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Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s: Martian Time-Slip / Dr. Bloodmoney / Now Wait for Last Year / Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said / A Scanner Darkly

de Philip K. Dick

Outros autores: Jonathan Lethem (Editor)

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528645,494 (4.27)2
"Philip K. Dick: (1928-1982) was a writer of incandescent originality and astonishing fertility, who made and unmade fictional world-systems with ferocious rapidity and unbridled speculative daring. The five novels collected in this volume - a successor to Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s - Offer an overview of the range of this science-fiction master." "Martian Time-Slip (1964) unfolds on a parched and thinly colonized Red Planet where the unscrupulous seek to profit from a troubled child's time-fracturing visions. Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965) chronicles the interwoven stories of a multiracial community of survivors, including the scientist who may have been responsible for World War III. Into this apocalyptic framework Dick weaves observations of daily life in the California of his own moment. Famous, among other reasons, for a therapy session involving a talking taxicab, Now Wait for Last Year (1966) explores the effects of JJ-180, a hallucinogen that alters not only perception, but reality." "In Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), a television star seeks to unravel a mystery that has left him stripped of his identity. A Scanner Darkly (1977), the basis for the 2006 film, envisions a drug-addled world in which a narcotics officer's tenuous hold on sanity is strained by his new surveillance assignment: himself. Regarded by some as Dick's most powerful novel, A Scanner Darkly mixes futuristic fantasy with an all-too-real evocation of the culture of addiction in 1970s America. Mixing metaphysics and madness, Dick's work remains exhilarating and unsettling in equal measure."--Jacket.… (mais)
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MARTIAN TIME-SLIP (***)

Arnie Kott: ‘... we got the future, and where else do you think things happen except in the future?’ (p. 115)

Martian Time-Slip refers to living in different times instead of present, also past or future.

This novel by Philip K. Dick is set in a colony on Mars and tells the story of Manfred Steiner, an autistic boy who can help other people to live in the past or in the future.
Arnie Kott, leader of the water worker’s union, becomes interested in Manfred because he wants to use Manfred’s skill to predict future in his business ventures.

Martian Time-Slip is a speculative science-fiction novel because Dick doesn’t tell about space ships or other futuristic electronic devices; so who remembers Blade Runner (or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) is crowded out by reading this novel.


FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID (***)

(Dec 6, - Dec 18, 2011)

"The exclusiveness of space, we've earned, is only a function of the brain as it handles perception. It regulates data in terms of mutually restrictive space units. Millions of them, trillions, theoretically, in fact. But in itself, space does not exist at all." (page 40)

"Do you now see what happened to Taverner?
He passed over an universe in which he didn't exist. And we passed over with him because we're objects of his percept system. And then when the drug wore off he passed back again."
(page 842)

"No nights are black enough for those that in despair their last fortune deplore." (page 736)

DR. BLOODMONEY (****)

It was a peculiar, nonsensical idea. It was as if the man had been gripped by his unconscious. He was no longer living a rational, ego-directed existence; he had surrended to some archetype.
(page 286)

In his earphones a loud signal came in. "Dangerfield, this is the New York Port Authority; can you give us any idea of the weather?"
"Oh," Dangerfield said, "we've got fine weather coming. You can put out to sea in thoese little boats and catch those little radioactive fish; nothing to worry about."

(page 319)

"Good lord," Barnes said. "He doesn't know what you're talking about. He's mentally ill." To Stockstill he said, "Listen, Doctor, isn't schizophrenia where a person loses track of their culture and its values? Well, this man has lost track; listen to him."
(page 395)

NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR (***)

Because, the cab said, life is composed of reality configurations so constituted.
(page 667)

It's the same, Kathy informed him. Everything's the same, when you break through to absolute reality; it's all one vast blur.
(page 494)

Are you waiting for last year to come by again or something?
(page 646)

A SCANNER DARKLY (****)

Do you know Bob Arctor or Bob the actor?
Who are you?
Who am I?

Sometimes I wish I knew how to go crazy. I forget how.
(907)

"A dream woke me," Arctor said. "A religious dream. In it there was this huge clap of thunder, and all of a sudden the heavens rolled aside and God appeared and His voice rumbled at me - what the hell did He say? - oh yeah. 'I am vexed with you, my son,' He said. He was scowling. I was shaking, in the dream, and looking up, and I said, 'What'd I do now, Lord?' And He said, 'You left the cap off the toothpaste tube again.' And then I realized it was my ex-wife."
(918)

"Do you think," he said aloud as he painstakingly drove, "that when we die and appear before God on Judgment Day, that our sins will be listed in chronological order or in order of severity, which could be ascending or descending, or alphabetically?
(941)

"In fact , we could put an ad in the L.A. Times: 'Modern three-bedroom tract house with two bathrooms for easy and fast flushing, high-grade dope stashed throughout all rooms; dope included in sale price.'"
(945)

When he turned on the tape-transport once more, Arctor was saying, "-as near as I can figure out, God is dead."
Luckman answered, "I didn't know He was sick."

