Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (1968) SFMW 4

“I notice you’ve never had any hesitation as to spending the bounty money I bring home on whatever momentarily attracts your attention.” He rose, strode to the console of his mood organ. “Instead of saving,” he said, “so we could buy a real sheep, to replace that fake electric one upstairs. (Loc. 125-27)

The title of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) certainly seems to invite the interpretation that Ridley Scott doggedly pursued in his 1982 film, Do Androids Dream of Origami Unicorns? No, wait… Blade Runner.

However, to my mind Dick's novel is rather less of a metaphysical mystery of machine consciousness than it is an obsessive-compulsive meditation on the many ways the author's characters conspire to alienate themselves.

Certainly, there is a sense in which the novel invites the reader to see humanity in androids and humanity as automata ("Most androids I’ve known have more vitality and desire to live than my wife", loc. 1251-52) and Dick goes to some lengths to explain the evolution of the various tests that have been developed in order to distinguish automaton from human.

The key point here is the indeterminacy that the act of attempted discrimination provokes and the Voigt-Kampff scale's unreliability in identifying differences between the two subjects, as well as the fact that the means of gradating the likelihood of android identity is perpetually being redefined, the Voigt-Kampff scale being merely the most recent iteration:

A small class of human beings could not pass the Voigt-Kampff scale. If you tested them in line with police work, you’d assess them as humanoid robots. You’d be wrong, but by then they’d be dead (loc. 545-46)

Beyond this, however, Dick's characters seem to do a good enough job of keeping themselves at arm's length from their own phenomenological experience. Deckard even comes to envy and fantasise about androids:

He wondered, now, about her, too. Some female androids seemed to him pretty; he had found himself physically attracted by several, and it was an odd sensation, knowing intellectually that they were machines, but emotionally reacting anyhow. (Loc. 1257-59)

The quote with which this review begins illustrates the densely layered emotional estrangement the novel's protagonist, Rick Deckard, has swaddled himself in: the association of the acquisition of money with the potential to acquire the living commodities (the prices of which he compulsively reviews) which, it is inferred, would in some way improve the quality of the lives of himself and his wife; the willing enslavement on a societal level to the influence of the mood organ; the totemic worship of animals in a post-apocalyptic environment that has destroyed many species to the point that the possession of fake animals is considered to be a social pre-requisite, and so on:

Owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one. And yet from a social standpoint it had to be done, given the absence of the real article. He had therefore no choice except to continue. (Loc. 238-41)

The tyranny of the object over the subject, one of the mainstays of postmodernist thought, finds a precursor in one of Deckard's author-reported observations:

He thought, too, about his need for a real animal; within him an actual hatred once more manifested itself toward his electric sheep, which he had to tend, had to care about, as if it lived. The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn’t know I exist. (Loc. 600-02).

Dick seems both terrified of and fascinated by the commodity-informed nature of urban life, to which he speculatively assigns a self-replicating nature -- when no-one is around to see it happening:

By coming here he had brought the void to them, had ushered in emptiness and the hush of economic death. (Loc. 635-36)

Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more[…] No one can win against kipple,” he said, “except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It’s a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization. (Loc. 881-83, 892-95).

The dominant religion of the novel's world, Mercerism, sees practitioners linking mentally with other devotees via Empathy Boxes to share the experience of Wilbur Mercer. Dick playfully describes Deckard's assessment of the androids' own aspirations towards a collective spiritual experience which, in the author's typical idiom, reveal a kaleidoscopic number of possible readings as to its symbolic connotations, inside and outside the text:

Roy Baty (the poop sheet informed him) has an aggressive, assertive air of ersatz authority. Given to mystical preoccupations, this android proposed the group escape attempt, underwriting it ideologically with a pretentious fiction as to the sacredness of so-called android “life.” In addition, this android stole, and experimented with, various mind-fusing drugs, claiming when caught that it hoped to promote in androids a group experience similar to that of Mercerism, which it pointed out remains unavailable to androids. (Loc. 2368-72)

In our own pre-technological singularity era, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? can be a tough read; not because it is particularly challenging, structurally, but because of the conclusions it invites. For analogue-educated digital converts of a certain age such as myself, the novel's vision of an entropic future seems much closer now than when one of science fiction's greatest visionaries brooded over the implications more than forty years ago:

