Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (67 page)

35. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (w. 1964, p. 1965). See Chapter 6. Rating: 10.

36. The Zap bun (w. 1964, serialized November 1965 and January 1966 as "Project Plowshare," in Worlds of Tomorrow, p. 1967 in book form). Government leaders of both the East and the West finally get wise to the notion that you don't need real weapons systems to keep populations subjugated under the yoke of cold war terror. Seeing is believing, so why not scrap expensive weapons research and just come up with some dazzlingly devastating videos? See Chapter 2. The Zap Gun was written concurrently, in March-April 1964, with The Penultimate Truth (see below). Both novels portray governments that deceive their people through ersatz media reality, with grave psychic costs for both the deceivers and the deceived. Both novels were written at high speed (Phil claimed that during this period he produced twelve hundred pages in three weeks-fifty-seven pages a day) with the aid of amphetamines during the final breakup of his marriage to Anne. And both novels are wayward, sometimes careening out of control. But they are utterly different in tone. The Penultimate Truth is somber, while The Zap Gun, for all its plot loopholes and clunking stylistic constructions, is hilarious and wildly brilliant. One reason for the tone shift lies in how The Zap Gun came to be written: An editor at Pyramid Books, a paperback house, decided to commission two novels bearing the archetypal-and market- able-SF titles Space Opera and The Zap Gun. Jack Vance took on the former; Phil, eager for a new project with which to cash in on his Hugo Award, grabbed Zap. The plot: Wep-fash (weapons-fashion) designer Lars Powderdry's role in creating ersatz shows of military might to dupe the "pursap" (pure sap) populace undermines him both morally and sexually, leading him into a desperate liaison with his female counterpart from enemy Peep-East, Lilo Topchev. Both Lilo and Maren Faine, Lars's other mistress, were inspired by Anne. 01' Orville, the missile guidance system "plowshared" (cf. Isaiah) into a talking toy, tries its best to help Lars out. The Empathic-Telepath Pseudononhomo Ludens Maze is a game so literally absorbing that it saves Earth from invasion. Surley G. Febbs, the paranoid pursap catapulted into dizzying power, gets my vote as the funniest character Phil created. Phil described Febbs to interviewer Charles Platt as "the black side of Jack Isidore [of Crap Artist]." Rating: 7.

37. The Penultimate Truth, originally titled In the Mold of Yancy (w. 1964, p. 1964.) Cynical world leaders keep their populations huddled in underground bomb shelters when in fact the war is long over; the leaders would rather continue to occupy immense baronial estates than let out the truth. See also The Zap Gun, above. The Penultimate Truth draws upon four of Phil's stories: "The Defenders" (1953), "The Mold of Yancy" (1955), "War Veteran" (1955), and "The Unreconstructed M" (1956). Penultimate is Phil's most pointed examination of the lies woven by government. But the seriousness of its theme is blunted by its clunking style and wayward plot. Stanton Brose, the purely evil leader of the "yance-men" (propagandizing speechwriters and filmmakers, who keep the underground populace deceived), is made up entirely of mechanized "artiforg" organs except for his brain; he's a cousin of sorts to Palmer Eldritch. Thomas Disch writes that Phil "knew himself to be a yanceman-albeit one employed in the lower levels of the power structure-as a hack writer producing sci-fi paperbacks. By way of signalling that fact and of sharing it with the unhappy few who could be counted on to read his hack novels as a phantasmal form of autobiography, Dick gave the Agency that is responsible for this global deception the then-current address of his own literary agent, Scott Meredith, at 580 Fifth Avenue." Disch notes that Phil's theme of pervasive deception parallels Orwell's 1984. As it happens, in The Zap Gun (written concurrently with Penultimate) Lars Powderdry, under Big Brother-type surveillance, asks himself: "But who can blame them? Orwell missed that point. They may be right and we may be wrong." Phil always considered all the possibilities. Rating: 4.

38. The Unteleported Man or Lies, Inc. (w. 1964-65, p. 1966, 1983, 1984 in differing book forms). A fascistic megacorporation lures colonists to a mysterious far-off planet named Whale's Mouth through a one-wayonly teleportation system. Protagonist Rachmael ben Applebaum decides to investigate by illicitly commandeering an interstellar spaceship. After numerous twisted drug trips, Rachmael alerts Earth to the Nazi-like terrors on Whale's Mouth. Lies has the most tangled publishing history of any of Phil's novels. In December 1964 he published a novelette, The Unteleported Man, in Fantastic. Ace editor Wollheim expressed interest in an expanded version; Phil wrote thirty thousand additional words, which he submitted to SMLA in May 1965. This part two consists largely of acidlike explorations by protagonist Applebaum (inspired by Phil's own short period of LSD use). Alas, these reality bends have damn near nothing to do with the part-one colonization plot. Wollheim rejected part two, infuriating Phil, who wrote to SMLA in May 1965 that the "far-out" elements were necessary for a "true novel" as opposed to the hackneyed "space opera" form of part one. (By 1977 Phil would concede that the part-two writing was weak.) Ace published part one as The Unteleported Man, half of an Ace Double, in 1966. In 1983 Berkeley published parts one and two together under the same title. In 1984, after the discovery of further 1979 revisions by Phil, Gollancz published a third version as Lies, Inc. (with two brief gap-filling passages by John Sladek). A summary of the whole: The part-one tale of overpopulation and migration to an alternate world is transformed into a part-two horror story of invasive irreality like Palmer Eldritch and then back again, with some 2-3-74 reflections (by way of the 1979 revisions) for good measure. Two stock elements of the sixties SF make an appearance: nefarious time-traveling Nazis and an I Ching-like book-within-a-book: The True and Complete Economic and Political History of Newcolonizedland, by Dr. Bloode. Damn weird. Rating: .5.---

