dispatched, a process matched only in speed by the writing's desire to meander about explaining the cranial anatomy of androids. In this manner, almost all of the book's climaxes are disposed of, after pages of buildup, as a vague flash in the rear view mirror and with the faintest feeling of: that's it?

Worse, the reader is prevented from ever identifying with Deckard at all, not just when he's in mortal danger. Deckard's relationships never draw us in, we never get to develop our own feelings for any of the character's, and we don't truly get to share Deckard's, leaving us with just the shallow knowledge of his physical and verbal response to those around him. As a result, the conflicts of interests, and what should have been the validation of all the novel's themes, falls almost wholly flat.

Furthermore, moving past the prose, there're instances where things seem to be done in order to augment a certain theme, or just for convenience, when it's hard to think of a rational reason for them to be done that way. For instance, there are several companies that make androids. Everyone who goes to Mars - and everyone who isn't dirt poor goes - gets a free android. So, if the demand is on Mars (it is, in fact, illegal to be an android running around on earth), and the companies are rich enough to go (they're described as, essentially, swimming in money), why the hell are they still on earth? In addition, partway through the novel, Deckard stumbles onto a nest of androids. In the middle of the nest is a single human. The man's existence eventually leads to a thematic coup de grace, but I'm unable to think of a single reason for him to be there at all.

Amazingly enough, almost none of these flaws exist when the point of view switches over to John Isidore, a mentally crippled "Chickenhead." Contrary to in Deckard's sections (where any semblance of emotion is subtle-ized itself right out of existence), Isidore's moods are painted in broad brushes. The effect can occasionally be comic, but amidst the overacting the character gained my sympathy in a way that no one else in the book came even close to matching. I guess I'm a bigger fan of melodrama than I am of blank stares.

Perhaps a part of my liking for Isidore comes from his job as an ambulance driver for an electric animal company. The obsession with animals was by far my favorite aspect of Dick's work; it showcases the changes to earth perfectly. The most interesting portion of the entire novel comes from a discussion of the merits of real and mechanical cats.

Approaching the question raised between humans and androids in a totally different way, Dick makes us look a bit closer at our own empathy. The majority of the technology is of a similar vein, seamlessly integrated and fascinating. Perhaps chief among them is the Penfield Mood Organ, a device that dictates your mood upon the dials you push. All of these devices are treated so irreverently by the characters that it often takes several seconds to realize that we don't (yet) have real world equivalents, and all of them are thematically charged to an impressive degree.

Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a novel that I failed to connect with on any meaningful level. That being said, it's not a novel that I could advise someone to not read. The book has enough interesting ideas that I can easily see why it's considered such a classic...it's just a pity that those ideas are so let down by the prose. ... Read more

Product Description
What if God were alive and in exile on a distant planet? And what if He wanted to come back? This is the unsettling and exhilirating premise of The Divine Invasion, the second novel in the trilogy that includes Valis and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (35)

A fairly tedious look at God, belief, and Reality
God needs to invade the Earth from outer space in this bizarre bit of theological fantasy from sci-fi legend Philip K. Dick.Herb Asher is the putative father whose obsession with songstress Linda Fox is interrupted by Divine Intervention.Elias Tate aids in bringing Emmanuel to Earth after his off-world immaculate conception.Earth's government fears Emmanuel is a monster from outer space who will destroy the human race, or at least the current theocracy.As Emmanuel grows, his confidante Zina engages him in seemingly endless discussions about the nature of God, belief, and Reality.Perhaps not as detachedly intellectual as "Valis" but certainly not one of Dick's better stories.

Book Two of the Trilogy
The Divine Invasion is the second book of PDK's religious trilogy, and the most typical of his style.Twisting plots and subplots abound, and characters who are unforgettable conspire to smuggle God (that's right) back to Earth, from where he has been exiled.You don't have to read Valis to understand this book, but it doesn't hurt.An amazing tour de force from one of science fiction's masters.

Passionate gumbo of Christianity and Jewish mysticism
This is a bewildering book to comprehend let alone comment upon. It combines arcane mysticism, autobiographic asides and a convoluted, almost incomprehensible plot. Needless to say I liked it and would recommend it to readers who, perhaps, have read some of Dick's earlier works and dismissed him as a shallow hack.

In my opinion the "Divine Invasion" is a borderline novel heavily layered with the author's theological conjectures. I found the mixing of metaphysical digressions, almost mini-essays, salted within the story narrative to be facinating - even if some of his observations were inscrutable. His theology is a passionate gumbo of Christianity and Jewish mysticism. It is sure to disconcert the true believer and baffle the rest of us.

Many of the story's plot fundamentals just don't make sense. This seems to be a characteristic of many of Dick's later novels. I suspect the author is ridiculing the conventions imposed upon him by editors when he was writing "hard" science fiction stories early in his career.

Dick includes several digressions that are purely of an autobiographical nature. Like his character Herb Asher, Dick had a troubled marriage, worked in a record store, liked classical music, audio equipment, heard voices and saw visions. It would be unwise to speculate what Dick's mental or emotional state was when he wrote this book. Although I occasionally felt like I was reading notes from a therapy journal.

At times one has the sense that Dick used this book to work out his personal conjectures regarding End Times, the Second Coming and the conflict between Good and Evil.Near the end of the book Elias, Herb Asher's business partner in the music store tells Herb, "Maybe you have a message to deliver to the world from God." Perhaps Phil Dick was an imperfect messanger.

God plays with the universe
Even for a master of the imagination like Philip K. Dick, casting God as the protagonist of a novel requires some audacity.Turning God into a 10-year-old boy with brain damage who doesn't quite remember that he's God - well, it makes sense that PKD took an interest in Judaism at about the time he wrote this book.We Jews have always had a habit of bothering the Creator something fierce.

Of course, odd as it is, the fact that God finds himself in this fix is not a joke.The divine invasion of the title has to do with the fact that the human main character, Herb Asher, finds himself accompanying a dying pregnant woman (whom he has married to provide her with protection) and the latest form of the prophet Elijah from a distant planet to Earth, against the wishes of the monolithic religious rulership of the whole planet.Why?Because the pregnant woman's unborn child is God, returning from a 2,000-year exile in a form that the world government, unwittingly in the thrall of evil, would never recognize.Some invasion.

Well, it actually comes off, sort of.God in child form reaches Earth safely and prepares for the final battle against evil.To improve his disguise, though, he has caused himself to forget a great deal.He has accomplished this by subjecting himself to a car accident while still in vitro, leading to brain damage and the death of his mother.He has also provided himself with a number of reminders that will eventually restore him to his full Godhead.Then again, these reminders turn out to have their own ideas.Herb Asher finds himself in the middle of a war where the combatants can hardly see each other, with the fate of the entire universe at stake.

So God, in the form of a brain-damaged child accompanied by his non-father and a 2,000-year-old prophet, arrays himself against the full force of the Earth's government, all of it under the control of cosmic evil.You do the math.

Pretty dramatic setup, which in previous years PKD would doubtless have milked for as much weirdness as it would hold.It seems perfect for one of his hundred-charactered paranoid fantasies, full of interstellar worms or telepathic slimes."The Divine Invasion" cuts a little closer to the bone.It's part of the so-called "VALIS trilogy," and spends a good many pages considering the possibility that God finds himself literally in a life or death struggle with evil on Earth, and could actually lose.As someone raised with the idea of an all-powerful God who can do exactly as he pleases, I find this notion rather confusing, but it's more convincing than a 30-ton monstrosity who grants you salvation by devouring you, say.(Yeah, PKD wrote a book about that, too.)

Until about halfway in, the narrative follows Herb Asher for most of its length.Herb's a good guy with the usual human flaws, such as a reluctance to do the right thing if it's difficult or dangerous.Once he finds himself pulled into this battle for the universe, though, he does okay.This is therefore the story of a hero, and well worth reading, but next thing you know the focus changes.The brain-damaged child who is God finds himself arguing over the nature of reality with a mysterious young girl named Zina, and the two of them start to use Herb as a sort of human chessman to prove their various points.Herb's actions become far less critical as a result.Philosophically interesting, but it feels like a bid on PKD's part for something less "in your face" than what came before.It's one of the few times I can recall that this author flinched.

Eventually, the focus returns to Herb and the plot takes off again, but the damage has already been done - the character no longer acts on his own behalf, but is acted upon.Does not leave a whole lot of room for spontaneity, to say the least, a serious weakness in a novel's protagonist.Nevertheless, he does have one more important decision to make, and that where the story gets its power back.It's only ten or fifteen pages from the end, but better late than never.

So much for "The Divine Invasion" itself.Let's consider it as the second volume of the so-called "VALIS trilogy".It's not a sequel in the true sense of the word, but it does consider some of the same issues and in a similar fashion.Both books (and to a lesser extent "The Transmigration of Timothy Archer") tell us that God is on the run, and by some means can contact a few humans here and there to help him in the battle against evil.These people, in addition to being outnumbered, carry also the stigma of being viewed as mentally unstable, for the excellent reason that they think God speaks to them.Talk about your Catch-22's.

In other words, "VALIS" and "The Divine Invasion" (and to a lesser extent "The Transmigration of Timothy Archer") attempt to address the problem of evil not as a philosophical issue, but as it directly impacts everyday people like you and me.Not many popular authors of sf adventure stories even considered that as a possibility before PKD came along.And the good news is that at the close of "The Divine Invasion", he actually came up with a hopeful message.Turns out there's a way for an ordinary, solitary human to give God a hand in the eternal struggle for the soul.I won't go into details, but it has nothing to do with saving the world.Which is mighty good news, since very few of us are Jesus Christ.According to PKD, we're good enough for the job anyway.

Benshlomo says, God needs partners.

Unique late PKD
It's hard to describe this book-- Gnostic SF? It's not conventional SF and likely won't please "Bladerunner"/ "Minority Report" fans, but it is delightful. PKD was in a very special state of mind when he wrote this book. He was searching for the meaning of his pink light revelations. Some of the passages are really mind expanding. Not quite as good as "Valis", but still brilliant. I wish PKD had lived longer. ... Read more

Product Description
VALIS, the disorienting and eeerily funny centerpiece of Dick's final trilogy, is part science fiction, part theological detective story, in which God is both missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate crime.Amazon.com Review
The first of Dick's three final novels (the others are Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of TimothyArcher).Known as science fiction only for lack of a better category,"Valis" takes place in our world and may even be semi-autobiographical.

The proponentof the novel, Horselover Fat, is thrust into a theological quest when hereceives communion in a burst of pink laser light.From the cancer ward ofa bay area hospital to the ranch of a fraudulent charismatic religiousfigure who turns out to have a direct com link with God, Dick leads us downthe twisted paths of Gnostic belief, mixed with his own bizarre andcompelling philosophy. Truly an eye opening look at the nature ofconsciousness and divinity. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (105)

The REAL meaning of VALIS
This book is about, not drugs or codependency or cancer, but nothing less than Dick's search for spiritual meaning in an irrational universe--and the grief he experiences when finding and losing it--and everything else, including the salvation of the universe.

Philip K. Dick's character is schizoid--he refers to himself as Horselover Fat throughout the book--until he is reintegrated later in the book by no less than Christ returned. The schizoid device is genius. It enables him to maintain a distance from the main character, Horselover, in order to provide commentary on his insanity and further descent into his own self-immolation and tragic life while enabling the reader to follow the quite logical spiritual quest he has undertaken.

As a spiritual person who has a deep understanding of cosmology, cosmogonies, and world myths, Dick is years ahead of his time, as usual, and has it all down through careful reading of esoteric texts and meditation on their meanings and interconnections. His notion that the Creator God is insane and jealous is the conclusion that many theologians have come to on their own since the publication of this book. Further, his position that we are in a black iron prison that eludes our senses and that the early Christians have negated for themselves coexists nicely with the notion that we are all deprived of memory of our true nature (another interpretation of the black iron prison) and that one of our missions in life is to remember our true identities. Lastly, his supposition that time will stop when his notion of a healthy force in the universe, in the end times, brings light and rationality to the black iron prison, freeing us all from the sick machinations of the Creator God is in line with the current thinking that we are in those end times and that we will soon be ascending (or descending) into a new reality, one free of misery, suffering, and, of course, irrationality.

In short, this book is for readers who can stomach the depressing decline of Dick into institutions and self-destruction, his complete redemption and reintegration at the ministrations of Christ, and his ultimate descent into his own delusions after her loss and the ultimate descent of the universe into an unknowable, unseen, eternal sentence into irrationality and evil.

Skip this book at your own peril.

Intersting ideas, just connected poorly
Ok, so, Im not familiar with Philip K. Dick outside of seeing, A Scanner Darkly. I picked this book because it was featured on Lost, and I thought, well, why not?

So I read it.

Its a short book, but for some reason it took me three weeks to plow through it. I was fairly open to the names(Horselover Fat...?)and the concept. I liked some of the ideas and characters which contrasted each other. I loved the beginning, and the entire bit about how when one tries to save someone, theyre really the ones who are in self destructive mode. I loved the concept post Gloria's death, and Sherry's bout with self pity. I loved Kevin the cynic and his theory as to why his cat died, and I loved the ending wrap-up which answers his question and really solidifies his beliefs which is similar to my own. For what its worth, Dick really dives into the meat of religion, and people, and why everything happens and presents a decent argument which is ruined by the in-betweens that sound like the product of a really long acid trip.