Yet, the dark fire waned; the life force oozed out of her, as he had so often witnessed before with other androids. The classic resignation. Mechanical, intellectual acceptance of that which a genuine organism—with two billion years of the pressure to live and evolve hagriding it—could never have reconciled itself to. “I can’t stand the way you androids give up,” he said savagely. (Loc. 2567-70)

Time and tide, he thought. The cycle of life. Ending in this, the last twilight. Before the silence of death. He perceived in this a micro-universe, complete. (Loc. 2377-78)

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Philip K. Dick, Dr. Bloodmoney (1965) SFMW 32

"I'll have a true factory in the old sense, the pre-war sense."
"'The pre-war sense,'" she echoed. "Is that good?" (loc. 3252-54)

Philip K. Dick's Dr. Bloodmoney revisits the author's habitual thematic obsessions of justifiable paranoia and the transmogrification of the illogical into the plausible and externalises, rather than internalises, them.

Written in 1963, but not published until 1965, Dr. Bloodmoney's narrative encapsulates what Frederic Jameson describes as the 'pastiche and schizophrenia' of the cultural forms of late capitalism.  The influence of the closing of Berlin's borders and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the ratification of the nuclear test ban treaty in 1963, and -- entirely appropriately, this being Philip K. Dick -- the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove (which the novel predates in everything other than title) are all contextual influences upon the work, and are echoed within it.

In the novel's historic present of the 1980s, civilisation struggles to reassert itself after having nearly been eradicated as the consequence of a defence-related nuclear accident in 1972 which has led to the destruction of the world's pre-existing infrastructural, political and economic organisation. The titular architect of the disaster, Dr. Bruno Bluthgeld ('blood money') lives on in the work, serving as a sort of totem for the failures of character that allowed the world to produce a means of 'defending' itself that if used would also destroy it.

The fact that humanity now seems set on working towards the reproduction of the forms that led to the moment of catastrophe make the recuperation of a positive reading of this bleakly pessimistic work difficult to construct, as characters yearn to devolve responsibility for their actions and dream of problems being 'automated out of existence' (loc. 3446-48):

Our little fragile world, Bonny thought, that we labored to build up, after the Emergency. This puny society with out tattered school books, our 'deluxe' cigarettes, our wood-burning trucks—it can't stand much punishment; it can't stand this that Bruno is doing or appears to be doing. One blow again directed at us and we will be gone; the brilliant animals will perish, all the new, odd species will disappear as suddenly as they arrived. Too bad, she thought with grief. It's unfair; Terry, the verbose dog—him, too. Maybe we were too ambitious; maybe we shouldn't have dared to try to rebuild and go on.    "I think we did pretty well, she thought, all in all. We've been alive; we've made love and drunk Gill's Five Star, taught our kids in a peculiar-windowed school building, put out News & Views, cranked up a car radio and listened daily to W. Somerset Maugham. What more could be asked of us? Christ, she thought. It isn't fair, this thing now. It isn't right at all. We have our horses to protect, our crops, our lives. . . . (loc. 3232-33)

If Dr. Bloodmoney is pregnant with anything, it is not the fecundity of parturition but rather the despair of not being able to give birth to the new. The foetal Bill is trapped within the body of his internally conjoined twin, Edie; Walt Dangerfield is trapped in orbit around the Earth, neither able to achieve escape velocity, nor return; psychokinetic phocomelus Hoppy Harrington strives to escape a body that holds more potential than any he could adopt.

Philip K. Dick's body of work is one of the cornerstones of the science fiction oeuvre, yet in a sense stands outside it. Dr. Bloodmoney is an archetypal Dick novel; conceptually perplexing, thematically dense, and richly rewarding to read and revisit, it is another excellent entry in the SF Masterworks series.

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Philip K. Dick, Ubik (1969) SFMW 26

'Runciter took a good long look at the fifty-cent pieces. He saw at once what the attendant meant; very definitely, the coins were not as they should be. Whose profile is this? he asked himself. Who’s this on all three coins? Not the right person at all.

And yet he’s familiar. I know him. And then he recognized the profile. I wonder what this means, he asked himself. Strangest thing I’ve ever seen. Most things in life eventually can be explained. But — Joe Chip on a fifty-cent piece?

It was the first Joe Chip money he had ever seen. He had an intuition, chillingly, that if he searched his pockets, and his billfold, he would find more.

This was just the beginning.'

Glen Runciter's 'prudence organisation' offers the services of psychically gifted anti-telepaths and 'pre-cogs' who foresee future events and intervene in order to influence the outcomes they have envisioned to counter the effects of telepaths employed by other businesses.

Runciter, and/or Runciter's team is/are killed having been lured off-world to Luna by business rival Ray Hollis. The novel subsequently recounts the quest of Runciter's technical lead, Joe Chip, to try to determine what has happened as the world around him appears to begin to revert to the early decades of the twentieth century.

It is impossible to determine whether the text is unfolding from the reported point of view of Runciter, or Chip, or whether they are both dead on the basis that all three positions are presented and vie for the reader's acceptance and belief. In this way, the text colludes with the indeterminate nature of the author's intentionality in disorientating the reader: "We haven’t gone anywhere. We’re where we’ve always been. But for some reason — for one of several possible reasons — reality has receded; it’s lost its underlying support and it’s ebbed back to previous forms" (Loc. 2348-50). For example, after a continuous section of chapters constituting more than half of the novel's length, the narrative shifts from Chip to Runciter's point of view with no visual signifiers such as asterisks or a section break to signify the same (Loc. 2899).

Matters are complicated by the fact that Dick wrote Ubik at the height of his addiction to prescribed amphetamines, dispensed as a treatment for depression and anxiety. Dick's world-view appears to imbue amphetamines with health-giving properties, and it makes perfect sense to him that they should be available to Glen Runciter from a vending machine (Loc. 2096-7) at the Beloved Brethren Moratorium where the book begins and ends, and where much of its reported actions may be taking place in the minds of the deceased, suspended in half-life in a cryogenic 'cold pac'.

A further layer of befuddlement is added to the novel's already complex perceptual structure in the person of Jory, a half-life teenage inhabitant of the Beloved Brethren Moratorium whose over-developed psychic abilities may be allowing him to rampage through the intelligence of other residents, influencing and possibly even consuming their minds.

Finally, there is the titular artifact Ubik itself. Each of the work's chapters begins with an advert for Ubik repackaged as some sort of consumer good, be it a foodstuff, a cosmetic or a medication. This alone invites a meta-textual reading of Ubik as a critique of the disorientating, alienating, all-pervasive nature of late capitalism. However, within the context of the narrative, Ubik is presented as something offering a (fake?) redemption, a substance that, if only Joe Chip could lay his hands on a spray can of it, Glen Runciter's messages inform him would stop further temporal regression. For the majority of the work's extent, however, Ubik remains tantalisingly out of reach for Chip, reverting from its spray form to an unusable powder or balm leaving him to 'wonder how much difference Ubik — dangled toward [him] again and again in countless different ways but always out of reach—would have made' (Loc. 2554-55).

Ubik is described in both scientific and religiose ways.

On the one hand, in a description larded with jargon seemingly for comic purposes, a spray can of Ubik is described as 'a portable negative ionizer, with a self-contained, high-voltage, low-amp unit powered by a peak-gain helium battery of 25kv. The negative ions are given a counter-clockwise spin by a radically biased acceleration chamber, which creates a centripetal tendency to them so that they cohere rather than dissipate. A negative ion field diminishes the velocity of antiprotophasons normally present in the atmosphere; as soon as their velocity falls they cease to be anti-protophasons and, under the principle of parity, no longer can unite with protophasons radiated from persons frozen in cold-pac; that is, those in half-life. The end result is that the proportion of protophasons not canceled by anti-protophasons increases, which means—for a specific time, anyhow—an increment in the net put-forth field of protophasonic activity…which the affected half-lifer experiences as greater vitality plus a lowering of the experience of low cold-pac temperatures' (Loc. 3242-48).

On the other, Ubik appears as some sort of self-aware life-force with supernatural abilities:

I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be. (Loc. 3267-69)

In summary, Ubik is a work of exceptional interest and an outstanding entry into the SF Masterworks series, offering both a rewarding reading and re-reading experience, and an archetypal example of Philip K. Dick's unique and dislocating craft.

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Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962) SFMW 73

The wall falls back into the moat.
Use no army now.
Make your commands known within your own town.
Perseverance brings humiliation.

Undeterred by the unfavourable reading of the I Ching, Frank 'Goldfish' Frink muses 'I should take my tools[...] be working, creating in my own way right up to the end, living as best I can, as actively as possible, until the wall falls back into the moat for all of us, all mankind' (pp. 54-55)
Philip K. Dick's 1962 work The Man in the High Castle is an alternate history set in a fictional world within which the Axis powers were victorious in the Second World War and the political map of the world has been redrawn accordingly.