39. Counter-Clock World, originally titled The Dead Grow Young and The Dead Are Young (w. 1965, p. 1967). Time suddenly flows backward, the dead awaken, and all adults must face death in their infancy. When a powerful black leader, the Anarch Peak, ascends from his tomb, the powers that be fear all hell will break loose. Expanded from the story "Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday" (Amazing, August 1966), Counter-Clock was Phil's first return to sustained novel writing after a long dry spell that included the badly glued together Unteleported Man and the uneven Ganymede collaboration with Ray Nelson. In the Counter-Clock world of 1998, time is flowing backward due to the Hobart Phase, pseudo-scientifically described (in the best SF tradition) as "one of the most vast of sidereal processes, occurring every few billion years." Lives progress from revival in the tomb to regression to the womb. "Future" ideas and inventions disappear or, rather, are "eradicated" by the Erads, who run the People's Topical Library and have as their futile aim the preservation of an eternally receding status quo. Protagonist Sebastian Hermes is the owner of the Flask of Hermes Vitarium (an allusion to alchemical psychic rebirth), one of many Vitariums in the business of digging up and then selling the reviving dead who find themselves trapped in the horror of the "Tiny Place" (the tomb; cf. schizophrenic entrapment in the "tomb world" of Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, discussed under Martian Time-Slip, above). Sebas tian is torn between his goodhearted but dependent wife, Lotta (drawn from fourth wife Nancy), and the unscrupulous Ann McGuire (inspired by third wife Anne). The Anarch Peak-revived by the Hobart Phase and rescued from the tomb by the Flask of Hermes-is an inspired black religious thinker who (based upon Bishop James A. Pike) had been expelled from the Episcopal Church after a heresy trial. Peak is more sympathetic than Bishop Timothy Archer, the Pike-inspired character in Phil's last novel. Phil did not, in Counter-Clock, meet the plot challenge of a retrogressing world; Ubik, written a year later, would remedy that failure with a vengeance. Rating: 5.

40. The Preserving Machine (w. 1953-66, p. 1969). This fine story collection, assembled and edited by the late Terry Carr, won Phil's praise when it first appeared. But it has since been superseded in quality by two later collections-The Best of Philip K. Dick (1977) and The Golden Man (1980) (see entries)-each of which includes stories that also appear in The Preserving Machine. But The Preserving Machine is the only one to feature "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (1966), a looping tale of memory implants and undercover spy activity on Mars that is, at the time of this writing, under film production by Carolco under the working title Total Recall; the film stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, is directed by Paul Verhoeven (Robocop), and has a projected budget of $50 million; the scheduled release date is summer 1990. Another story unique to this volume, "Retreat Syndrome" (1965), is a chilling SF invasion tale that also employs the implanted-memory theme and somehow manages to interweave Phil's marital tensions of the time into the espionage plot. Rating: 6.

41. The Ganymede Takeover, in collaboration with Ray Nelson; originally titled The Stones Rejected (w. 1964-66, p. 1967). The Ganymedeans, telepathic worms, have occupied Earth and hold their power with the help of craven human underlings. But resistance is building, and a future of freedom is possible if only black leader Percy X can overcome his intense mistrust of potential white allies. See also Chapter 7. Nelson writes that Ganymede represented a "preliminary sketch" for Ring of Fire, a proposed sequel to High Castle, which would portray a hybrid Amerasian culture. In Ganymede the worms who occupy Earth are a "comic metaphor" for the machinations of the Japanese Imperial Court, while protagonist Joan Hiashi is a composite portrait of the authors' wives Nancy Dick and Kirsten Nelson. Joan Hiashi becomes the "Nowhere Girl" as a result of the nefarious therapy of Nazi-like Terran shrink Rudolph Balkani, chief of the Bureau of Psychedelic Research. Percy X, the separatist black leader who spurs Earth's revolt against the Ganymede invaders, falls victim to his longing for power in the final showdown, in which the empathy of humanistic shrink Dr. Paul Rivers prevails. An intelligent potboiler. Rating: 3.

42. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, originally titled The Elec tric Toad; Do Androids Dream?; The Electric Sheep; The Killers Are Among Us! Cried Rick Deckard to the Special Man (w: 1966, p. 1968). Rick Deckard makes a living hunting runaway androids. When he starts to feel for them, he learns the true difference between the human soul and the machine. Androids inspired the 1982 film Blade Runner (see Chapter 12 for the story of Phil Meets Hollywood) and has been reprinted under that title. Androids is an excellent novel from the same vintage year-1966-that produced Ubik. Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter who earns his living, in 1992, by killing "andys" (androids) who have escaped from their labors in the Martian colonies and are trying to pass as humans on bleak post-nuclear holocaust Earth (Andys Roy and Irmgard Baty are modeled after Ray and Kirsten Nelson). Two results of the radioactive fallout have been to make virtually all species of animals extinct (owning a real live owl or sheep-as opposed to a simulacrum thereof-is the height of status) and to create a new category of humans known as "specials" (mutants, including low-IQ "chickenheads"). John Isidore, named for the wise fool in Crap Artist, is a lonely chickenhead whose compassion for lovely andy Pris Stratton proves sadly misplaced. