Nearly caught up! Well then, this isn’t my first Philip K. Dick novel, but in some ways every Philip K. Dick novel is your first. Many of the major thematic elements will be the same, of course. They will always be concerned with paranoia, the implications of the development and use of mind-altering chemicals, the power of government, and so on. But every time you open a Philip K. Dick novel you can never quite be sure what you’ll find, or how you’ll emerge. (Plus, I’ve got to say that I love these covers. They are so un-Vintage, but so completely Philip K. Dick.) Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said doesn’t disappoint, though it’s obviously one of his earlier books. The prose is a bit stilted and his treatment of women borders on the misogynistic (which is not to say that his female characters become any more real in his later works, but his prose certainly gets better and his male characters are less Boys’-Own-Adventurish).
I won’t pretend to have entirely understood this book, although on the surface it was fairly straightforward. (I think someday I’m going to make a list of words I over-use. “Although” will probably be at the top of the list.) Jason Taverner is the host of a prime-time variety show and a “six”, a rare genetically engineered human. On Tuesday evening he leaves the studio with everything, money, fame, power and a beautiful, talented woman in his bed. When he wakes up the next morning he has none of it. It is not that he has been robbed or slandered or imprisoned. He has simply never existed. The totalitarian state that the US has become has no record of his birth, his television program does not air, his albums were never recorded, and his friends and lovers and incapable of recognizing his face. What follows is a paranoid romp through a strangely familiar world of drugs, a world-wide network for transferring information, incest, morality, and the nature of success (is it genetic? circumstantial?). This sounds rather vague, but seriously, you try writing about a Philip K. Dick novel without sounding like the dust jacket; it’s impossible, you simply won’t make any sense.
It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything by Dick (the last was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and before that I think it was V.A.L.I.S., nearly ten years ago), but I won’t be leaving things so long in the future. I’ve already got The Man in the High Castle in the queue.
Next is the last book before I’m fully caught up, Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.