It is a book about chance, belief, the shaping of fate and the making of history in a figurative and literal sense. The interpretation and manipulation of history is the dominant theme of the work at both a personal and a societal level.

From the former perspective, the I Ching serves to influence the decisions of the work's protagonists, Frank and Juliana Frink, who although formerly married do not encounter oneanother in the novel's time line.

From the latter, the novel-within-the-novel entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy by Hawthorn Abendsen, who appears in the work towards its conclusion, posits an historical outcome to the Second World War which will be more familiar to the reader and which informs the work's thrilling conclusion.

'Now one appreciates Saint Paul's incisive word choice... seen through glass darkly not a metaphor, but astute reference to optical distortion. We really do see astigmatically, in fundamental sense: our space and our time creations of our own psyche, and when these momentarily falter - like acute disturbance of middle ear' (p. 225)

The Man in the High Castle is often introduced as Dick's greatest work, and its intricate world-building, ability to create a firm sense of place within the context of the societal alterity it crafts, and the prismatic, shifting perspectives of its inner textual histories provide ample support for this assertion.

The text reveals itself in a precise and satisfying manner, akin to unfolding the geometries of a piece of crisp origami:

'One by one Hawth made the choices. Thousands of them. By means of the lines. Historic period. Subject. Characters. Plot. It took years. Hawth even asked the oracle what sort of success it would be. It told him that it would be a very great success, the first one of his career. So you were right. You must use the oracle quite a lot yourself, to have known' (p. 245)

'I'm not sure of anything,' he said.
'Believe,' Juliana said. (p. 247)

'Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find. I'm lucky.' (p. 248)

Note: The Man in the High Castle was the third entry in the 2001 hardback SF Masterworks series (first cover image above), and the seventy third entry in the numbered SF Masterworks series (second cover image; 2009). A printing error saw the volume bear the number '72'.

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Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974) SFMW 46

He could feel within his brain the powerful six-determined constituents moving already into focus. I am not like other men, he told himself. I will get out of this, whatever it is. Somehow. (p. 25)
Jason Taverner is a 'six', 'sixth in a line of DNA reconstruction systems' (p. 118), one of four living examples of a eugenic experiment (p. 117), 'an elite group, bred out of aristocratic prior circles to set and maintain the mores of the world, who had in practice drizzled off into nothingness because they could not stand one another' (p. 120). A light entertainment TV show host and recording artist of repute, Taverner awakes subsequent to having been attacked to find himself in a decrepit hotel room with $5,000 dollars in his pocket and no identity. Neither his ID cards, nor his personal history, nor his professional standing remain as he remembers them. Indeed, the very details of his birth appear to have been effaced from the public records.

'Am I being paid back for something I did? he asked himself. Something I don't know about or remember? But nobody pays back, he reflected. I learned that a long time ago: you're not paid back for the bad you do nor the good you do. It all comes out uneven in the end. Haven't I learned that by now, if I've learned anything?' (pp. 65-66).

A heavily-scrutinsed police state 'rules... society', a 'legacy of the [student-led] Second Civil War... from pigs to pols. In one easy jump' (p. 180). The operations of the ideological state apparatus that forms the novel's setting sees Taverner come to the attention of Police General Felix Buckman, who is perplexed by his subject's non-status and concludes that he 'must wait for him to figure it out... and be there with him, either physically or electronically, when it happens' (p. 126). Buckman and his sister Alys maintain an incestuous relationship that has produced a son. Alys proves to be central to the novel's denouement, and her first encounter with Taverner begins to tie together the protagonist's previous reality with his currently existing one (p. 132):

"Alys, you know about me; you know who I am. Why doesn't anybody else know?"
"Because they've never been there" (p. 136)

Subsequent to a disorientating, drug-fuelled crisis with a startling and apparently incomprehensible conclusion at the Buckman's apartment, Taverner flees and encounters the potter Mary Ann Dominic with whom he seeks sanctuary in a restaurant fitted out with a jukebox that contains his latest hit record. With his reality 'leaking back' (p. 159), Taverner is haunted by the thought that his entire career is a 'retroactive hallucination' and that he 'only exist[s] so long as [he] take[s] the drug' that Alys gave him:

Maybe I am only one of a great number of people leading synthetic lives of popularity, money, power by means of a capsule. While actually living, meanwhile, in bug-infested, ratty old hotel rooms. On skid row. Derelicts, nobodies. Amounting to zero. But, meanwhile, dreaming (p. 160)

As Taverner succumbs to the strain of disparate realities coalescing in his person and gives himself up to Buckman, so the author appears to step forward in order to give voice to an inner monologue that sounds very little like the voice of the protagonist as we have come to discern it:

Fucking dope, he thought. You can always tell when it hits you but never when it unhits, if it ever does. It impairs you forever or you think so; you can't be sure. Maybe it never leaves. And they say, Hey man, your brain's burned out, and you say, Maybe so. You can't be sure, and you can't not be sure. And all because you dropped a cap, or one cap too many that somebody said, Hey, this'll get you off (p. 157).

The work's title comes from the author's depiction of Felix Buckman's meditations whilst listening to recordings of John Dowland's 'Lachrimae Antiquae Pavan' which he describes as 'the first piece[...] of abstract music'. Why the book is not consequently called Flow My Tears, The Policeman Thought I have yet to fathom (p. 96).

Chapter 11, a philosophical reckoning in the middle of the work, constitutes its thematic and physical centre. Taverner's pursuit of his identity takes him to the Las Vegas apartment of a former lover, Ruth Rae, who also fails to remember him. Taverner and Rae, who has a succession of failed relationships behind her, rehearse their necessarily (in view of the former's predicament) different perspectives on love, life and loss: 'you call them up on the phone one day and say, "This is Jason," and they say "Who?" and then you know you've had it. They don't know who the hell you are. So I guess they never did know you; you never had them in the first place' (p. 103).

The ambiguities that the novel has built upon are promptly exploded by the author in the twenty-seventh chapter (pp. 183-98) wherein an over-reaching concept is over-explained in a manner unusual for Philip K. Dick.

By the mid-1970s, whilst his literary powers may arguably have already peaked, Dick was approaching the height of his personal psychoses. With the author as Taverner ('I don't want to be hunted any more'), and Buckman as a representative of the state authorities Dick believed to be pursuing him ('To live is to be hunted' (p. 188)), the author/protagonist-policeman/state stuctures 'play roles' and 'occupy positions' (p. 191) on the way to the conclusion that 'the real, ultimate truth is that despite your fame and your great public following, you are expendable... and I am not. That is the difference between the two of us. Therefore you must go, and I remain' (p. 192). Which is which is, of course, a matter of indeterminacy: a state of textual and topical ambivalence which is a function of the the thematic forces that Dick has set in play, but which elude his grasp and exceed the limits of authorial perception.

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is a quick, entertaining read, but it my opinion does not merit inclusion in the SF Masterworks series, which is heavily over-represented with Philip K. Dick's work.

'We'll show them; we'll make them believe' (p. 163)

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Philip K. Dick, A Maze Of Death (1970) SFMW 57

When marine biologists Seth and Mary Morley volunteer for a new post on the frontier world Delmak-O, they arrive to find a leaderless group of twelve other colonists with no idea as to what they are doing there. The situation is made worse by the malfunction of the satellite that is supposed to detail them as to the purpose of their assignment.

Then the colonists begin to die.

The fact that the chapter summaries in the prefatory matter of A Maze of Death bear no resemblance whatsoever to the events depicted in the book is hint enough that nothing will prove to be as it first appears in the next 180 pages.

All of Philip K. Dick's works have an eerie way of making you think they have been written with you in mind, which is both unsettling and yet also entirely in keeping with throb of paranoia that pulsates at the heart of almost all of his novels in some way. Hence, on the day I read A Maze of Death I had bought the ingredients to make a lamb curry (p. 24), and had taken delivery of a bottle of Seagrams whisky (p. 31) only a day or two before.

Dick's trademark ‘justifed paranoia’ suffuses the work. As usual, the author hints that there is a something outside the text that is trying to get into it: 'They’re experimenting with us, [Seth Morley] thought wildly. That’s what this is: an experiment. Maybe there never were any instructions on the satellite’s tape. Maybe it was all planned’ (p. 50). The characters share an uncomfortable sense that they are under observation, in much the same as Dick appears to have envisaged his readership pontificating over the factual basis of his relationship with the thematic concerns of his oeuvre: ‘He did not like the mixture of artificial life forms with the real ones; the mixing together of them made him sense the whole landscape as false… as if, he thought, those hills in the background, and that great plateau to the right are a painted backdrop. As if all this, and ourselves, and the settlement – are all contained in a geodetic dome. And above us Treaton’s research men, like entirely deformed scientists of pulp fiction, are peering down at us as we walk, tiny-creature-wise, along our humble way’. (p. 101)