What I didnt get was the middle part about Mother Goose, the manifest, the pink light, the talk about fictional people tied to century old teories, jumbled with, and awkwardy connected to a pink light which transfers information exclusively to the chosen ones via sattelite, or a little girl who is God, or Krishna, or a program designed to answer questions and whisk away multiple personality disorders via tubes and sattlites, and...What?

I dont know.

And dont ask me, but when I finished this book, what I got was that this was really one giant acid trip in California shared by out of luck, out of work dudes with too much time and money on their hands.

And thats the end of that.

Not as good as you might think
I have read many books like this and it really isn't that good. Dick tries to hard to be funny and metaphysical at the same time. Probably a good book if you're a college student or just getting into examining your "self" and the universe, but believ me there are better books.His writing is an easy read though.

Book One of the Trilogy
Valis is addictive but strangely alienating to read.PDK's alter ego Horselover Fat spends most of his time in endless documentation of sci-fi/religious analysis, and the plot is very, very difficult to summarize.If you like PDK, you may not necessarily like this.But, as I said, I couldn't put it down.

Basically the greatest book ever written
Call me a fool, that's fine.I love Philip K Dick's entire catalogue.But Valis is my absolute favorite (with Radio Free Ablemuth a close 2nd) perhaps it's because of my personal life when I read it the first time.I had been reading Dick for years and somehow never read Valis until college.I can honestly say that this was one of the few books that ever changed my life, I've read dozens of times.If you don't get that's your problem! ... Read more

Product Description
Stunningly plausible in its portrayal of a neo-fascist America, where everyone informs on everyone else, this Orwellian novel bores deeply into the bedrock of the self--and plants dynamite at its center. "Fifty or a hundred years from now, (Dick's) world will stand alone on its own terms."--Norman Spinrad. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (71)

Enthralled
I found the book completely enjoyable. Dick's writing style is colorful, imaginative, and easy to follow. I enjoyed everything about the book except for the crux upon which the plot resided, which was this mystery drug. It was handled so quick, in such a spurious fashion, and the descriptives of it left me dazed.In short, it was extremely contrived and was very disappointing. So, 5 stars for everything else, but the thing that made the rest of the story possible was just plain lame.

Despite that, I do recommend this book.

Philip Dick, unforgettable
I'll be short. Each novel by Philip Dick is amazing to me. I just keep looking for other books by him. This one has been the last one I've read. I'm already looking for others. I really recommend it, and the author also.

Very strange book
The first book I've ever read by Phillip K Dick, although I've seen a bunch of movies based on his books (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly). The story starts off describing the life of a major celebrity and his lifestyle - casual sex partners from Hollywood hills, romps in Venice, drug indulgences and plenty of crazy, surrealistic living - before his life becomes surrealistic itself. He manages to cope with a descent into anonymity and all sorts of quirky escape-the-cops-with-the-weird-stranger-who-just-befriended-you action in it that we've now gotten used to. Yeah, right.

At the end, there's an odd, cowardly encounter with the policeman of the title, and then some sort of crazy "ten years after, this is where the story's proponents ended up" sort of thing.

Riveting Account of the Nature of Reality and Humanity
Dick's reputation has grown since his death in 1982, as reflected by the release of several movies based on his books (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and others).There have even been a few retrospectives about him published in the New York Times.Apparently, he was a cult science fiction author who wanted, but never received (at least during his lifetime), literary recognition.

Although this book is never ranked among his best, I was favorably impressed.Science fiction as a genre has literary merit because it allows a writer like Dick to grapple in a compelling way with the most fundamental themes: what does it mean to be human?; what is reality?; where does free will end and determinism take over?; what is man's fate?In this book, Dick struggles mostly with the first two issues.

The book's premise is a celebrity's sudden loss of his identity.No one knows who he is and he has no identification or any record of ever having existed.In the dystopia imagined by Dick back in 1974, with some eery similarities to the present day, documented identity is everything and identity theft or loss is a catastrophe.

I would say that the celebrity hero -- Jason Taverner -- discovers that identity is both everything and nothing at all.He is devastated by his loss of identity, but he is a deeply unhappy man who is no better off with his identity.The identity and celebrity are required to survive and prosper in the police state, but Taverner discovers that they do not make him happy.By the end of the book, he begins to interact with others in a more positive and "human" fashion.

Taverner's police adversary -- Police General Buckman -- also becomes dissatisfied with his own reality and with his ability to manipulate, create, and master that reality for his own purposes.

The Police General's sister is an extraordinary character who creates and manipulates realities, but in a way that does not redeem her.

The book suffers from two major flaws.First, it should have ended before the epilogue.The epilogue is wholly unsatisfactory and seems to undercut everything the rest of the book sought to establish.The fundamental premise of the book is the ruthless power of the police state assisted by modern technology that chrushes the individual; the epilogue seems to contradict this.

Second, the dialogue is not well written.In fact, I was tempted to put the book down after reading the first several pages.But stick with it.Once Dick gets into the meat of his subject -- the nature of reality, paranoia, the individual versus the state, and the future dystopia -- he is a master.He never quite gets the dialogue right, but he can tell a story that requires the reader to confront first principles.

What Maketh The Man?
Philip K Dick was an unusual science fiction writer in that, while he tended to write in (usually dystopian) alternative universes, the "space opera" aspect - the act of universe creation (which so obsessed JRR Tolkien, for example) isn't what interests him. If Star Wars was the ultimate piece of fantasy escapism, with a ludicrous morality play veneer thrown in for an emotional punch at the end, then Dick's works tend to exist at the other end of the spectrum: the world is described incidentally, the ingenious devices and drugs are means of locomoting and teasing out the existential questions they pose for his characters. There is always little bit of scientific hocus pocus thrown in, but never for the sake of it: always as a means to crystallising Dick's character theme.

So Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? isn't, really, a futuristic gumshoe PI noir about killing replicants (though it functions pretty well on that level) but an examination of what really makes us human; what *is* empathy; and what consequences would there be for the way we relate to each other if we could achieve it artificially? And here, in Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, Dick ruminates on identity - what am *I*, if not a collection of relationships, impulses and memories in other people's minds? - and reality - what, when it comes to it, is the world itself, if not a collection of relations, impulses and memories in *my* brain?

What if we really could alter brains to change these things - how would that alter the way we see ourselves and the world? How, given the limitations of the above view, do we know we cannot?These are big themes, not the sort of thing that science fiction, in the main, handles awfully well. But because Philip Dick is so concerned with his characters, all of whom feel real, human, fallible and contrary - that is, they react in ways we can relate to - it is easy to forget this is a science fiction book at all (it is a matter of record that Dick despaired of his pigeonholing as a writer of pulp fiction).

Flow My Tears is characteristic of Philip Dick in other respects (not the least its idiosyncratic title!). As in Ubik, the The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and A Scanner Darkly, narcotics - Dick's equivalent of the red and blue pills from Alice In Wonderland - play a significant role, and his paranoia, by 1974 well documented and approaching the psychotic, is well on display. Dick tended to portray his futures as governed by dystopian states not out of political disposition or dramatic impetus but, I suspect, because he genuinely believed that's where the world was inevitably headed. (And he was right!!)

Flow My Tears isn't a perfect novel: the motivations of secondary characters aren't always easy to divine and it's difficult to know which of Jason Taverner and Felix Buckman is meant to be the "emotional axis" of the book - it feels as though it should be Taverner, but Buckman is drawn as a far more complex and carefully worked out character. Ultimately I wouldnot put it in the same category as The Man in the High Castle or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but it's certainly readable and entertaining and linear in a way that later novels weren't.

Olly Buxton ... Read more

Product Description
With this collection of stories, readers are drawn into a world with a mysterious twist, a sense of otherness that eludes description. This thought-provoking writing--part science fiction, part mystery, part fantasy--includes all of the writer's earliest short and medium-length fiction. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Outstanding
Philip K. Dick absolutely one of my favorite writers. So I picked up this copy of collected short stories.It is just great to read.

Essential reading for everyone (and everything)
The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford collects some of Dick's earliest writing, including much of his output from 1952-1955. Even writers who don't appreciate his prose style would have to admire his fecundity: some of these stories were written within days of each other, yet each has something unique about it.

Fans of Dick will see early brushstrokes that were later transformed into masterpieces. There are a few post-apocalyptic stories here; this is a genre that Dick would revisit throughout the 1950s, as mounting hysteria, foreign and domestic, seemed to make war inevitable. There are also scheming insects (and even a murderous bath towel), vengeful teddy bears, sentient shoes, and world-weary computers. One of Dick's best qualities is that he can make the reader feel empathy for just about anyone-a dog barking for what seems to his owners like no reason, a teary-eyed Martian swine, or a hyper-evolved hamster. So reading this collection might, for some, be a bit of a workout. Unlike a novel, where the reader sees through the eyes of one or maybe two characters for 200+ pages, here you're walking in someone-or something-else's shoes every few pages. At times, it's almost intoxicating.

On to the stories: I'll just mention a few of my favorites, though they've all got positive qualities.

Stability, which is the first story Dick wrote, would be of interest just because of its priority, but it's worth a read strictly on its own merits. Dick creates a world where innovation is frozen, a la Rand's Anthem, inviting the reader to root for a young man with an invention. But, there is a very unexpected twist...

Roog, the first story Dick saw published, is a dog's eye view of the world that deserves a second read after reading Dick's note on the story in the appendix.

Beyond Lies the Wub is an incredible piece of short fiction that really makes you think. I read the story three times, and each time took something different away. Not to give anything away, but you'll definitely think twice before you eat your next steak.

The Infinites is a story that everyone who hated the infamous Star Trek: Voyager episode "Threshold" should read. Not to give anything away, but "Threshold" is one of several Trek stories based upon the erroneous idea that evolution is a teleological process, with an endpoint already mapped out in our genes. Here, Dick takes this idea, turns it on its head, and does something with it.

Variable Man combines a few Dickian favorites: omniscient computers, a constant war terror, and a wily, inarticulate everyman protagonist. Some elements of the plot are visible miles off, but the ending isn't.

Paycheck is a longish story with a typical Dickian hero and several elements that would later make it into We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, which was in turn the basis for Paul Verhoeven's excellent Total Recall. I think that it deserves a movie treatment of its own.

Colony takes paranoia to an absurdly high level. As Dick says in his note, it's one thing to think that your boss is plotting against you, and quite another to think that your boss's phone is plotting against you.

Nanny is a biting indictment of planned obsolescence. It was a true story in 1952, and an even truer one now.

All told, this is a great introduction to the writing of one of the acknowledged masters, and certainly belongs in the library of every PKD fan.

Signs Of What Would Come
In May of 1987 Underwood-Miller published a five volume set titled "The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick", with the first volume being subtitled "Beyond Lies the Wub".In April of 1990 the Carroll Group began republishing the series and changed the subtitle to "The Shot Happy Life of The Brown Oxford".This was the only change made to the first volume, as they kept the Forword by Steven Owen Godersky and the Introduction by Roger Zelazny.They also kept the same 25 stories in the same order as the previous edition, something which would not be true for the later volumes.

This is a splendid collection of Philip K. Dick's early short fiction, presented in the order in which they were believed to have been written, which is not the same as the order in which they were published.The original collection was ranked 3rd on the Locus poll for collections in 1988.There are too many stories here to go through them all in detail, but there are several ones of note:

The first story is titled "Stability", and was written in 1947 or earlier.It was never published prior to the first edition of this collection.As with a number of stories in this collection it involves time travel, and in this case the disrupting effect it has on a stable society.

"Roog" was the first story that he sold, although it was not published until after several others.It involves differences in perception, in particular between man and his best friend.There are some interesting comments from Philip K. Dick about this story in the notes section at the back of the book.

"Beyond Lies the Wub" was his first story to actually be published.It is a clever story about man's preconception of the forms which life takes, and perhaps a little about man's violent nature.There is a humorous twist at the end as well.

Also included are the two Doc Labyrinth stories, "The Preserving Machine" and "The Short Happy Life of the brown Oxford".Both stories deal with creating life, the former is about preserving man's great musical works as life forms and the latter with animating non-living items.Both of these stories are light and humorous.

The story which is likely to be familiar to many people new to Philip K. Dick, is "Paycheck", for which there was a movie of the same name which came out in 2003.In this story a man finds that he agreed to have his memory wiped out after completing a work assignment, and that apparently he agreed to give up his paycheck in lieu of some seemingly inconsequential items.

As I mentioned above, several of the stories have to do with time travel, and in particular Dick makes use of a machine that he calls a time scoop, which can reach backward or forward in time to pick up things.If you like stories based on time travel, then you will undoubtedly enjoy Dick's twist on the idea.If you don't like those kinds of stories, there are still many stories here which deal with space travel, future societies, etc., which you are likely to enjoy.

