THE COSMIC PUPPETS

This is the only full-lenth fantasy that Dick wrote; the rest are either science fiction or mainstream. But this present-day small-town setting in which magic works has much in common with his many future worlds in which the magic is supplied by altered states of consciousness, time paradoxes, and alien gods. Here a man named Ted Barton returns to his hometown of Millgate, Virginia, for the first time since he was a child, and finds that the streets, landmarks, stores, and people are all different. Although all small American towns are interchangeable to some extent, this goes too far, particularly when he finds an old newspaper record of his death at age nine. Somehow Barton has entered an alternate universe, one in which he is no longer supposed to exist. He becomes obsessed with the need to verify his own existence, and soon discovers himself in the middle of a sort of Armageddon, where the cosmic forces of darkness and light are fighting it out. This is an early Dick novel that prefigures many of the themes of his later fiction, and is consistently entertaining.

SOLAR LOTTERY              

Dick’s first published novel, Solar Lottery (1955) is impressive and original. It was much influenced by several famous sf novels--A. E. van Vogt’s complexly plotted World of Null-A, Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian black comedy Player Piano, and Alfred Bester’s pyrotechnic novel of telepathic police The Demolished Man. Solar Lottery is not unworthy of being mentioned in their company. It is not quite a typical Dick novel: it lacks the humor of the later works, as well as the theme of reality breakdown, but it is quite effective on its own terms. Dick foresaw a world where all power is concentrated in the hands of the government and private corporations. A great quiz game which decides the leader, but it is rigged against the powerless. Furthermore, the system, with its built-in structure of killing its own leaders, decrees that nothing lasts or should last. In its dark, complex picture of power relationships, this novel is totally relevant today.

THE WORLD JONES MADE

One of Dick’s early novels, The World Jones Made (1956) has well-realized characters and psychological complexity, but lacks a coherent plot focus. Without the reality breakdowns, multi-focal viewpoints, robots, and time paradoxes of Dick’s later pyrotechnic creations, it ranks as a minor work in the PKD canon but is interesting for what it tries to do, showing a blackly ironic rise and fall of a man called Jones. Jones, whose character is based on Hitler, is a “precog” who can see the future, and builds up a mass movement to oppose the prevailing state ideology of Relativism. The Jews’ role here is played by the Drifters, a harmless race of amoeba-like aliens, who represent the universe Jones wants to conquer. Jones is opposed by Cussick, the policeman, who is the voice of conventional, commonsense reality. But Jones is like Cussick’s alter ego, and the two men’s lives are entwined in complex and surprising ways. The psychology of the policeman and the unhappy marriage of the protagonist are elements to be found in a number of Dick’s later books. Here there is a somewhat contrived positive ending, but what impresses is Dick’s precognitive vision, which has been shown time and again in the years since the 50s to be right on the mark politically, sociologically, and philosophically.

EYE IN THE SKY

Eye in the Sky is an early Dick novel, first published in 1957, and I think of it as the first, and most accessible book in a thematic group on the subject of reality breakdown which also includes The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, and Valis. Sparkling with brilliant humor and memorable, characterizations, Eye in the Sky thrusts a group of eight people, lying unconscious after a freak accident in a particle accelerator, into the bizarre alternate universes existing within each other's minds. One of the group, an old war veteran, is a fanatical member of a racist, fundamentalist Islamic cult (was Dick a little bit ahead of his time?). In the veteran's reality, religious charms, holy water, and prayers actually work. The hero ascends to heaven on an umbrella, where he finds to his amazement that the universe is geocentric, and God is a gigantic, malevolent eye. That scene fascinated me as a boy when I first read the cheap Ace paperback version (with Valigursky's wonderful cover painting of a huge eyeball) in the late 50s, and over the years I have re-read (and rebought) the book many times. This is a work that breaks boundaries; it conveys a powerful experience that  the world as perceived through the senses is a veil of illusion, like the maya of Indian philosophy. Matter is but mind stuff, and even our stable identities are temporary cohesions in the flux. Psychedelic? Definitely. The ending is a bit more upbeat than in some of Dick's other books. After the trip, we are back on dry land. Or so it seems. One can never be fully sure again after reading Eye in the Sky.

THE MAN WHO JAPED

This was an early attempt by Dick to infuse humor into his science-fiction novels. A minor novel by the standards of his mature work, its flashes of originality and light touches of satire more than compensate for the contrived and improbable plot elements. The novel is set in a society based on the ideology of Morec (Moral Reclamation). Morec regulates individual morality through compulsory block meetings, in which one’s friends and neighbors have the opportunity to take one to task for sexual peccadilloes or other lapses from puritanical conformity. Dick based his critique of the state as moral policemen on the structure of Chinese communism. It is not difficult, however, to see the roots of satire in American society, which has a long history of repression, from the Puritans to the Moral Majority. The protagonist is a man working for the media that promotes Morec, but he finds himself unconsciously japing, making fun of, the symbols of the regime. The most interesting part of the novel is when, after he is subjected to reprogramming, he suffers a breakdown in which his entire reality disappears. This episode prefigures themes that will become central in later Dick novels such as Ubik and Valis.

TIME OUT OF JOINT

Although technically a science-fiction book, Time Out of Joint (1959) reads more like a strange hybrid of science fiction and the mainstream realist novels Dick was also writing at the time. The major part of the story takes place in a small town, rendered with much more detailed texture of description and characterization than in any of Dick’s sf novels to that date. Dick throws out many tantalizing clues throughout the first part of the book that this version of the fifties is not quite the one we know. But it is an excellent imitation, aided by the fact that all the residents of the town have been hypnotized to believe they are living in the sleepy Eisenhower-era of the 1950s. The main character, Ragle Gumm, starts to break out of his hypnosis and realizes there is a conspiracy to keep him in ignorance. In one of Dick’s most famous scenes, a soft-drink stand disappears and in its place is found a slip of paper that says “soft-drink stand.” The book is a powerful comment on the fragile nature of reality as well as a reminder that sometimes the paranoid is simply perceiving the situation accurately.

DR. FUTURITY

Although it would have to be called one of Dick’s weaker novels, Dr. Futurity, first published in 1960, is still a lot of fun. It concerns a present-day doctor who is plucked into the future by a tribe of Indians with time-travel technology. In their world the healing arts have been lost, since the ideal of dying to make room for an improved breed of humanity has displaced the value of living one’s own life. The Indians, however, are inspired by a fanatical and paranoid leader, who is lying mortally wounded, on whom they wish the doctor to operate. In his effort to save the man, the doctor is thrust into a series of ingenious time paradoxes, which can be seen as a warm-up for the far richer novels Martian Time-Slip (1964) and Now Wait for Last Year (1966).

VULCAN'S HAMMER

This minor novel in Dick’s oeuvre is the tale of a giant computer, Vulcan 3, to which humanity has acceded absolute power over the fate of the world. Its flying “hammers” are deadly extensions of itself, spying on everybody and killing whomever it perceives as a threat. One needs to be very paranoid indeed to survive against this paranoid machine. Vulcan 3 is not as memorable a character as another killer computer, HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both, however, are representations of the disembodied intellect becoming self-aware and preempting the unmechanical wisdom of the feelings. Vulcan is a metaphor for the failure of the rational thinking mind to integrate the irrational feeling side of the personality. The result is that the ego is mechanized, or Vulcanized, and the wrath of the fire god is visited upon a self-destructive humanity.