A Maze of Death returns to another of what we might call 'Dick’s ticks', namely the structure and function of religious belief. On this occasion, Dick begins by positing that a god exists and that prayer is effective if ‘electronically transmitted through the network of god-worlds so that all Manifestations are reached’ (p. 52). Not surprisingly, this is not a hypothesis that the extraordinary conclusion of the work can necessarily affirm, but it does makes for a fascinating frame-within-a-frame through which to view the text. From the author’s foreword: ‘The theology in this novel is not an analogue of any known religion. It stems from an attempt by William Sarill and myself to develop an abstract, logical system of religious thought, based on the arbitrary postulate that god exists’ (p. 3). The visible manifestation of the power of faith is a reality in this novel: ‘I can understand there being widespread atheism in previous eras, when religion was based on faith in things unseen... but now it’s not unseen, as Specktowsky indicated’ (p. 88)

The core text in the colonist’s religion is Specktowskty’s How I Rose From the Dead in My Spare Time and So Can You (p. 9), which reconstructs the christian trinity in the form of the Mentufacturer, the Intercessor, and the Walker-on-Earth, opposing the death-urge personified in the Form Destroyer: ‘The thing about the Mentufacturer[…] is that he can renew everything. He can abort the decay process by replacing the decaying object with a new one, one whose form is perfect. And then that decays. The Form Destroyer gets hold of it – and presently the Mentufacturer replaces that[…] But I can’t do that. I decay and the Form Destroyer has me. And it will get only worse’ (pp. 10-11)

The vertiginous final chapters wherein the mystery of the shared tattoo, ‘Persus 9’ (p. 168), is revealed and the narrative is shown to have been part of another sequence of events altogether reveal the events that preceded it to have been ‘a comforting web[…] in particular the postulate that god existed’ (p. 181). However, when Seth Morley says ‘I wish to God[…] that there really was an Intercessor’ (p. 184), he should have been careful what he asked for. The reader is left to their own devices to try to make sense of what is happening as perceptions clash and fictive realities overlap in the work’s concluding pages.

If A Maze of Death has a theme, it could be said to be that in making a life for oneself among the ruins of our shortcomings (namely, our susceptibility to failure, our destiny to decay, and our universal ignorance), the ability to retain a sense of perspective is everything.

Whilst I am entranced by the idea that one should be motivated to walk away from a life that you have made for yourself on the basis that ‘the cheese is terrible here’ (p. 14), there are bleaker themes to muse upon. When the colonists are forced to consider their isolation on Delmak-O they concede that ‘we have one vast fear, and that is this: there is no purpose to us being here, and we’ll never be able to leave’ (p. 31)

Each of the colonists characterises a different shortcoming, and there is a little of the author - and also the reader - in all of them: ‘The thing we have in common is that we’re failures. Take Tallchief. Couldn’t you tell he’s a wino? And Susie – all she can think about is sexual conquests. I can make a guess about you, too. You’re overweight; obviously you eat too much[...] Babble is a hyochondriac. Betty Jo Berm is a compulsive pill-taker: her life is in those little plastic bottles. That kid, Tony Dunkelwelt; he lives for his mystical insights, his schizophrenic trances[…] Maggie, here,’ he gestured toward her. ‘She lives in an illusory world of prayer and fasting, doing service to a diety which isn’t interested in her.’ To Maggie he said, ‘Have you ever seen the Intercessor, Maggie?’ (p. 79)

The destructive work of the Form Destroyer also stalks the novel: ‘Maybe they were alright before they got here, and something here made them change. If that is so, it will change us, too[…]. Eventually.’ (p. 40) Accompanying this observation is a tangible fear of neither understanding how, nor even being aware of, such changes, and realizing that only those who observe you will notice. Except they too are changing in turn, and the processes of decay are perpetual and reciprocal.

It is also difficult not to become aware of the novel’s insistent reminders that humanity has reached a point in its evolution where it is not only wilfully ignorant, but also quite content to be so: ‘Each of you seems to be living in his own private world. Without regard for anyone else. It’s as if[…] all you want, each of you, is to be left alone’ (p. 76). ‘We live in a world created and manufactured from the results of the work of millions of men, most of them dead, virtually none of them given any credit[…] It wouldn’t matter[…] if this whole colony, everybody in it, died. None of us contribute anything. We’re nothing more than parasites, feeding off the galaxy’ (pp. 80-81).