Sci-Fi from the Cold War
This first volume of THE COMPLETE STORIES OF PHILIPK. DICK is probably more important as an historical artifact than as literature.I found it fascinating.These stories were written in the 1950s during the time of The Korean War, The Cold War, McCarthy and Stalinism.There had been unconfirmed sightings of flying saucers and EarthMen's' own creation of nuclear weapons heightened the paranoia.Of course there are lots of quaint and now-laughable elements in these stories, like people smoking cigarettes two hundred years from now and a woman being embarrassed about having to strip naked in order to make sure no alien life forms were attached to her.Many of the ideas in these stories have since been usurped by TV science fiction shows, so most of the ideas are not all that novel today.But there were several stories that I found surprising and provocative.My favorite was "The Great C," in which a supercomputer rules the earth after a nuclear holocaust and demands a yearly human sacrifice.A close second was "Colony," in which explorers on a pleasant asteroid are menaced by a life form that can assume the forms of mundane objects before devouring the earthlings.The later stories in the book are more concerned with the rise of consumerism and the "keeping up with the Joneses" mentality that took over America after World War II.These stories are very amusing.Within this particular genre, there's a lot of variety in the point of view.Most often it's paranoid, but at other times it's amused.I liked these stories and look forward to eventually reading the entire collection.

Good collection, but....
The problem with slapping the "genius" label on a writer is that people tend to overlook that writer's flaws. All the glowing reviews make this collection sound better then it really is. PKD certainly was a genius, but he wasn't perfect. His best stories are absolutely amazing, but it took him time to get there and he wrote several clunkers along the way.

This book collects 25 of PKD's short stories from the early 1950s. Like most of his early work it's inconsistent. To those who are familiar with his writing, the brilliance that would later come is sometimes apparent. However, the young PKD was still growing as a writer and hadn't quite found his voice yet. The best stories in this collection are great reads. Unfortunately, there are several stories here that are just filler and are significant only because PKD wrote them. If you are not familiar with PKD's work some of these stories will be a great introduction. But most of them are far from perfect.

Here are a few high and low points:

Roog:
This is a fun little story. The men who come to collect your garbage are not what they seem, and only your dog knows why.

The Gun:
This is one of those filler stories, cause it has not point to it. I guess PKD needed a quick buck.

Beyond Lies the Wub:
More filler.

The Skull:
Some of these stories could have been made into episodes of the Twilight Zone, like this one. An interesting take on the story of Christ. The premise is not very original by today's standards, but still a good story.

The Preserving Machine:
Probably the worst story in the collection.

Expendable:
One of the best stories in the collection is also the shortest; only 5 pages. It is also one of the funniest. Next time you see an ant, beware.

The Variable Man:
Another really good story. A man from the past comes into the future when the earth is at war with an alien empire. PKD in full control here.

The Indefatigable Frog:
PKD's comical side is pretty unique and fun.

The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford:
The title story is kinda cute, but nothing special.

Meddler:
Another of the "Twilight Zone" type stories. Many writers have speculated about the end of the world. But only PKD would think that the end would be caused by butterflies.

Paycheck:
The recent John Woo film is based on this story. A fascinating premise is marred by poor execution. All the later PKD trademarks are here: evil all controling government, paranoia, and normal people trapped by circumstances beyond their control. Had PKD written this story 10 years later it would probably come out much better.

Colony:
More paranoia, but this time PKD uses it to comic effect. The colonists try to evacuate while naked. One of the best in the collection.

Prize Ship:
Time travel stories usually have a twist; so does this one. I laughed when I finished it.

Nanny:
A not so subtle take on the cold war arms race. Interesting, but could have been edited down some more. ... Read more

Product Description
In Radio Free Albemuth, his last novel, Philip K. Dick morphed and recombined themes that had informed his fiction from A Scanner Darkly to VALIS and produced a wild, impassioned work that reads like a visionary alternate history of the United States. Agonizingly suspenseful, darkly hilarious, and filled with enough conspiracy theories to thrill the most hardened paranoid, Radio Free Albemuth is proof of Dick's stature as our century's greatest science fiction writer. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (40)

Huh?
I listened to the audio version by Tim Weiner. Aliens broadcasting advice, paranoid presidents, subliminal music, visions, and other general wackiness didn't really make much sense.

Doesn't matter. Tim Weiner's incredible performance of this "interesting" book was entertaining. Not for everyone though.

It's just VALIS, again.
It's always thrilling when a manuscript from a brilliant author is published posthumously. So I had high hopes with "Radio Free Albemuth", released from the private collection of some Tim Powers. Bummer ! It turned out to be a re-run (or was it a pre-run ?) of the sickly abomination that was VALIS.
That makes two flukes on the account of the otherwise extraordinarily talented, most important science fiction writer of the 20th century. Well, perhaps it just counts as one, since it's really just the same novel, rehashed twice.

So this novel had all the dreadful "insights" that plagued the dope-inspired "masterpiece" VALIS. Well actually, in this novel, badly autobiographical like VALIS, Dick claims that none of the drug allegations were ever true. I'll let historians be the ultimate judge about that. Anyway, the extraterrestrial inspiration, the phosphene glimpsing, the pink beam of warning straight to the forehead, the Koine Greek, it was all there. I was surprised that the obnoxious little girl didn't turn up, as in the last chapter of VALIS. Think Dakota Fanning in some unrewarding role.

If you will masochistically insist, like I have, to go through all of Dick's work for completeness, even the known misfires, then this one might be slightly less unpalatable than VALIS itself. I found some relief in the typical Dick humor that rapidly turned into slapstick, when Phil decides to get friendly with a young female member of the thought police. And also, the frenetic but doomed attempts to stage a coup against the new world order, at the end of the novel, rekindle the vibrant buzz that is normally so intense in a Dick novel, from the first sentence to the last.

Yet, my final review is unabated. Don't ever read this as a first introduction to Dick. Read his large set of revolutionary art instead, and then forgive him for being human after all, errorprone as demonstrated by this failure; not the writing deity that you'd expect when you marvel at his stunning analysis of both 20th- and 21st-century life, in all his other novels. See one of the ground-breaking movies based loosely on his work, if you're visually oriented. But keep this disappointment for later.

One Step Over the Red Line
I wonder what Philip K. Dick thought of Radio Free Europe, the American show broadcast to anti-American nations during and after the Cold War.He had little patience with any totalitarian system, so he may have thought it was a good idea to invade evil empires with ideas.He certainly thought enough of the notion to base this novel on it.In this case, though, it's not just evil nations being invaded by ideas, it's all of Earth.

Within the story, there's no Radio Free Albemuth as such - that's a joke between some of the characters trying to figure out what's happened to their friend Nicholas Brady - but there is a broadcast from space that locates certain people and attempts to free them from the evil illusion that Earth is.Nicholas, like a few thousand others, comes to see by this extraterrestrial effort that Earth is under the thrall of a vast wickedness, and that the information beamed into his brain is in the nature of an invasion by a Vast Active Living Intelligence System.(Yeah, it's VALIS, from the later PKD novel of the same name, which makes this novel a sort of first pass at the later story.Hold your horses, we'll get to that.)

In some ways, this sort of moral invasion sounds like a pretty a good idea.It's an even better idea in the world of "Radio Free Albemuth", an alternative America in which one Ferris F. Freemont has won the American presidency and turned the county into a Stalinist police state, under the guise of fighting Communist infiltration at home.This is pretty scary for ordinary citizens like Nicholas's close friend Philip K. Dick, the science fiction writer.Such citizens find themselves under constant observation by the Friends of the American People, a sort of volunteer secret police who bully others into informing on their friends and neighbors.For someone like Nicholas himself, this state of affairs is even more tense.Not only is he under surveillance like everyone else, he's also in touch with an extraterrestrial (and maybe divine) enemy of the state.And there's always the possibility that he may just be nuts.

Complicating matters further is the fact that all of this is loosely based on events that occurred in PKD's own real life in 1974."Radio Free Albemuth" may have been one way for him to sort through his experience, but it doesn't always make a good novel.For instance, as you may have noticed, he more or less divided himself in half here - Nicholas has the experiences and "Phil" watches.By naming a character after himself, PKD evidently sought to consider his materials coolly and figure out just what the truth was.This is fine for an essay or philosophical treatise, but a novel usually requires a little more heat.

What's more, Phil and Nicholas trade off narrating "Radio Free Albemuth," so this division doesn't really even work as a distancing device.What's the point of ascribing all your pain to a fictional character if you're then going to inhabit that character in the first person?

Phil and Nicholas, and Nicholas's wife Rachel, also spend a lot of time discussing the ethics and cosmology that Nicholas receives by divine broadcast.It makes for some fascinating reading here and there - PKD's prose had been improving for several years by this time, and "Radio Free Albemuth" is no exception to that process.Nevertheless, the exposition slows the novel way down, which is a shame.After all, with this setup, the novel had a perfect opportunity to join the ranks of paranoid thrillers like "The Parallax View" and "The Manchurian Candidate", but it doesn't really work to interrupt a thriller periodically for philosophical/theological discourse.

Okay, so it's not a paranoid thriller.I have a sneaking hunch that PKD wrote "Radio Free Albemuth" to comfort himself after some years of genuine agony - to assure himself that the world had some meaning, that he would be okay one day, and that eventually the good guys would win.If I'm at all on the right track about this, it was a wise choice.As you might guess, by writing a story for himself, PKD came up with a story for the rest of us.

Now, he was too much of a realist to tack on a happy ending - even in his earliest days he almost never did that.With this story, as the narration itself points out, we're considering a worldwide global empire of evil established nearly two thousand years ago, opposed by a small cadre of men and women largely unknown to each other, all of whom hear voices in their heads.This is not "Star Wars".The Empire strikes back with a vengeance and the good guys' victories are much smaller.They are there, however, and that's what gives "Radio Free Albemuth" its teeth.I said earlier that novels require more heat than expository works, and as a matter of fact the finale of "Albemuth" has enough emotional punch to satisfy anyone, whether PKD put it there deliberately or not.

A good many commentators have suggested that this novel was a sort of first draft for "VALIS", which found a publisher during PKD's lifetime where "Albemuth" did not.At some point I'll discuss whether "VALIS" was more deserving of that distinction than "Albemuth".For now, suffice to say this: The fact that "Radio Free Albemuth", with its message of small but potent victory over death and destruction, found a publisher at all and can be read by you and me, is in itself one of those small victories.Like so much of PKD's work, especially his later stuff, it makes you feel good at the end.Read and enjoy.

Benshlomo says, The little things aren't as little as they seem.

A Curiously Mind Melding Experience - P.K.D Style
What a task PKD must have had, trying to decipher and express in written form his 1974 metaphysical experience. How do you describe that which transcends all language and understanding? Even for a man of his stature, it must have been an incredible challenge. The good thing for us is we now have the VALIS series of books of whichRADIO FREE ALBEMUTH is an important part and clue. Autobiographical, fictional and brilliantly executed, classic PKD style!

"Showing him visually a happier promise, on his own, unaided he would have stayed in his rut forever -something had intervened and severed the iron chains."

Nicholas Brady had been waiting for God all his life and although he "would have preferred something or someone more tangible" to his amazement and immense relief, after much confusion and deliberating on Nicholas's part, VALIS finally reveals himself and comes to his aid. Activating the 'disinhibiting stimulus,' restoring his memory and severing the chains of the Black Iron Prison. Whilst simultaneously healing and opening his mind to the Plasmate and the VAST ACTIVE LIVING INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM- VALIS-his real father.

Nicholas could now positively"envision vast operations by VALIS and his transcendental forces against the cruel bondage we were in."Vast operations against "the Empires value system, the supremacy of the state." The fascist police state, also described as "the evil body" and "the physical manifestation of the Antagonist" aka: " the Adversary."
"It was an ancient fight."

Disapointing
I'm getting a bit tired of all these totalitarian regime stories, though admittedly there are some very frightening similarities with today's America and the world as a whole. However, the story is very loose, all these techno-theological references seem very naive now, and it totally lacks any nerve, leaving you wondering whether you should stop reading it or go on till the end. I don't know what it must have been like reading 20 years ago, but now it just doesn't make it for a good read. ... Read more

Product Description

Customer Reviews (9)

A gripping non sci-fi story with all the sci-fi familiarities of PKD
I read this book after being very impressed by PKDs Humpty Dumpty in Oakland, which was the first non-science fiction book of the author that I had read. Again I am very impressed by the way the book is written.

The story takes place in the early 60s in a rural community. Interesting as this set-up might be for a European born in 1986 this is admittedly not the most fascinating time and place. However this would not be a PKD book if all of the people living in this rural community wouldn't be paranoid, miserable or, most often, both.

The brilliantly written thought patterns of the characters in this book is so enticing that the main story line about the man whose teeth were all exactly alike is not even that important but more a way by which the author drives the characters into certain thought and action patterns that cause them to be ever more distrustful and destructive to themselves and those around them.

While not the happiest of books (like many of PKDs works) it is wonderfully written and very enticing. The time and place, with for example the pressing idea that women should be at home and men should be earning money made the story all the more interesting.

Highly recommended

Philip K. Dick Just Keeps Getting Better!
"What if you found Neanderthal bones in your back yard? What if it affected the value of your real estate? Only Philip K. Dick could write this peculiar and oddly twisted account of such a problem."

A Neanderthal in Northern California?
Would the discovery of Neanderthal bones in a nearby suburb perk your interest and make you want to live there? What if it meant that renting prices would go up? Leo Runcible lives in rural Marin County, in a WASPy town in California. He is smart, Jewish, liberal and above all civic minded, and the discovery of what he thinks is Neanderthal bones makes him think that the publicity of this discovery would subsequently raise the local real estate prices. The remains are not what he hopes for when he discovers that they were created recently as a result of local water polluting nearby. In this novel, Leo's care of the neighborhood and a spat with his neighbor have archaeologists descend on Marin County, and a dark secret is uncovered that could threaten the entire town's well-being.