(1033)

(Nietzsche neither!)
( )
  NewLibrary78 | Jul 22, 2023 |
Martian Time-Slip / Dr. Bloodmoney / Now Wait for Last Year
The first three novels collected here are all works of the mid-1960s—Martian Time-Slip (1964), Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along after the Bomb (1965), and Now Wait for Last Year (1966)—and in fact, they overlap with the novels published in Library of America's Four Novels of the 1960s.

I recently read a post about Philip K. Dick in r/printSF, where someone criticized his prose and characterization. A bunch of defenders of Dick swooped in to explain that, yes, his prose and characterization were bad... but the other aspects of his books made them good anyway. My reaction was, "Hold on! You guys are his 'defenders'!?" I feel like sf fans often don't know what characterization is, and these "defenses" prove it... because how many writers in 1960s sf or even contemporary sf match Dick for characterization? All of Dick's characters feel like real people to me, with their little obsessions, their fragile self-images, their internal contradictions, their neediness. What makes his books work, in my opinion, is that even though they are set in the future, their protagonists feel like people from now, where "now" is both the 1960s and the 2020s. People trying to do jobs they hate, support families, deal with prejudice, make it through bad marriages. I like the real workaday aspect to his characters, especially in Martian Time-Slip and Now Wait for Last Year. These are people on Mars or during an interplanetary war, yet they are ordinary people trying to get done whatever needs to be done. Now Wait for Last Year, in particular, is a triumph: I found the ending surprising but uplifting and fascinating, and not something that fits with the stereotypical image of Dick. A real portrait of character and character growth.

Similarly, people praise Dick for the disconcerting nature of his books. You're reading a story about some perfectly ordinary guy on Mars, and then suddenly the guy realizes he can see through people's skin and that everyone around him is a fake, or time starts skipping back and forth. This all done incredibly matter-of-factly, which is what makes it so effective... how does this happen if not through Dick's prose? I never once felt while reading a Dick novel that I read a clunky turn of phrase; Dick writes smoothly and without showing off. This is what makes his stuff work as a writer, because the creepy, weird stuff is as matter-of-fact as everything else. As I said in my previous reviews of Dick, I think he really captures the dissociated aspect of modern life, which has only gotten worse in the sixty years since these novels were written. I don't feel like I can see people's skin... but I do feel alienated from the people around me. The way people fall through time, in both Martian Time-Slip and Now Wait for Last Year, is very well done.

Something I don't think Dick gets praised for enough is his worldbuilding. I really enjoyed the early chapters of Martian Time-Slip, before the weirdness ratcheted up. I found its depiction of a new society, its interplay with the old, all compelling and realistic; I like the idea of a corrupt union man being one of the major players on a Martian colony, and its focus on humdrum things like land speculation. New world but same old bullshit. I also like that Dick reuses a lot of worldbuilding elements from book to book even when the books clearly don't take place in the same fictional milieu; it lets you quickly orient yourself. The exploration of how a great leader might extend his greatness via time travel or alternate selves, similarly, is a great idea the Dick plays with well... and he does so without getting bogged down in technical details, or committing to one interpretation of events, or anything else that might drain the weirdness from it.

I will say that I found Dick's postapocalyptic novel, Dr. Bloodmoney, the least interesting of the seven Dick novels I've read so far this year. Decent characters, some neat concepts, but I feel like no character was strong enough to grab me. But Dick published an astounding seventeen novels in the 1960s (if I am counting correctly), so it's not too surprising if they are not all winners.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said / A Scanner Darkly
The second half takes us out of Dick's shockingly prolific 1960s period into the 1970s, with Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) and A Scanner Darkly (1977). Both of these books are about drugs. Not that Dick hadn't tackled drug use before (drugs that alter reality played key roles in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time-Slip, and Now Wait for Last Year), but A Scanner Darkly in particular represents his deepest engagement with the reality of drug use.

Flow My Tears is good, solid, minor Dick. It's a lot like, say, Ubik, in that it starts great but ends up petering out once the explanations arrive. A television celebrity (there are a lot of variety show hosts in Dick's novels; their continued cultural relevance is one of his predictions that did not really pan out) wakes up one day to find that he doesn't exist and never has. How does he navigate such a world? Especially considering that the United States has become a police state where being without papers is a crime. Jason Taverner moves from encounter to encounter with people who don't know who he is... and as he goes on, it seems that his original reality is breaking through. It's a great idea, but I didn't find the ultimate "explanation" of what had happened very interesting or convincing. It might have been better to just not explain it!