There are numerous false starts and dead ends on the path to enlightenment within A Maze of Death, most notably in the form of the tench, which appears to be a ‘great globular mass of protoplasmic slush’ (pp. 171-72), but isn’t. The tench answers questions in a circular manner redolent of the I Ching: ‘I’m asking, “Why are we alive?”’ [Maggie Walsh] placed the paper before the tench and waited. The answer, when they had obtained it, read: ‘To be in the fullness of possession, and at the height of power’. (p. 127)

Ultimately, the author suggests that if we are prepared, or perhaps capable, of appreciating it for what it really is, there may be a redemptive spark within us that could be fanned into life: ‘Something to save us,[…] something to doom us. It – the equation of everything – could go either way’ (p. 89)

In the last instance, an assessment of A Maze of Death is a question of perspective: what you see, and what you want to see; what you accept and understand, and what you are trying to efface from memory and turn your thoughts away from. You will accept assistance in propagating the former’s illusory states of being until a time comes, as it does for Seth Morley in the penultimate chapter, when you realize you have to make a change. Assuming it ever arrives, the much-desired change may be neither what you expected, nor what you hoped for. Sometimes, it may even be a logical impossibility (‘But we invented you!’ (p. 187)), but that will not stop it happening. Beyond it, however, will be something else: the kernel of change to come.

As if perceived through distorting mirrors, the ways in which the thematic and narrative perspectives of A Maze of Death will be elongated in the stunning final two chapters of the work break out into the novel around half way through, although you do not realize this when reading it for the first time:‘You know, Specktowsky speaks about us as being “prisoners of our own preconceptions and expectations. And that one of the conditions of the Curse is to remain mired in the quasi-reality of those proclivities. Without ever seeing reality as it actually is’ (p. 102)

Bleak, confusing, and seductive, A Maze of Death is a fine entry in the SF Masterworks series and one of Philip K. Dick's most satisfying novels.

‘I am outside and isolated. But in a sense all of us are’ (p. 126)

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Philip K. Dick, Time Out Of Joint (1959) SFMW 55

'Do you know what I'm really doing every day?... They know, but I don't' (p. 129)

Ragle Gumm make a comfortable living by means of his mastery of a newspaper competition called 'Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next', and lives with his sister Margo and brother-in-law Vic. However, as elements of his existence cease to exist and resolve themselves into pieces of paper, so he begins to question whether the reality he finds himself in is indeed real. With a sense of unease, Gumm comes to believe that he is 'the man with the KICK ME sign pinned on him. No matter how hard he tries, he can't whirl around fast enough to see it. But his intuition tells him it's there' (p. 115).

Like Ragle Gumm, Philip K. Dick experienced a number of 'leaks in [his] reality' (p. 87). Much of the pleasurable labour of reading his works lies in attempting to discern where the leaks are getting in, and what they mean. Meaning in PKD's novels is prone to disintegrate under the influence (in several senses) of philtres and filters. Drink, drugs, psychoanalysis and a tangible paranoia which the author often proves to be entirely justified permeate his canon. Whilst Ragle Gumm passes on the carbon tetrachloride he is offered in Time Out Of Joint, and has more phantom memories of drinking warm beer on a pacific atoll than he actually consumes during the course of the novel, Gumm finally discovers that his 'lunacy' is not madness, but a consequence of his involvement on behalf of both sides in an interplanetary civil war.

PKD may be somewhat over-represented in the SF Masterworks series, but the influence Time Out Of Joint has had on the genre overall more than merits this particular title's inclusion. Jim Carrey vehicle The Truman Show was clearly heavily influenced by Time Out Of Joint, and Gumm's psychological conditioning has been borrowed by any number of SF novels and TV shows. The Federation's manipulation of Roj Blake, protagonist of cult 1970s British SF space opera Blake's 7 springs to mind, for one.

There is a level at which this text operates as metaphor for the alienation of contemporary life. Gumm's tantalising glimpses of another world and his desire to escape from a reality he believes to be an illusion are highly engaging. 'I know that I almost got away... I almost got over the edge and saw things the way they are. Not the way they've been arranged to look' (p. 154).

'Reality... I give you the real' (p. 156).

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