Philip K. Dick is an excellent writer, whose characters feel real, and stories too engaging to put down.

Reviewed by James Rojek

Fighting and Fossils
Well, it certainly sounds like a science fiction title, but this is not a science fiction novel. Philip K. Dick fans know that the man's dearest professional ambition was to establish a dual career, as a writer of both science fiction and mainstream novels, but that he never quite made it; mainstream titles account for only two of the more than thirty published during his lifetime. The rest of his mainstream work began coming out shortly after his death in 1982, when the success of the movie "Blade Runner" attracted commercial publishers, and this book was published the following year.

So you read PKD's non-sf work and you have to ask yourself the question; If he could not find a place for himself in the mainstream market, was that the market's fault or his? That is, was his mainstream work any good? Based on this novel, the answer is an unqualified Yes.

It concerns the conflicts and struggles of the people of Carquinez, California, a real place north of San Francisco not far from the Pacific coast. And what are they struggling about? Well, pretty much everything, it seems. None of them seem to like each other very much, and that includes the individual members of the two married couples. It's one of PKD's best tricks to make you care about them anyway.

Another of his best tricks is borrowing current events for the issues dividing the people of Carquinez. Unlike some other novels, this one manages to comment on historical movements like civil rights by dealing solely with the lives of its characters. So Leo Runcible, a local real estate broker, runs afoul of Walt Dombrosio, a commercial designer, because Walt invites a black man to dinner and Leo is afraid that people will see and refuse to buy homes in the neighborhood. Not that he's a racist - he's actually a Jew, proud of his World War II service and quite prepared to throw an old and valued friend out of his house when that friend reacts badly to the presence of a black man next door. He's still upset, though, and in retaliation calls the police when Walt drunkenly puts his car in a ditch one night. Things escalate from there until the novel concludes the following Christmas.

When you add in the fact that Leo's wife is an alcoholic and Walt's wife is a harpy, you can see why no one seems happy. Leo also has to deal with some casual antisemitism and Walt has to deal with the first rumblings of feminism in his own marriage, which he doesn't like at all. The man whose teeth are all exactly alike arrives about halfway through the story - he's a fossilized skull that Leo finds on his property, and all of his teeth really are exactly alike. They all look like molars, no incisors or canines. It may even be a Neanderthal skull. Whatever it is, though, it ramps up the heat between Leo and Walt something fierce.

In short, Philip K. Dick the mainstream novelist dealt with the attempts of the suburban postwar middle class to "make it", thus falling somewhere between John Cheever and Philip Roth, only on the other coast and with a lot less money. What sets PKD's work apart is his characters and their motivations, or rather their confusion - Leo, Walt, their wives and the other citizens of Carquinez do things without quite knowing why, whether those actions are useful or destructive. Why on Earth, for instance, would a man throw a chair at his pregnant wife and then tell her he loves her? Unforgivable, to be sure, but also more than enough to keep a reader interested. Fascinated, even. You have to give the author credit for courage, at least; there's no point in being a writer if you're going to flinch from life's ugly realities.

Barry Malzberg once said that PKD's failure to publish most of his mainstream material may have done his science fiction a world of good, since it forced him to deal with his mainstream concerns in his science fiction work and thus produce a brand new style of sf. Maybe so, but on the evidence of TMWTWAEA, that pressure worked both ways. His success as a writer of science fiction gave him the tools necessary to include the unexpected in his mainstream work. I can't think of another author who would have even thought to make an important plot point out of fossils.

That cross-pollination between the author's sf imagination and his mainstream observations shows up especially well when it comes to plotting. I've complained in the past that a lot of PKD's sf novels bounce from event to event with next to no connective tissue and mess up a lot of good ideas that way. Well, real life is often like that, and a similar kind of veering around works pretty well in this novel. And why not? In a mainstream setting, all that confusion is just a day in the life of Leo Runcible - part hustler, part public benefactor. No surprise, really. PKD always wanted his readers to feel empathy for his characters, even the jerks.

When I set myself the project of reviewing all of Philip K. Dick's novels, I considered restricting myself to the work published during his lifetime. Having read "The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike," I think I've changed my mind. Stay tuned for "Humpty Dumpty in Oakland" and the rest.

Benshlomo says, Sometimes you just have to dig for the gold.

One of PKDs least known books
I first became a fan of Philip K. Dick shortly after his death, before his popularity had hit its full stride.Picking up his books in the early 1980s was sometimes a bit of a treasure hunt: while a few were readily available (such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man in the High Castle), others were quite elusive, like The Man Who Japed or The World Jones Made.Eventually, I would get them all, but there were still his unpublished books to get:Mary and the Giant, Puttering About in a Small Land, etc.One title always stood out among these works:The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike.At long last, I have had a chance to buy and read this book.

Like much of PKD's posthumously published books, The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike is not a science fiction novel but rather a mainstream story of life for a pair of 1950s Marin County, California couples.Leo Runcible is a successful real estate agent who likes to think of himself as liberal:when a neighbor has a black man as a dinner guest, Leo defends the neighbor's right to do so, at the cost of a friendship and a business deal.Nevertheless, Leo is bitter at the neighbor, Walt Dombrosio, for creating the provocative situation, and soon gets his revenge by getting Walt arrested for drunk driving.

Walt loses his license and is dependent on his wife to transport him daily to work.For Walt, this will cause damage to his marriage and eventually lead him to his own revenge against Leo, which will have consequences no one could have anticipated.The wives, meanwhile have their own issues to deal with.Leo's wife, Janet, is almost pathologically neurotic and has an uncanny ability to make any situation worse.Sherry Dombrosio is the only reasonably well-adjusted character among the four, but saddled with the brutish Walt, she will also be the one who suffers the most.

Was the book worth the quarter-century wait?Well, it's good, but it's not THAT good.As with much of PKD's posthumously published books, this is not quite Dick at his best, which is probably why it never was published earlier.Also, for those fans expecting his wonderful science fiction, this work could be disappointing.For PKD completists, however, this should be a worthy addition to their collections. ... Read more

Product Description
Loosely based on the story of Bishop James Pike, Dick's last novel tells of an erudite man of the cloth whose faith is shaken by the suicides of his son and mistress, and then transformed by his bizarre quest for the identity of Christ. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (27)

The very best of PKD
I don't have the time to write a review, but I was looking online for a list of the best PKD books and I was a tad disappointed.That being said, if you are a PKD fan, or if you are just getting into him, here are what I believe to be his best books.

1.The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - Far and away his most interesting book.The commentary on the nature of transubstantiation, communion, and drug culture is simply fascinating.

2.Transmigration of Timothy Archer - Here PKD displays the best writing of his career.The title character and the narrator, Angel Archer, are the most developed and human characters in PKD's cannon.

3.A Scanner Darkly - As good as everyone says it is, probably the best in the Am-I-Who-I-Say-I-Am sub-genre of science fiction.

4.VALIS - Truly one of the most bizarre and compulsively readable (not to mention difficult) autobiographies you're likely to encounter, VALIS is PKD's personal exegesis--a learned exploration of what the author refers to as his encounter with the divine.This book is the culmination of PKD's theology, of whihc we see traces in nearly everyone of his works.

5.Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, & Ubik (Tie) - I would be remiss to leave these books off of the list, though I think that they receive more acclaim than they deserve.The same can be said of The Man in the High Castle, which looks immature compared to Dick's later works.Amazing what a Hugo can do, I guess.

Well, there's my list, take it or leave it.I'd gladly argue with anyone as to my rather arbitary ordering of these literary masterpieces.Either way, whether you agree or disagree, go read some PKD!

An interesting conclusion
The VALIS trilogy, of which this book is the "conclusion", is definitely one of my favorites, because the author, PKD, introduces such mind-bending concepts. If you have read the previous two books in this trilogy, you would already be expecting to go through half of the book without any obvious connection to the other two, and this book is no exception. It is very strange, and very interesting. It is classic Philip K. Dick. Each book stands well alone, but I would recommend all three of them. Valis and The Divine Invasion: A Novel are the other two books.

Book Three of the Trilogy
Timothy Archer is the third book of PDK's theological trilogy, and the most affecting.The protagonist, named Angel, deals with the suicides of her husband, her best friend and the ultimate death of her father-in-law, modeled after Bishop James Pike, who was a friend of PDK.Although much strangeness surrounds the story, the pain and the poignant struggle that is Angel's life is what remains when the book is over.By far the most touching of Dick's novels, if indeed any of them can be called touching.

All three books in this trilogy are quite different, and reading them all in quick succession makes for quite an experience.If you are a patient reader, and like the author's style, there are great rewards here.

Back Down to Earth
As I recall, at about the time that this novel was published in 1983, a reviewer in a major national magazine described Philip K. Dick's abandonment of his longstanding addiction to amphetamines toward the end of his life.The author, said this reviewer, having kicked uppers, obviously entered into a depression, and it showed in his work - "Transmigration" was a depressed book.

Like many readers and critics, this reviewer ascribes autobiographical meaning to fiction, a practice that gives me a serious pain in the glutes."Transmigration" has a depressed feel because PKD was off drugs, is that it?How about the fact that its narrator/protagonist has lost her husband, her best friend, and her beloved father-in-law inside of a year, two to suicide and one to misadventure?That's not depressing enough for you?You don't think PKD was imaginative enough to enter into the minds of his own characters, regardless of his personal circumstances?Baloney.

Having ranted in this way, however, one must admit that "Transmigration" is not, in fact, particularly cheerful.Angel Archer, the first-person narrator, begins the novel by going to a Berkeley houseboat on the day John Lennon dies, for a seminar with one of those West Coast guru types named Edgar Barefoot.She doesn't really seem to believe that he can help her (she's wrong, actually), but it's something to do.This gives you an idea of how disconnected she is, and considering how many of her loved ones are gone, it's not at all surprising.

Something about this seminar gets her recalling her earlier years, when she was married to Jeff, the son of California's Episcopal bishop Tim Archer.She recalls the day that she introduced Tim to her friend Kirsten, a feminist leader, hoping to arrange a sort of political alliance between the bishop and the feminists.And Tim is a progressive churchman, having marched with Dr. King in Alabama, so an alliance with the feminists is likely, but Angel gets more than she bargained for - Tim and Kirsten soon become lovers, trying to keep their relationship a secret from the church while spiraling deeper into religious mysticism and leaving Jeff far behind.The young man commits suicide, which only convinces Tim and Kirsten that he has rejoined them from the beyond.With Angel looking on in dismay, they set out to search for God on Earth.

In the previous two volumes of the so-called "VALIS trilogy", this search actually yields results, however dangerous to the seeker.In "Transmigration," it's a recipe for disaster.Angel realizes this very quickly, but can't quite bring herself to say so.And thus the tragedy unfolds.

"Transmigration" was a breakthrough novel for PKD in several ways, not least in his use of first-person narration for only the second time in his body of work, and one of his rare books with a woman at the center - a remarkably believable and sympathetic woman, at that.What's more, having previously distanced himself from the drug culture he had lived in for years, in "Transmigration" he distanced himself from the religious mysticism that had obsessed him since 1974.Angel, seeing the ruin that this obsession has brought about, determines to root herself in the real world at all costs.Remarkably, in inventing a narrator who turns her back on the cosmos, PKD produced a very spiritual book.

How does that come about?Well, for one thing, the more mature Angel Archer looks back on her past and focuses as much as possible on what happened, rather than some amorphous sense of what it all means.And this, as it turns out, is a spiritual practice; as usual with PKD, empathy is what makes us human, and Angel finds that the more she concentrates on the reality of her past, the more empathy she has.Tim the archbishop can talk about salvation through suffering all he likes, but it's daughter-in-law Angel who actually demonstrates that idea in action.

Which brings us to the second unexpected spiritual lesson to be found in "Transmigration" - Angel loves her friend, her husband and her father-in-law, but it can be difficult to understand why.One can only assume that if these people existed in real life, they would have their lovable qualities, but for some reason Angel reveals them at their worst.Jeff can be inattentive and self-involved, Tim oblivious to the consequences of his actions, and Kirsten downright cruel.Angel herself is no saint, either.This is where the empathy comes in -Angel goes through various kinds of hell with these people, sees them clearly and without a lot of cosmic hocus-pocus, and loves them anyway.Along with the tragic consequences of her inability to help them, it's this that makes "Transmigration" so moving.

I gather that Timothy Archer is loosely based on James Pike, a leading progressive of the 60's who was indeed the Episcopal bishop of California.His virtues and flaws are similar, he makes a lot of the same mistakes and dies a similar death, and he was a friend of PKD's.Never mind all that, interesting though it is.The value of "Transmigration", especially as PKD's final completed novel, lies in the author's ability at the end to do in mainstream work what he had already done so often in sf - show us the critical importance of empathy.

In an interview recorded a few years ago, one of PKD's friends said that he read "Transmigration" after the author's death and felt intense gratitude that the man died sane.I don't think PKD was ever genuinely mad, but in his last piece he certainly demonstrated that he possessed a sanity of the very best kind.

Benshlomo says, You have to take people as they are - that's your best self talking.

