THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE

Winner of the Hugo Award in 1962, the basic premise of this book is irresistible: that there is an alternate universe in which Germany and Japan won World War II. Philosophically, the book has proved deep enough to spark plenty of critical debate, and its use of the I Ching helped popularize that five-thousand-year-old Chinese oracle in America in the 1960s. Naziism is portrayed as an unmitigated evil, the yang to Japan’s yin, and the Japanese come off much better in comparison, becoming humane rulers in the world of the novel, which is set in California. Even more interesting than the alternate history scenario are the questions the novel raises about ontological priority—which reality is real and which fake? Are we the ones living in the fictitious reality? Additionally, the characters are memorable and subtly drawn. Their lives touch tangentially in a fascinating dance. The narrative point of view switches among them, often in a stream-of-consciousness mode, in one of Dick’s most successful uses of the multi-focal technique.

WE CAN BUILD YOU              

This is a transitional work between Dick’s mainstream novels of the 1950s and the science fiction of the 1960s, as the science-fictional element is de-emphasized in favor of psychological themes. Written in 1962, its first book publication was not until 1972. Critics usually unfairly regard We Can Build You as an artistic failure because what seems to be the main plot of the book—the story of a company that produces simulacra, or lifelike androids of historical Civil War figures—bit by bit dissolves into exclusive focus on the narrator Louis Rosen’s obsessive love for his partner’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Pris Frauenzimmer. Certainly Dick will confound those expecting conventional narrative unity, for this is an experimental novel masquerading as straight science fiction. As Louis descends into schizophrenia, the center of interest shifts from the projection of human life on the inanimate through building simulacra, to the search for authentic human feeling within oneself.

MARTIAN TIME-SLIP

In this major novel, first published in 1964, Dick effectively utilizes multifocal viewpoints to comment on the nature of the schizophrenic experience and its implications for our evaluation of “normal” experience. The precognitive schizophrenic boy, Manfred Steiner, into whose mind the narrative sometimes strays, sees the world as entropic, in continual decline, as the horrifying spirit of the Gubbler pervades everything, reducing all communication to meaningless “gubble” and all life to dust and rot. Schizophrenia is seen here as a horror in which the dark shadowy fears and inner demons are let loose into the day world of ordinary consciousness. Manfred innocently projects his deranged vision so powerfully on others that they begin to see things the way he does, causing one main character’s time-sense to become non-chronological. It seems to have the power of a pervasive, infectious disease in this novel, replicating itself throughout the fabric of society. It is interesting to read this in contrast with another sixties book about the schizophrenic experience, R. D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience (1967. Dick hardly soft-pedals the horrific aspects of the disorder, but like Laing also plays with the possibility that the psychotic may sometimes glimpse reality more fully than “normal” people can.

DR. BLOODMONEY

Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb, was published in 1965, and owed its title to the inspiration of Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. However, it has no relationship to the film other than the coincidental presence of a mad scientist and a nuclear war. The first third of the novel takes place on the day nuclear bombs strike the San Francisco area; the rest is set years later in western Marin County, where a small community of survivors has adapted to the post-holocaust environment. Perhaps the most surprising feature of this world is how much life is proceeding as normal. There is a large cast of characters through whose eyes we alternately view the events of the story. Among them is Bluthgeld, the scientist who helped create the Bomb, who in his paranoia and solipsism massively affects the reality of the other characters. But all of them subtly touch the lives of each other. Everyone in the book can and does have the power to affect each other’s universe, warping each other’s everyday reality in many little ways. The post-holocaust setting has its greatest significance in presenting a community, a microcosm of humanity, forming a common reality as the sum of their mutual interexperience.

THE GAME PLAYERS OF TITAN

In criticial estimation, The Game Players of Titan suffers by comparison with Dick’s masterpieces The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time-Slip, and Dr. Bloodmoney, also written in the early 1960s, because it does not have their serious themes or strong sociological dimension. Nevertheless, this book partakes of the brilliance of the overall concept that runs through Dick’s work in this period. What’s more, it is a very funny novel. The vugs, whose natural form is that of amorphous, gelatinous blobs, have occupied Earth after winning a war in which humanity nearly managed to sterilize itself through radiation exposure. Vugs have the capability of controlling humans’ minds or simulating their form, behavior, and memories, often taking names such as U. S. Cummings and E. B. Black. The plot revolves around the game of Bluff, which is somewhat akin to Monopoly, which is used to decide mates and property rights. The plot culminates with an interspecies game of Bluff between the humans and vugs, who have the advantage of psychokinetic powers, which they use to change the values of the cards as they play. There are mind-altering drugs, psychosis, talking cars, and crazy humor. In short, a feast for the Dick fan.

THE SIMULACRA

This is a grab bag of almost all the themes and character types found in Dick’s other novels written in the early 60s. Everything is here: a repressive police state, a ruling elite in conflict with huge cartels, a charismatic cult leader, a fascinating and ruthless woman, time travel, psychic powers, Nazis, androids, emigration to Mars, and mind-manipulating media and simulacra. It shows that the way society appears to be structured is a complete fake, and that media manipulation conceals the real centers of power. Dick crowds more characters and different points of view into the anarchic pages of pages of this novel than in any of his other books. But it does not seem to go anywhere: it is a plunge into the deeper waters of Dick’s universe, but without any clear re-emergence into the air. The energy is more frenetic than transformative. Such a tour de force lacks the impact of Dick’s major works, though it is a dazzling ride. It’s pure PKD.

NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR

Although Now Wait for Last Year is usually grouped with the novels of Dick’s late 1960s period, it was completed by late 1963. It as the first of several novels in which drugs are a major element, the others being The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Lies Inc., and A Scanner Darkly. In Now Wait for Last Year the drug in question, JJ-180, supposedly hallucinogenic, does more than alter consciousness: it takes the user backwards or forwards in time. It alters not just subjective reality, but also objective reality, and allows concourse between the parallel universes of different time tracks. Of the novel’s main characters, Gino Molinari, the world leader, attempts to use the drug to break out of the fatality of history and linear time and borrow from other possible universes for the benefit of his own. His physician, Eric Sweetscent, for his part, tries to create a desirable future by communicating with future versions of himself. His love/hate relationship with his wife becomes a major element of his desire to escape the present. In a well-known scene, he gets psychological counseling from a talking taxicab. This is a brilliant and fascinating novel that tends to get overlooked among Dick’s better known works.

CLANS OF THE ALPHANE MOON

This is one of Dick’s funniest novels, in spite of the fact that the plot centers on a lethal marital relationship—Chuck and Mary Rittersdorf are actually trying to kill each other. He is depressed and resigned in the midst of their breakup; she is bitchy and vindictive, planning to take him for all he is worth and more. Their showdown culminates out on the distant moon Alpha III M2, a former hospital world inhabited entirely by the clinically insane. The former patients have adapted well to having been left alone by psychiatrists, living in relative peace with each other by grouping into different “clans” according to their psychosis. Their social functions are defined by their type of abnormality. For example, the Pares (paranoids) live in Adolfville and constitute the statesman class. But there is nothing inherently crazier about their society than the one we find on Earth. It should be noted that the sanest and most empathetic character in the book is Lord Running Clam, a telepathic Ganymedean slime mold, who saves Chuck from suicide and lines him up with a more compatible woman. This is classic PKD with all his usual neuroses but also a good dose of humor and hope.

THE CRACK IN SPACE

The recurrence of the theme of the discovery of living ancient ancestors in modern times, as in Dick’s The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike and The Simulacra, suggests a symbolic incursion into modern consciousness of the buried, primitive self. But despite flashes of the author’s characteristic humor, The Crack in Space is substandard PKD. It relies on routine political intrigue and a meandering plot without compelling characters. Except for Jim Briskin, the first black man ever to run for president, there seem to be none who are not mired down in petty, personal, materialistic concerns. This novel also lacks both the themes of the problematical marriage and the breakthrough to a higher reality that mark much of Dick’s best work. Probably only those who have read just about everything else Dick wrote need seek this one out.

THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH

The setting of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is a future Earth where the environment has heated up intolerably. Because of overpopulation, people are "drafted" to emigrate the even more miserable environments of Mars and other planets. The colonists, to escape the dreary reality of their hovels, take a hallucinogenic drug, Can-D. Like the psychedelic voyagers of the 1960s, they also have something like theological debates about the reality of the Can-D experience. A kind of negative messiah named Palmer Eldritch introduces a new drug called Chew-Z and at first it seems an improvement, producing not a fantasy state but a "genuine new universe." But those who step into it find themselves subject to Eldritch as the evil god of a hallucinated world. The hero Barney Mayerson, after taking the drug, is turned into a phantom in a future world that regards him as only semi-real, and then finds himself turning into Eldritch himself. Thus Chew-Z, promising the fulfillment of all desires, only produces a nightmare from which one perhaps never awakens. But drugs are in a sense a red herring in this novel. Can-D and Chew-Z are, rather, pretexts for revealing the fragility of the fabric of reality woven by our perceptions and conditioning.

THE ZAP GUN

Written in 1964 more or less concurrently with The Penultimate Truth, this is one of several of Dick’s good second-rank novels of the 1960s that tends to be overlooked. The book actually has practically nothing to do with its title, which was bestowed upon it because the publisher just wanted to publish a novel called The Zap Gun. But this is no science fiction spoof. It’s highly humorous, but it’s a serious satire on the arms race and techniques of political manipulation. Dick challenges the very notion of consensual reality, which is a product of mass consciousness, a lowest common denominator of belief that the media, moneyed interests, and the government conspire to perpetuate. Lars Powderdry is a “weapons fashion designer” who goes into drug-induced mediumistic trances to meet the consumer demand for new weapons concepts. None of his weapons actually works, but they don’t need to in this society of “pursaps” (pure saps) who are unaware that all the new wonder weapons are nonfunctional and work only in filmed simulations. This is a terrifically clever work of trenchant irony.

THE PENULTIMATE TRUTH

This novel focuses on the theme of fakery and its uses in structuring political realities. Dick delights in devising paradoxes to illustrate the idea that getting to the ultimate truth is impossible: there is always another layer to be penetrated. A major hoax is perpetrated against most of Earth’s population, which retreats underground in huge “ant tanks” to avoid being killed in a nuclear war. The war ends, but the leaders choose not to tell these “tankers,” who are kept busy manufacturing robots called “leadies” while being fed television images of the war that is supposedly raging above, fought by the leadies. The plot of the novel was cobbled together from several of Dick’s short stories. Still, in its somewhat ill-structured way, The Penultimate Truth, with all its improbabilities and looseness, is honest in its headlong plunge through its willful convolutions of plot. Since it is not offering any ultimate truth, after all, it hardly need disguise itself in perfect form.