The paratext here indicates Dick's goal was to write a novel about different kinds of love, inspired by a drug trip Dick had where he experienced pure love. To be honest, I would not have picked up on this theme myself, but upon being told about it, it's a fascinating one: we see selfish love, sexual love, self-less love, animal love, incestual love, delusional love. What doesn't quite work, for the theme or the novel as a whole, is that I didn't really find that Taverner had a meaningful revelation about love himself. The revelation in Now Wait for Last Year, for example, was better handled.

A Scanner Darkly, on the other hand, was a very different treatment of drugs. (I actually have read it before, back in 2007. Like all of the Dick I read before this year, I read it because of the movie... but I never actually got around to watching the movie!) While most of Dick's drug novels focus on an idea that drugs can literally alter reality, even sending you through time, A Scanner Darkly focuses on perceptual reality. Maybe that should be a comedown, since that's the things drugs actually can do, but Dick handles it well here. So well you maybe don't even need the drugs, actually!

A Scanner Darkly is about an undercover drug cop who becomes an absolute master at segregating his two identities: Fred the cop and Bob Arctor the dealer. This is because one of the drugs he's own is separating the two hemispheres of his brain... but it also feels like a riff on the idea that we are different things to different people, and you don't need any drugs to be that. Those are the best parts of the book, Fred hearing about Bob and having to pretend he's not Bob, and in a sense, not pretending he's not Bob, because Bob is someone else, and Fred's reality slowly begins to crack. But overall there's a lot to like here; as usual for Dick, the characters maybe are types, but they feel like real people, and the imagery is vivid. There's a lot of dialogue here, and it's excellent stuff, it feels like real people talking. I have no way of knowing how accurate the glimpse into 1970s drug culture is—or, indeed, drug culture of any era—but it feels real to me. The twists and turns are good, there are good jokes (the one about the Planet of the Apes films is hilarious), the ending for Donna is haunting, the author's note at the end is very well put. A lot of Dick novels start well but don't really stick the landing. This one does.
1 vote Stevil2001 | Sep 9, 2022 |
ok I rated it before reading it because (1) I've read the Dick pieces before and they're not perfect but brilliant in irreplaceable ways, and (2) this kind of thing is just up that brilliant collaborator Lethem's alley. It's gotta be great. yeah. ( )
  AnnKlefstad | Feb 4, 2022 |
So far I have read only two of these five novels, A Scanner Darkly and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Dick is a true California weirdo. and he captures the essence of that state while giving us memorable sci-fi. ( )
  annbury | Feb 5, 2012 |
Martian Time-Slip

Arnie Kott: ‘... we got the future, and where else do you think things happen except in the future?’ (p. 115)

Martian Time-Slip refers to living in different times instead of present, also past or future.

This novel by Philip K. Dick is set in a colony on Mars and tells the story of Manfred Steiner, an autistic boy who can help other people to live in the past or in the future.
Arnie Kott, leader of the water worker’s union, becomes interested in Manfred because he wants to use Manfred’s skill to predict future in his business ventures.

Martian Time-Slip is a speculative science-fiction novel because Dick doesn’t tell about space ships or other futuristic electronic devices; so who remembers Blade Runner (or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) is crowded out by reading this novel. ( )
  GrazianoRonca | Oct 11, 2010 |
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"Philip K. Dick: (1928-1982) was a writer of incandescent originality and astonishing fertility, who made and unmade fictional world-systems with ferocious rapidity and unbridled speculative daring. The five novels collected in this volume - a successor to Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s - Offer an overview of the range of this science-fiction master." "Martian Time-Slip (1964) unfolds on a parched and thinly colonized Red Planet where the unscrupulous seek to profit from a troubled child's time-fracturing visions. Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965) chronicles the interwoven stories of a multiracial community of survivors, including the scientist who may have been responsible for World War III. Into this apocalyptic framework Dick weaves observations of daily life in the California of his own moment. Famous, among other reasons, for a therapy session involving a talking taxicab, Now Wait for Last Year (1966) explores the effects of JJ-180, a hallucinogen that alters not only perception, but reality." "In Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), a television star seeks to unravel a mystery that has left him stripped of his identity. A Scanner Darkly (1977), the basis for the 2006 film, envisions a drug-addled world in which a narcotics officer's tenuous hold on sanity is strained by his new surveillance assignment: himself. Regarded by some as Dick's most powerful novel, A Scanner Darkly mixes futuristic fantasy with an all-too-real evocation of the culture of addiction in 1970s America. Mixing metaphysics and madness, Dick's work remains exhilarating and unsettling in equal measure."--Jacket.

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