Bishop Timothy Archer according to his daughter in law
PKD at his best: The story of renaissance man Tim Archer, ex-lawyer, ex-alcoholic, current Episcopalian Bishop and Civil Rights activists' leader, seeker of the true religion, occultist. The story of his personal tragedies, eventual downfall, and - transmigration - is taking place mainly in Northern California and is narrated by Angel Archer, his daughter in law, or rather, as a consequence of the events unfolding, the widow of his son. Angel is depressed about the suicide of her husband, her best friend who was also Tim Archer's lover, and the accidental (is there really anything accidental, random in a PKD novel?) death of Bishop Tim Archer in the Israeli desert. Still, she is fascinated and moved by what she experienced (believed to have experienced?), and that fascination rubs of on the reader: I read this 250 page novel in only two settings.
What makes PKD (Philip K. Dick) such a fantastic writer, in my eyes, is his ability to transport his unusual ideas about the very vague substance of reality in such a casual way; There is no dry lecture about the constructivist nature of reality, weighted with dry philosophical terms and sentences with unnecessarily complicated grammar. Instead, one reads a dinner conversation which within a few sentences drifts from small talk about the menu to philosophy of the mind, the occult, and back to the food on the table. There is no dumbing down of ideas or insights, in contrast, the fact that PKD's ideas are articulated by different people at different times makes it harder to figure out what he really means. But the fact that these ideas are packed into an extremely well written novel featuring characters, whomsomewhat alternatively minded contemporaries can probably relate to, predigests them nicely. At the end of the book one ends up not only understanding how PKD thinks that "real" is a very relative term, and how he speculates that information can travel between minds in ways unbeknown to modern man; one also understands how it must FEEL to be subjected to bouts of reality dissolution. These are the things he brilliantly accomplishes to communicate in "The Transmigration of Timothy Archer".
... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A Wonderful Glimpse Into the Mind of a Troubled Creative Genius
Dick's life, and his literary creations, were not as disconnected as some might think.For most of his life, he struggled with a variety of mental and emotional challenges that were often reflected in the stories he told.

Toward the end of his life he began to have what many would describe as a mental breakdown, yet he retained a kind of clarity, of self-analytical passion, that drove him to delve deeply into the experiences he was having.These experiences, reflected in his last 5 or 6 novels, are documented in letters and notes, and in an almost obsessive journal of thoughts and ideas he struggled with during the final years of his life.

Some have criticized this tome as ponderous, confusing, and poorly edited.For me, it is raw, pure, unfiltered Dick.Some is sad, some illuminating, and some hysterically funny, but I'm glad to have it all so that I can find my own path to his mind, and heart.

Valis
Radio Free Albemuth
A SCANNER DARKLY
The Divine Invasion
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

Poorly Edited
Philip K. Dick was a brilliant man who, like many brilliant men, has been posthumously mishandled by editors, biographers, etc. In Pursuit of Valis, I believe, is a further example of this. The editor's introduction is poorly written and riddled with assumptions and errors. The material in the book is choppy and poorly edited. Phil Dick never intended this material to be sold, he never will see any profits on the sale of this book, so who profits from its sale? The editor? His estate? His fans? I don't know. I am sure Sutin is getting his cut. Some of us wish that he would leave Phil Dick alone. But, that aside, if you are going to publish works not written for public consumption, at least do it properly. Surely, the volume could have been edited so as to make the material easier to comprehend? And what of the sloppy printing? Fans of PKD will buy this and enjoy it as they should, because at least we get a glimpse of the man. But at what cost?

Unforgettable, albeit confusing in parts.
From the author responsible for "Bladerunner" and "Total Recall" comes this very personal record of schizophrenia, conspiracyand hallucinatory mysticism. The bulk of "Valis" deals with Dick's attempts to understand the teachings of the ancient gnosticChristians - a quest which took on new urgency as Dick came to believe that the Roman Empire was using technology suppliedby evil aliens to keep time frozen at 70 A.D. Unforgettable, albeit confusing in parts. ... Read more

Product Description
Beyond Lies the Wub
Beyond the Door
The Crystal Crypt
The Defenders
The Gun ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

All fans should read "Beyond Lies The Wub"
For me, this is the best Philip K Dick deal that includes his classic short story "Beyond Lies The Wub". The book is formatted in a very user-friendly style and I'm really enjoying it. This seems to be the best value of all the Philip K Dick choices in the Kindle store. ... Read more

Product Description
This title has fewer than 24 printed text pages. World Without War is presented here in a high quality paperback edition. This popular classic work by E. G. von Wald is in the English language. If you enjoy the works of E. G. von Wald then we highly recommend this publication for your book collection. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

5 of Dick's Best Early Stories
This is an older collection containing, "The Variable Man," "Second Variety," "The Minority Report," "Autofac," and "A World of Talent."They are all outstanding stories Dick wrote during the 50s. "Second Variety," and "The Minority Report" have both been filmed as "Screamers" and "Minority Report."

"The Variable Man" is the longest story and noteworthy for being one of the first stories to feature a sort relativistic kill vehicle as a plot device.It takes place about 200 years in the future, when a semi-totalitarian Earth government is fighting a war with aliens from Proxima Centauri, who have blockaded the system, and are trying to perfect a bomb that will destroy the Proxima system by hitting that star a nearly the speed of light.They rely on computers to predict their chances of success in the war, but when they accidentally bring a man from the past forward in time his lack of predictability ruins the computer's calculations.Mayhem ensues.

"Second Variety" and "Autofac" are also prescient in their anticipation of the hazards of self-replicating machines.Both stories are about self-replicatingand self-repairng machines used during a war (not the same one) that get dangerously out of control as the war reaches its end.

"The Minority Report" involves a future police system where psychics with precognition are used to prevent murders.It follows the adventures of the police commissioner when the system traps him for the murder of a man he's never heard of.

"A World of Talent" was written in reaction to the polyanna attitude many science fiction writers carried towards psychic powers, and shows the destructive effects they can have, particularily in the stratification of society.

If you're looking at a book to introduce you to PKD, or just want to read the stories those two movies were based on, this might be a good one to pick up. If you're a die-hard PKD fan though, most of these stories are reprinted in the recent five-volume series, "The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick." ... Read more

Product Description
It's America in 1962--where slavery is legal and the few surviving Jews hide anxiously under assumed names; all because twenty years earlier America lost a war and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (176)

Strong Contender for Worst Book of the Century
A great idea...what if the Axis powers won the war?Feeble execution, really having nothing to do with that premise.If you like bizarre, plotless jibberish, this is the book for you!A few recognizable Third Reich names thrown in are the only connection to the original concept.Otherwise, I have no idea what this book was about.It annoys me to waste my time with a book like this but because it was short, I plodded through to the end.My overall impression was to question the mental well-being of "Mr. Dick".As for winning the Hugo Award, that "credential" won't influence any of my book selections in the future - in fact, I'll avoid ANYTHING that received that "commendation".

Great book
I read this because it was the next book on my list that win a hugo award and is also on the kindle at the same time. What i didnt expect is to have such a fantastic, interesting, thought provoking read like this one. Dealing with themes of racism, reality, chance and control, and hope this book provides a very good picture of how life would be like in the former united states. If you have any hesitations at all about this book sweep them aside and take a chance, you'll be glad you did. The bad news is that its kind of open ended and is begging for a sequel, but even worse than that is the fact that the author has been dead for 30 years, i know its a bummer. Nonetheless i highly recommend this book to anyone that wants a good, fast, intelligent read.

The I Ching versus the V2 Rocket
Alternate history works are perhaps the ultimate What If? stories - in this case, what if FDR was assassinated in 1934? Such a small change; the United States has gotten through several presidential assassinations with barely a hiccup. But here, in this book, the end result is that Germany and Japan win WWII and have split the US in two, Japan controlling the West Coast, Germany the East.

Dick looks at this scenario not from a historical or geopolitical viewpoint, but rather focuses on just what life is like for several fairly ordinary Americans under this regime. By doing so, he manages to convey not just the events, technology, and rules of this world, but also the flavor, the cultural assimilation, the everyday decisions and opportunities that spring from this different set-up.

Each of his characters is sharply shown, from the small business owner selling `authentic' American collectables to the Japanese, to the machinist trying to realize a dream of becoming independent by making truly new American jewelry and getting out from the enforced regimentation of working for an American owned but Japanese controlled factory. These people ring true-to-life, and their daily decisions and circumstance paint a by-the-way picture of the entire society that would have been difficult to delineate by any straightforward discourse.

But on top of all of this, Dick throws a ringer into the game, for in this alternate reality, there is a book written, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, that supposes that the U.S. and its allies won WWII, with its own depiction of just how the world would have developed under that scenario. By presenting both projections, Dick also manages to slide in a fairly satirical look at the America of the time this was written, and which still echoes very well against today's world. As becomes clearer and clearer as you progress with this book, the very nature of what is real, what is `authentic', what force(s) drive the universe, is being called into question, and the answers the reader may find here might be somewhat disturbing.

This is a quiet book; there's not a lot of action, no blow-em-up revolts, and the depiction of Japanese society as benign and law-loving contrasted with German technological prowess coupled with total moral absence may perhaps be too limited and naïve to really satisfy. But nevertheless it is a book that will grab, that will force an examination of what forces underpin any society, that will present a definite and memorable picture of an alternate culture that is very foreign to most Americans.

Clearly Dick's best book, and appropriately honored with 1963 Hugo Award. A must read for any reader who wishes to call himself well versed in the category of science fiction.

---Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)

Potent historical parable
The Man in the High Castle is, unusually for Philip K. Dick, not science fiction but a reflection on history and how it is written. Japan and Germany have won WWII. A novelist, hiding in the buffer Rocky Mountain State, has produced the ultimate counterfactual: what if the Allies had won? But far from resembling the reality we know, this bold, forbidden pamphlet is, in spite of its audacity, permeated with totalitarian thinking. So is, indeed, the rump United States in California, a Japanese puppet state - or rather it is permeated with a strange hybrid of oriental culture and paternalistic, Nippon Americophilia.

The novel tracks a parallel spy story, a ploy to assassinate the 'man in the high castle', the writer of the forbidden novel, and attempts to revive authentic American handicrafts by two unemployed workers. The plot, though, isn't the book's attraction. And as a reconstruction of a what-if world, this isn't as convincing as, say, Harris's Fatherland. But no matter: what is interesting is how Dick creates an imaginary fusion culture, in particular through the unique Japanese-English style of his dialogues and through the oracular I Ching, or Book of Changes. His novel has most value in creating an alternate mentality. Less convincing as an alternate reality, The Man in the High Castle is utterly absorbing as a cultural and historical parable.

A new history or a new world?
Philip K. Dick isn't writing about alternate history.He is asking us what reality is.What do we see and feel and taste and is there only one outcome or is there many outcomes all overlapping at once?This isn't a Sci-Fi book, this is a book about the human mind, about space and time, about how we see our world.
The author is a wonderful builder of worlds.He never just goes outside the box - he has no clue that there ever was a box.And he forces you to look at both the good and the bad, the beauty and the ugly, the human soul with all the flaws, hate, razorblades and booze!
Here we have a world split between the part ruled by the Japanese and the part crushed by the Germans.A world that is about to have another war of wills, a war between the two empires.And no matter who wins, it will not be a world any one would wish to live in.
Get it used or new, but get it.
... Read more

Product Description
In the years following World War III, a new and powerful faith has arisen from a scorched and poisoned Earth, a faith that embraces the architect of world wide devastation. The Servants of Wrath have deified Carlton Lufteufel and re-christened him the Deus Irae. In the small community of Charlottesville, Utah, Tibor McMasters, born without arms or legs, has, through an array of prostheses, established a far-reaching reputation as an inspired painter. When the new church commissions a grand mural depicting the Deus Irae, it falls upon Tibor to make a treacherous journey to find the man, to find the god, and capture his terrible visage for posterity. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

PKD: Gold Standard of Science Fiction
It amused me to no end reading all these reviews by confused Zelazny fans. "It's a bad acid trip!" "I don't like questioning theology!" To which I can only say "Shove off!" Philip K. Dick remains, long after his death, the only true artist in an ever more debased genre.

Deus Irae in particular illustrates this. It follows a phocomelus mural painter (something readers of Dr. Bloodmoney will be familiar with) as he goes on a "pilg" to directly experience the God of Wrath -- the man who pressed the big button on doomsday and nuked the world. Along the way, he encounters all the varied denizens of this post-nuclear war world -- including some friendly reptoids and an intelligent, malfunctioning factory responsible for a genuine laugh-out-loud moment -- and is further accompanied by the hideous follower of the laughed at and ignored Christian church.

Like all of Dick's best work, this takes the reader into scary philosophical and theological waters: How can people believe in an all-loving God in the face of so much suffering? And how much of the history of the big religions is truth, myth, or just some con-job from an old drunk in a barn?

No Answers Here
Here's a novel with important pieces missing.

That's not necessarily a bad thing.Most of us would probably prefer a novel with important pieces missing to one with everything spelled out.Then again, there's a fine line between making readers think for themselves and leaving them in the dark.In this case, the authors may have stepped over the line.Let's have a look.

In post-apocalyptic America, a new religion has come into being.They worship a new god, the Deus Irae, or God of Wrath.They believe that this god also has a human form (or maybe just a human servant) in the person of one Carleton Lufteufel, a former government official who gave the order that set off the nuclear devastation.Since this god's works plainly surround the people at all times, the Church of Wrath attracts a lot of followers, and the old Christian church is in a bad way.

The Church of Wrath commissions Tibor McMasters to paint a mural on one of their buildings - a wise choice, since he's the greatest artist of the age despite having no arms or legs.To that end, the Church sends him on a journey to find Carleton Lufteufel, take a picture, and include his genuine likeness in the work.A local Christian novice, Pete Sands, decides to go along.He tells himself he's doing this to protect Tibor from harm.He may have other motives - his church would clearly prefer that Tibor fail in this quest.And Tibor has some grave doubts about the whole thing.Will Tibor and Pete find Carleton Lufteufel?And more importantly, if they do, what will they do about it?

Not a bad setup, you'll agree.What's more, in their journeys Tibor and Pete encounter some nice freakish details, such as talking bugs and lizards, a carnivorous computer and a cranky automatic factory.Their encounters with these oddities are often funny, thank God; the factory, for instance, attempts to fix Pete's bicycle and instead produces a torrent of pogo sticks.

The writing is worth the time, too.I've said before that Philip K. Dick was not a great stylist, but he could be phenomenal when on his game.Roger Zelazny, his co-writer, had a deserved reputation as one of the best stylists in science fiction.Together, they produced a lot of wonderful passages here, such as when Tibor obtains a dog to keep him company.An armless and legless man in a poisonous wilderness would certainly be happy to have a dog - these passages in "Deus Irae" go one step further and make you feel his joy personally.

So it's all the more frustrating to read through "Deus Irae" and find yourself with so many unanswered questions.For instance, what in the world is so godlike about Carleton Lufteufel?At one point, Tibor encounters a powerful presence that descends on him from the sky, speaks to him, gives him arms and legs and then takes them away, so the God of Wrath is no mere specter.What's the connection between this powerful being and Carleton Lufteufel, though?Elsewhere we see Lufteufel himself, living in an old bunker with a developmentally delayed girl, in great pain from the metal shards that the nuclear explosions drove into his head - does this man turn into the God of Wrath periodically?Is he even aware that people consider him to be the God in human form?What the heck is going on?

More sticky yet is the novel's conclusion.Suffice to say here that an abrupt act of dreadful violence brings the whole quest for Carleton Lufteufel to a sudden halt.It's plain enough how this event might plunge Tibor into despair, but there's another witness who realizes at that moment how the event was supposed to play out, and sees that it has not done so.Well, if it had, what would the consequences be?And does the witness wish that things had worked out as planned?And why?In context, these are important questions, and the emotional pitch of the writing bites hard, but the answers are vague at best.Sorry, guys - no pass.

As I said, it's not an author's job to spoon-feed us everything, but this is going a little far.Without answers to some of these basic questions, "Deus Irae" reads like a series of unconnected episodes, and it obviously tried for more than that.The last few chapters, indeed, give some hints about what the authors wanted to achieve, and for that, the imaginative content and the quality of the writing, this novel may be worth a read.Too bad it isn't worth two or more.

Oddly enough, the flaws of "Deus Irae" do not generally appear in the rest of Philip K. Dick's work - his plotting was usually very clear and he rarely concluded his novels too soon.Those flaws are sometimes to be found, however, in Roger Zelazny's work.I read somewhere that PKD invited Zelazny's collaboration because he didn't know enough about Christianity.I'm not convinced of that, frankly - PKD's exploration of religion took up his entire life.I suspect it was Zelazny who suggested the road setting, and who may have allowed the story to run out of gas.

Oh well.It's a PKD story nevertheless.Anyone who has read "Dr. Bloodmoney" will recognize the postapocalyptic America, full of small towns and dangerous mutants, brought on by an evil scientist with a significant German name, and including a figure with no arms or legs.If PKD felt he needed a collaborator, for the second and last time in his career, that was his business.

I also read that when Zelazny learned of PKD's financial difficulties, he reduced his royalty share from one half to one third.I hope God blesses him for that, and I really don't care which God does the job.

Benshlomo says, Partnership is difficult, but worth it.

Worst Dick Novel I've Read
I have read over a dozen Philip K. Dick books and can say without a doubt this was the worse one I read, and maybe the worst book I have read in a long time. People have claimed that Dick's Vulcan's Hammer is the worst, but this has to be up there. I had enjoyed the posthumous collaboration between Alfred Bester and Roger Zelazny called Psychoshop and thought this would be the same caliber. Nope. This novel was aimless and boring. Yes, boring. I plowed through it hoping it would go over some hump and get good. Never did.

I would recommend reading just about any Philip K. Dick book over this one. If you need recommendations I'd say go: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man In The High Castle, The Divine Invasion, VALIS, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Radio Free Albemuth, Scanner Darkly, Now Wait For Last Year, Ubik, Martian Time-Slip, Time Out of Joint, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said...before even thinking about reading this book.

Last snub, what's up with the Vintage cover art for this title?

I love Zelazny, don't like Dick, gonna quit reading Dick now
A disclaimer: Like a previous reviewer, I will read anything Zelazny wrote, because he's a true master. Amber! Lord of Light! Amazing stuff. He died far too young.

Philip K. Dick, on the other hand, doesn't float my boat. I've read three of his books now, and didn't like any of them. I'm gonna quit. I should have quit before this one.

Bottom line: If you loved Canticle for Liebowitz and Lord of Light, you'll like this. I loved Lord of Light, but Canticle is as far as I want to go into questioning Christian theology, so this one gets three stars, mainly for Zelazny's influence.

Good Collaboration, a tightly-woven tale.
I always wondered how two writers collaborate to write one novel.Does one start and write til he's stuck, then send it over to the other?Or is one responsible for the dialogue, the other plot and exposition?Do they trade chapters back and forth?

Deus Irae is immediately recognizable Dick.God & theology theme, wacky mutants, and dialogue that cause you think about and examineour basic Christian beliefs.Why not a God of Death and Retribution?

I can't say I've read any Roger Zelazny, so I don't recognize his style, plotline, or contribution to the book.However, if he was responsible fortoning down the paranoia and rambling to which Dick sometimes succumbs, I guess it was a good mix. ... Read more

Product Description
In 2007, Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s became the fastest selling title in The Library of America's history. The 2008 companion volume, Five Novels of the1960s & 70s, broke series records for advance sales. Now comes a third and final volume gathering the best novels of Dick's final years, when religious revelation, always important in his work, became a dominant and irresistible theme.

In A Maze of Death (1970), a darkly speculative mystery that foreshadows Dick's final novels, colonists on the planet Delmak-O try to determine the nature of the God-or "Mentufacturer"-who plots their destiny. The late masterpiece VALIS (1981) is a novelistic reworking of "the events of 2-3-74," when Dick's life was transformed by what he believed was a mystical revelation. It is a harrowing self-portrait of a man torn between conflicting interpretations of what might be gnostic illumination or psychotic breakdown. The Divine Invasion (1981), a sequel to VALIS, is a powerful exploration of gnostic insight and its human consequences. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982), Dick's last novel, is by turns theological thriller, roman à clef, and disenchanted portrait of late 1970s California life, based loosely on the controversial career of Bishop James Pike-a close friend and kindred spirit. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Possibly Dick's greatest works
The three Library of America editions of Philip K. Dick's work contain all of his his best material, with only a few notable exclusions. Valis and Later Novels, however, just might contain his very best. Besides Maze of Death, published in 1970, the others are his three final novels before he died in 1982. Sometimes referred to as the Valis Trilogy, these three loosely connected novels represent a huge leap forward in terms of Dick's writing ability. They show him struggling with the events that shaped his life beginning in February of '74, in which he had a deeply spiritual "invasion of the mind," which Dick attributed at various times to God, aliens, the Soviets, and even a future version of himself.

Valis is Dick's attempt to explain what exactly happened to him in that time period. Structured within a semi-autobiographical framework, it is a mind-bending extrapolation of nearly everything going on in Dick's head at the time, and is considered by many, including me, to be his masterpiece. It even includes dozens of actual passages from the Exegesis, his reflections on the events of '2-3-74,' as Dick referred to it. Although people new to him may want to start with something else, every fan should read this and then proceed to be awe-struck.

The Divine Invasion takes these same ideas about God, or Valis, but structures them around a more traditional, futuristic framework. Of the four novels in this collection, this is probably my least favorite. It's still definitely worth a read, and works a lot better when read directly after Valis. There are definitely some great ideas here, unfortunately it doesn't always quite work.

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer can very well be considered one of Dick's 'straight' novels, the first he'd written since the late '50's, and unfortunately his last. This is one of Dick's most beautiful novels, based on his real-life relationship with the semi-famous Bishop Pike, and features many of the same themes that permeate Valis and The Divine Invasion, although they are much more toned down and based in reality here.

Maze of Death was published four years prior to his experiences in '74, and the only reason I can think of as to why it's included is that there's definitely a religious bent to it. It sort of serves as a springboard for his later works. Plus, it's one of Dick's greatest novels, and absolutely had to be included somewhere in these LOA releases. Maze features many of the same concepts as his previous novel, Ubik, in that there are a group of people trapped in a world that may not be what it appears at first to be. Suffice to say, if you like Ubik, you should definitely like this as well. It is perhaps my favorite pre-'74 work of his.

The book itself is absolutely beautiful, with great annotations and a chronology of Dick's life at the end. The typeface is smaller than the Vintage trade paperbacks, but in my opinion not much smaller than your average mass-market paperback.As an example of the print size, the stories here are about 20 pages shorter than their Vintage counterparts.

All in all, this is definitely a collection all Philip K. Dick fans should purchase. Though a newer fan may want to start with one of the previous two releases from LOA, anybody familiar with his style should have no trouble comprehending anything here. And once you turn the final page, you just may see the world a little differently than you did before.

The Master scores again
These last efforts by P. Dick are worthy of his best and vary in depth and setting, plot and characters which show his mastery as a novelist and writer, not just in science fiction.

Essential reading
Philip K. Dick spent most of his life relegated to cult status, often with most of his novels out-of-print. I remember trying to find his work in the 70's and 80's. Back then it seemed far-fetched, paranoid and dystopian in nature, but awesome just the same. Today a lot of his work seems drawn from the headlines of current newspapers and each year his work is held in higher esteem. Yes, we've reached the point of critical overload, where, if you haven't read some of his work, you should. Dick is essential reading for the 21st century.

I'm not sure if I completely agree with the previous reviewer about the need to start with one of the previous volumes. With few exceptions, you can't go wrong with any of Dick's novels. And none of the exceptions are present in any of the Library of the Americas volumes. Perhaps the best idea is to pre-order the box set. If you've never read him before, you are in for a real treat. I envy you. Enjoy!

A great sample of Dick's later novels built to last.
Let me start off by saying this is not for people new to Dick: if you want to get one of the LOA volumes to see if you like him, get one of the first two volumes, four novels of the sixties or five novels of the sixties and seventies. This one is more for people who are already a fan and want to become acquainted with his later, weirder writings. A Maze of Death and The Divine Invasion are closer to his traditional stuff, but VALIS and Transmigration are much different. They're just as good as his other stuff, but not very good as starting points. However, if you've read and enjoyed him, it's very interesting to see his religious views (or lack of) in VALIS, and to see he can write something other than Sci-Fi with Transmigration.
I highly recommend buying this collection: It would be cheaper than buying the individual novels and because of the marvelous binding it will surely last. ... Read more

Product Description

Electronic mechanic Jennings wakes up with no memory of the past two years of his life -- except that he had agreed to work for Retherick Construction.Payment for his services, now completed, is a bag of seemingly worthless objects: a code key, a ticket stub, a receipt, a length of wire, half a poker chip, a piece of green cloth and a bus token.But when he is confronted by the Special Police, who seem to be investigating Retherick for their own reasons, Jennings finds himself running for his life, realizing that the "worthless" objects are the key to unlocking his recent past, and ensuring that he has a future.

Viewed by many as the greatest science fiction writer on any planet, Philip K. Dick has written some of the most intriguing, original and thought-provoking fiction of our time.He has been described by The Wall Street Journal as the man who, "More than anyone else…really puts you inside people’s minds."

Customer Reviews (6)

Awesome collection, but...
This is a GREAT collection of Phillip K. Dick's earliest short stories. Great writing all around. My only complaint is that there is a very repetitive feel as Dick is obsessed with two topics: war, and "what does 'human' really mean?" If you don't mind having the same points driven home page after page, it's a winner.

J.Ja

Nice book...good collection.
My husband turned me onto this author.It is definitely science fiction and I thought I would hate it, but I found several short stories in it I liked.They are really thought provoking.My husband bought this book and I know he would give it 5 stars, so I did.This is a nice change from a long, chaptered story, because you can jump around and pick and choose the longer and shorter ones depending on what time frame you are looking at.The stores run in length from 4 pages to 15 pages just to give you an idea.

Good BOok.
It's a good collection. It is true that this is a reissue, however there are plenty of people who have never seen it before. (Including Me.)

The story Paycheck is completely different from the movie, in ALL manners. Also, it includes a ton of good stories, even if a few aren't the best. The forward also helps.

It's just a VERY good Sci-Fi book. Enough said. Beyond the Wub is priceless.

Not really a review, but...
I just wanted to inform that this is the same "The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol. 1", published before under the titles "Beyond Lies the Wub" or "The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford". I think it would be much easier to find this new edition, but this title is listed as "by Steven Owen Godersky" and not "by Philip K. Dick". If you already own the collection (or this particular volume), there is no need to buy it - the content is exactly the same. I am referring to the ISBN 0806526300 in this review, not the 0575070013 - so pay attention when you buy it.

Entertaining Collection
While this is a reissue of an earlier publication, this story collection is an excellent first book for those new to Philip K. Dick, as I was.In his forward to this edition, Dick writes that good science fiction must offer the reader a truly new idea and "it must be intellectually stimulating to the reader; it must invade his [or her] mind and wake it up to the possibility of something[s]he had not up to then thought of."(The brackets are mine.)

If we accept Dick's definition of good sci-fi, then this is truly good.The collection contains no stories that are "bad," and many that are outstanding.My favorites include "The Skull," the "Infinites," "The Variable Man," and "Beyond Lies the Wub."

If you don't yet own a story collection of Dick's, this one would be a good place to start. ... Read more

Product Description
Many thousands of readers consider Philip K. Dick the greatest science fiction mind on any planet. Since his untimely death in 1982, interest in Dick's works has continued to mount and his reputation has been further enhanced by a growing body of critical attention. The Philip K. Dick Award is now given annually to a distinguished work of science fiction, and the Philip K. Dick Society is devoted to the study and promulgation of his works.

This collection includes all of the writer's earliest short and medium-length fiction (including some previously unpublished stories) covering the years 1952-1955. These fascinating stories include Second Variety, Foster, You're Dead and The Father-Thing, and many others.

"A useful acquisition for any serious SF library or collection". -- Kirkus

"The collected stories of Philip K. Dick is awe inspiring". -- The Washington Post

"More than anyone else in the field, Mr. Dick really puts you inside people's minds". -- Wall Street Journal ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

The real surreal
What is there to say? It is PKD in mid-career short story mode. A must for fans of sci-fi with a human basis, fans of the surreal, or readers who are just ready for some very interesting, well written change of pace. The man is a master.

Considerable Overlap!
I just wanted to make everyone that might be interested in this excellent book aware that there is considerable overlap between it and The PKD Reader:

-= The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Volume 3 (Second Variety) =-
1. Fair Game
2. The Hanging Stranger
3. The Eyes have it
4. The Golden Man
5. The Turning Wheel
6. The Last of the Masters
7. The Father-Thing
8. Strange Eden
9. Tony and the Beetles
10. Null-O
11. To Serve the Master
12. Exhibit Piece
13. The Crawlers
14. Sales Pitch
15. Shell Game
16. Upon the Dull Earth
17. Foster, you're dead
18. Pay for the Printer
19. War Veteran
20. The Chromium Fence
21. Misadjustment
22. Psi-Man Heal My Child!
23. Second Variety

-= The Philip K. Dick Reader =-
1. Fair Game
2. The Hanging Stranger
3. The Eyes have it
4. The Golden Man
5. The Turning Wheel
6. The Last of the Masters
7. The Father-Thing
8. Strange Eden
9. Tony and the Beetles
10. Null-O
11. To Serve the Master
12. Exhibit Piece
13. The Crawlers
14. Sales Pitch
15. Shell Game
16. Upon the Dull Earth
17. Foster, you're dead
18. Pay for the Printer
19. War Veteran
20. The Chromium Fence
21. We can remember it for you wholesale
22. The Minority Report
23. Paycheck
24. Second Variety

So if you already have The PKD Reader you might not want to purchase this book (and vice-versa).

A must
Philip K. Dick's novels I read long ago. And have reread many since. So believe me when I tell you what a treat it is to finally get around to reading some of his short stories. Even if you're not primarily a PKD fan; maybe you're an aficionado of the short story, and this book comes up in the 'we recommend for you ' list. Take it as serendipitous that you've made it this far and buy this book. You will not regret it.

The Third Volume Of An Amazing Collection
In May of 1987 Underwood-Miller published a five volume set titled "The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick".The third volume of the collection was subtitled "The Father-Thing".In April of 1991 the Carroll Group republished the third volume changing the subtitle to "Second Variety".In addition to the change of title this volume now contains the story "Second Variety" which was originally in the second volume of the Underwood-Miller set.It seems clear that they made these changes in order to take advantage of the release of "Total Recall", which was around the time of the Carroll Group's re-release of the second volume of the series, and that did have the cascading effect of destroying the chronological approach that the original set of books used, but that doesn't change the fact that this is an excellent series of books and well worth owning by anyone who loves science fiction.Ultimately, this book contains the same stories as volume 3 in the original set, with the addition of "Second Variety" as the last story in the book.

There are 24 stories in this book, with a greater number of longer stories than were in the first two volumes of the series.While Dick's short stories are excellent, the novelette length gives him a bit more room to really explore some of his ideas, something which he uses to great effect in several of this book's stories.One theme which appears in several of the stories here is that of mutation.Dick clearly rejected John W. Campbell Jr.'s idea that mutations should always be viewed as good and leading humanity into the future.This idea is central to stories like "The Golden Man" , "A World of Talent", and "Psi-man Heal My Child", though that is not to say that Dick viewed mutations as bad either, simply that he used a more balanced and realistic approach to the subject.

Another theme which appears in several stories in this volume is that of humanity losing control of their technology, and we see this in such stories as "The Last of the Masters",
"To Serve the Master", and the title story "Second Variety", which was the basis for the 1996 film "Screamers".Along the same lines, we see mankind on the brink of elimination in stories like "Tony and the Beetles", and "Pay for the Printer" along with several of the stories which I had already mentioned.It is not surprising that Dick revisited many of these ideas over and over, as most authors do.Dick also had an incredible output of stories during the early fifties was incredible, with nearly all of the stories in the first three volumes were written between 1952 and 1954, so again one would expect a fair amount of repeated themes.What is surprising is that he manages to make the stories fresh by taking the reader in different directions each time.

This is a great volume in a great collection of Philip K. Dick's work.While changed slightly from the original collection, which was ranked 3rd on the Locus poll for collections in 1988, the completeness of the collection is still in tact.Outside of the stories I have already listed, there are other very good ones as well, such as "The Father-Thing", "Foster, You're Dead", and "Shell Game".The longer stories in this volume put it in front of the first two volumes in terms of the overall quality, but the whole series is certainly worthwhile.

A Must for the Dick Fan and a Good Introduction to PKD
There would be little point in giving a synopsis of each of the 24 stories in this book.That would give a false sense of repetition since many feature images of ash and overturned bathtubs -- the aftermath of nuclear war -- or struggles between mutants and normal humans, each fearing their extinction.But they don't seem any more repetitious than a skilled musician working variations on a theme for that is what many are.These stories, written in 1953 and 1954 -- with one exception, are arranged chronologically, so the student of Dick can see him play with an idea for two or three stories in a row.

Along the way we get the humor, intricate plotting, and sudden reversals in our moral sympathies characteristic of Dick.And there are the machines that so often are a force of death in Dick though they behave more and more like life.Such is the case with the title story, one of Dick's most paranoid and basis for the movie _Screamers_.When sophisticated weapons take on human guise and began to stalk man, what Dick calls his grand theme, knowing who is human and who only pretends to be, is starkly exhibited.

Other famous stories are "The Golden Man" with its purging of mutants before they infect the human gene pool, "The Father-Thing" which is what a boy realizes has replaced his real father, and "Sales Pitch", a story which anticipates, with its all purpose android advertising its virtues through rather thuggish means, the work of Ron Goulart.

There are some memorable stories not so well known."Foster, You're Dead" was originally conceived as a protest against a remark by President Eisenhower that citizens should be responsible for their own bomb shelters.Its young hero lives terrified in a world where making knives from scratch and digging underground shelters are parts of the school curriculum and each new year brings the newest model of bomb shelter, terrified because his father can't afford to buy one for the family."War Veteran" reads like a futuristic _Mission Impossible_ episode.The spirit of Charles Fort may be at work in "Null-O", a satire on the absurd philosophy that no distinctions between things are valid, a philosophy practiced by "perfect paranoids".(Fort may have inspired the weakest and first story in the collection, "Fair Game", with its van Vogtian plotting giving way at the end to a silly twist.)

Dick fans will see "Shell Game", with its colony of paranoids, as sort of a test run for Dick's _Clans of the Alphane Moon_, and the time jumping child of "A World of Talent" is reminiscent of Manfred Steiner in Dick's _Martian Time-Slip_.This collection also features one of Dick's occasional fantasies, "Upon the Dull Earth".

Any admirer of Dick will want to read this collection, and those needing an introduction to his work will find no bad stories in this exhibit of 14 months in Dick's career. ... Read more

Product Description
On the arid colony of Mars the only thing more precious than water may be a ten-year-old schizophrenic boy named Manfred Steiner. For although the UN has slated "anomalous" children for deportation and destruction, other people--especially Supreme Goodmember Arnie Kott of the Water Worker's union--suspect that Manfred's disordermay be a window into the future. In Martian Time-Slip Philip K. Dick uses power politics and extraterrestrial real estate scams, adultery, and murder to penetrate the mysteries of being and time. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (44)

Haunting Sci-Fi Work
Philip K. Dick is a sci-fi legend for a reason. He was able to envision the future in his books while still focusing on the most important aspects of any story--characters that are compelling and a plot that grabs the reader's attention. This work offers a good deal of insight into the human condition. Dick gives us glances at real estate speculation, autism, education, global and union politics, mental illness, suicide, race relations, the nature of time-travel, amongst other things. While the book starts off slow, Dick is able to show that while times and locales may change, the human heart does not. While fans of action plots or hard sci-fi will be less than satisfied with the work, casual readers of the genre will enjoy it. Fans of the author will also enjoy it and recognize its value as Dick started creating works that, in many ways, transcend the genre. While Dick has a breezy style, I would not recommend this work to readers who skim through works. If not read closely, parts of the time jump scenes will be confusing.

Six or seven rewrites later and somehow they wound up with "Mars Attacks"
Manfred Steiner can see the future and it horrifies him.Arnie Kott sees the future and knows that nothing but opportunity lies ahead, if you can just grease the right palms and have the right vision.Both of them want to change the future and only one of them can.Manfred is autustic and barely able to communicate, Arnie is perfectly normal, as far as people go, even if he's a bit ambitious.They live on Mars.This is their story.It's not going to end well for one of them.

One thing we've seen with the latter day Mars stories is that they tend to concentrate on the hard science aspects of going to Mars, with the human consequence of it, while important, taking a second place.Kim Stanley Robinson's famed Mars Trilogy managed to work on both aspects fairly well, even if it did veer more into science by the end of it, and there's a whole host of other stories that have tried to slip their way in a maze of technical descriptions about terraforming and actual human emotions.Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles" dispensed with that entirely and sort of just went with the feel of moving to an alien world and slowly replacing the people that used to live there.

Dick's novel sort of takes the middle ground, with the Martian colony already set up and running, giving him room to focus more on the people who live there and what they go through to live there.Most of it is dreary and depressing and grey, but it's life all the same, which seems to be a constant theme for Dick (it crops up again in "Man in the High Castle", which on some level is about Life As We Know It being radically different but focusing on the people who get by from day to day) . . . the novel is essentially an ensemble piece, with Arnie Kott being the focal point that most of the events seem to rotate around.He's the leader of the local union, and a bit of a hustler, making sure that he has the best in black market goods, women, and so on.But he'd like more and when he comes across Manfred, and a doctor's theories that autistic kids are just experiencing time at a different rate than we are, he decides this might come in handy.

We meet a cast of characters, all of which are connected to each other in ways that don't seem obvious, giving the events a sense of inevitability, as one character's suicide makes other events possible, as interrelations between the others send the story along to its conclusion.Dick plays with perception quite a bit, especially toward the middle and end parts, with the book feeling like it's going off the rails (there's at least one of those moments in any Dick novel, where you feel like he's lost you entirely by shifting into a different plane of thought) in one sequence where repair guy Jack Bohlen goes to a party with Arnie and his mistress.Meanwhile we're treated to views of everyone else from Manfred's point of view, which is just as warped as you might imagine.

People expecting action or anything like that are probably in the wrong spot and definitely with the wrong author.Dick's skill was questioning how we interpret reality and perhaps how he interpreted reality, in putting individuals over collective authorities and putting forward a fluid view of Time.The novel is spare, the characters are downtrodden, the view of the future bleak no matter who is looking at it, and Dick seems to be suggesting, like a song from "Avenue Q", that everyone is a little bit schizophrenic.

SF critic John Clute once compared this to the writing of William Faulkner and said it was bleak and depressing but also hideously and hilariously funny . . . I can't say there are many laugh out loud moments but there is a certain black humor in everyone just deciding that giving up seems like too much work so they might as well go on anyway.It doesn't pack the strongest punch of his novels but it excels in making Mars seem like the grimy modernity of our world, just one step removed to another landscape, and that sense of construction in its details that pushes it toward a conclusion that is completely impossible to avoid.You're going to get the future one way or another, it just may not be the one you want or expect.

A difficult exploration of the human condition
While dealing with the common, indeed one might even say overworked and mundane, concept of a human colony on Mars, "Martian Time-Slip"also delves into the realm of mental illness, including schizophrenia and autism. Philip K Dick raises the interesting speculation that mental illness may arise because those afflicted somehow interact (or, in the case of autism, are unable to interact) with the world through an entirely altered perception of the flow of time.

Many sci-fi readers (and this comment probably includes myself) are used to a somewhat more action-oriented story. From this rather limited perspective, one can say that "Martian Time-Slip" is built around an exceptionally imaginative and rather exciting plot idea.

Arnie Kott, one of the upper crust of the fairly recently established Martian colony, has heard a rumour that the United Nations is planning to build an enormous apartment complex in the hitherto worthless Franklin D Roosevelt mountain range on Mars. Part of the rumour is Kott's understanding that Leo Bohlen, a wealthy entrepreneur from earth, has already arrived on Mars and is well on his way to establishing a claim to the land in the mountain range that will supercede all others.

Other events in the story lead Kott to the belief that Manfred Steiner, a severely autistic child, suffers from this debilitating mental illness as a result of an altered perception of the flow of time. When he also learns that the Bleekmen, the local aboriginal population, believe that "Dirty Knobby", one of their holy places, may be a portal into time that is accessible to the likes of Manfred Steiner, Kott seeks to use Steiner to go back in time to ensure he places a claim on the contested land in the FDR Range before Bohlen arrives.

However, instead of focusing on this tremendously innovative plot-line as a story, Dick has used the plot merely as a background against which he has chosen to explore the themes of mental illness, loneliness, greed, isolation, lust, racism, hopelessness and prejudice. The same events are repeated in the story on several occasions but are shown as they might be observed through the perceptions of different participants in the story. I'm more than willing to admit that this may be my own shortcoming as a reader but, frankly, I found the multiple points of view exceedingly difficult to follow to the point where I was unable to determine exactly what was happening. Was I reading about events moving forward or was this a recapitulation of something that had already taken place but looked at through somebody else's eyes?

I was also dismayed by the fact that the science involved with life in a Martian colony seemed virtually non-existent. With very little alteration, Dick's story could have taken place in an arbitrary 1950's earth location that involved previously undeveloped land and a local aboriginal population. Mars, in effect, became entirely irrelevant!

Many readers might suggest that it is Dick's rather novel exploration of the human condition that makes "Martian Time-Slip" a revered classic of the genre. For my money, I just found it tedious and a difficult novel to finish. Not recommended.

Paul Weiss

Not great but maybe worth reading...
Ok, it's a PKDick book, so it's full of ideas and nice touches but it's not nearly as good as some of his others. The plot is weak, (as PKD himself admitted) the characters aren't great and some of the dialogue is absolutely cringe-worthy.

If you haven't read them I would suggest: Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch or Maze of Death instead, they follow similar themes (with less emphasis on the study of schizophrenia) as Martian Time Slip but are much better, more interesting works.

Many ways to take this....
This is a difficult book to discuss without revealing spoilers, but I'd like to say it's quite a bit more than what some of the reviewers here suggest.

This is more than just a book about Mars colonies and inventive ways of understanding schizophrenia.As usual, Dick is creating a world where so many layers intertwine and interconnect, that at the end, one might feel a little confused, wondering what the point was.

I don't know if I have it all "figured out" but in this book Dick creates a convincing and unnerving inner-portrait of schizophrenia, mixed in with themes of "history repeating itself" and a healthy dose of "predestination vs. freewill."

It's a brooding story, but clear, and bright like the Martian landscape he describes.It raises at least as many questions as it answers, but I think many questions can be filled in, such as where did the original Martians ("the Bleekmen") come from?Somehow they are both our present and our past, this much is clear, though its ominous and disconcerting that it is never entirely explained.

Like most PKD stories, this novel tends to dig in and live a bit in your psyche long after the initial reading. ... Read more

Product Description
Bob Arctor is a dealer of the lethally addictive drug Substance D. Fred is the police agent assigned to tail and eventually bust him. To do so, Fred takes on the identity of a drug dealer named Bob Arctor. And since Substance D--which Arctor takes in massive doses--gradually splits the user's brain into two distinct, combative entities, Fred doesn't realize he is narcing on himself.

Caustically funny, eerily accurate in its depiction of junkies, scam artists, and the walking brain-dead, Philip K. Dick's industrial-grade stress test of identity is as unnerving as it is enthralling.Amazon.com Review
Mind- and reality-bending drugs factor again and again inPhilip K. Dick's hugely influential SF stories. A ScannerDarkly cuts closest to the bone, drawing on Dick's own experiencewith illicit chemicals and on his many friends who died from drugabuse. Nevertheless, it's blackly farcical, full of comic-surrealconversations between people whose synapses are partly fried, suddenflights of paranoid logic, and bad trips like the one whose victimspends a subjective eternity having all his sins read to him, inshifts, by compound-eyed aliens. (It takes 11,000 years of this toreach the time when as a boy he discovered masturbation.) The antiheroBob Arctor is forced by his double life into warring doublepersonalities: as futuristic narcotics agent "Fred," face blurred by ahigh-tech scrambler, he must spy on and entrap suspected drug dealerBob Arctor. His disintegration under the influence of the insidiousSubstance D is genuine tragicomedy. For Arctor there's no way off theaddict's downward escalator, but what awaits at the bottom is a kindof redemption--there are more wheels within wheels than we suspected,and his life is not entirely wasted. --David Langford,Amazon.co.uk ... Read more

Customer Reviews (135)

Surreal, Drug Addled, Paranoid
I thought this was going to be more science fiction oriented book. While there weresome elements of that if I had to describe it to somebody I would be more inclined to use words like surreal, drug addled, paranoid. In a Scanner Darkly you have a cop, who is also working undercover as a drug dealer, and he's been assigned to take out the drug dealer who just happens to be himself. He has also completely fried his brain on the imaginary drug of the novel known as "Substance D". I'd have to say this book has more in common with Huxleys Brave New World and Orwells 1984 with a 70s stoner influence than any science fiction I've ever read. The story loses me in a few spots but overall I thought it was an entertaining book worth reading.

"Echolalia, Bruce, Echolalia"
Once a guy hit his head while he was taking out the corn popper. In a split second, he decided to abandon his current life and start a new life, not to mention a secret life along with it. I'm not sure which came first - the new life or the secret life - or even which is which - but all sorts of drugs were involved, and somewhere along the way, each of his selves developed their own secrets which were kept from each other, and due to the competitive natures of his brain's halves, the only sure thing was inevitable oblivion. But before that comes a pure understanding of reality, of time as a loop, of a reflection of a reflection of reality, and other relativities. Do you remember the part in The Man in the High Castle when the fan tells the writer the truth about his story? She might have explained it better if she'd handed him a copy of A Scanner Darkly. PKD, as you might know, was obsessed with the idea that his own timeline (and memories) had been altered without his knowledge. Another idea which gripped him was that time was not a line at all, but rather "round." That he was, for example, living among Romans about 2,000 years ago, but that maybe he wasn't plucked from that setting - maybe the setting had been altered around him, so that he believed he was living in the 1960's. The roundness of time is better expressed in Scanner than in The Man... with such theories such as, "The First and Second Coming of Christ are the same event." I think the film with Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson, and Robert Downey, Jr., will be quite impressive, if the director stayed true to the novel. (Please, for a change, can we have a PKD film that resembles the novel!) Dialogue and characterization are two of the things he does best, and I expect to see that reflected in the film; as well, I hope his passion, his message, and his take on reality are treated with care.

p.s. Fans of Valis, Radio Free Albemoth, and The Divine Invasion will be happy to see the return of the pink rectangle of light on the wall!

didn't see the film but love the graphic novel
i paid considerably more (several dollars) for this hardback adaptation of the film . i consider it money well spent . others will tell you why . DICK was an excellent author . get this book . you may enjoy it more if you don't have the film in your head . not to say it wasn't excellent too . can't beat these prices . you've seen other PHILIP K. DICK works turned into film . it's hardly a gamble . very interesting .

Love Never Fails
We're coming into the home stretch, folks.You and I have gone through some of Philip K. Dick's best work, such as "Martian Time-Slip" and "Dr. Bloodmoney" and "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch ".There are only a few PKD novels left, and I've saved some of the best for last.Of "A Scanner Darkly", for instance, the author said "I believe it is a masterpiece.I believe it is the only masterpiece I will ever write."Wow.

In old usage, a "masterpiece" was a piece of work that a journeyman put together to advance to the rank of master within a guild.By that measure, Philip K. Dick was a master long before he wrote "A Scanner Darkly" in 1973.Nevertheless, this novel marks a sort of leap in his skill.He was always concerned with some pretty big issues, such as the need for empathy and the question of what makes a human being.He also returned to certain themes several times, including drugs, paranoia and the uncertain nature of what we call reality.In this novel, he dug deeper into all of these matters than maybe at any time before.What's more, while he always seemed to love his characters and grieve over their pain, he clearly took "A Scanner Darkly" much more personally.In his Afterword, he goes so far as to say "I am not a character in this novel, I am the novel."It shows.

Like a lot of great sf, but unlike most of PKD's speculative work, "A Scanner Darkly" reads pretty much like a mainstream novel except for the few technological developments.In this case, there are two such advances, if you can call them that.The first, since this is PKD, is a new recreational drug.It's called Substance D, and it's scary.It gets you high in some fashion, but if you take it, you run the risk of dividing the hemispheres of your brain so that they don't work together anymore.They function separately, or in extreme cases compete with each other.Either way, that's pretty much it.You thought you had one personality?Guess again.

The other technological advance is something called a scramble suit, which is composed of a material that broadcasts a huge number of facial and body features on its surface.Put it on and you're a vague blur that no one can identify.Very useful for undercover narcotics officers; in anonymity lies their security.

So one day Bob Arctor, a Substance D addict and undercover officer (who's called "Fred" when in his scramble suit), receives orders from his superiors (who don't know who he is) to bug the home of Bob Arctor the suspected dealer and collect evidence to be used against him at trial.Because he is an addict, and because the use of the scramble suit confuses him even beyond the drug's effects, he shortly loses track of himself and begins to suspect that Bob Arctor might really be a dealer.The activities of his paranoid housemate Jim Barris don't help his state of mind, and neither do his growing feelings for his friend Donna.

In short, both Substance D and the scramble suit tend to divide a person's personality into two untenable parts, and Bob Arctor has to deal with both technologies under increasing emotional tension.Like most great novels, then, the various parts of "A Scanner Darkly" work together to reinforce each other until you can't put the thing down.But does that make it a masterpiece?

Not by itself.While all of these wheels within wheels spin around and around, though, Bob Arctor and his friends maneuver through the precisely described physical world of Anaheim, California, with all its prefabricated plastic fast-food joints and gas stations and similarly denatured landscapes.With a few exceptions, they're actually very nice people - you wouldn't think a bunch of head cases could live together peacefully for any length of time, but with a few exceptions they do.Masterful characters in a masterful setting.

Also, this may be PKD's finest prose.He always wrote very fast, and therefore his style could get a little crude, but in 1973 his output had slowed.He took his time.He placed the information he wanted to convey into his characters' thoughts rather than in his own authorial voice, which makes his wild ideas touching rather than simply interesting.So when you discover that some character, by chemical means, has entered into a whole new mode of perception but can't communicate it to anyone, it's almost enough to make you cry.

If you ask me, the most devastating aspect of "A Scanner Darkly" is the way the characters hope for a better world even while the one they inhabit crumbles around them, either because of the effects of Substance D on their personalities or because of what they're forced to do to survive.The novel's title, of course, rings a change on the famous passage from 1 Corinthians in which Paul says that although we now perceive as through a glass darkly, one day we will see clearly.The rest of the chapter implies that when our perception is thus cleared up, we will experience _agape_, what the Jews call _chesed_, or selfless love.It's the kind of love that Bob Arctor, watching his mind crumble away, surrounded in his own home by police videoscanners that see him at all times but don't know him at all, continues to believe in.

The author informs us in his Afterword that many of his characters were based on people he knew - he lists several of them along with their various fates, mostly death, brain damage or psychosis.He says he loved them all, and in "A Scanner Darkly" he did right by them.You bet it's a masterpiece.

Benshlomo says, You don't stop loving people just because they mess up.

Highly Recommend
I only discovered Dick and his work by the film adaptations that were inevitably made. A Scanner Darkly, much like most books that get made into movies, gives the viewer a much deeper and thorough perspective into a particular universe. I found this book to be much more involved and (in some cases) MUCH darker than the film.

I had seen A Scanner Darkly (the film) before, and I couldn't have helped but feel that it was merely a series of events that only barely became more than just a sum of its parts at the end. A quality film, worth watching just for the visuals, but it certainly could be confusing. The book however, seems to roll at a much-easier-to-digest pace. I rarely if ever found myself lost amongst the seedy, drug-laced, atmosphere.

It's entertaining, and perhaps more importantly, it's written well, something that tends to be harder to find in science fiction. Philip K Dick may not always what he wants to say, but he certainly knows HOW he wants to say it. This book does a good job of bridging the gap between sci fi and literature.

Really, if you even remotely enjoyed the film, you'll find something to like here. ... Read more

Product Description
In The Postmodern Humanism of Philip K. Dick, Jason Vest examines how Dick adapted the conventions of science fiction and postmodernism to reflect humanist concerns about the difficulties of maintaining identity, agency, and autonomy in the latter half of the 20th century. Vest also explores Dick's literary relationship to Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino. ... Read more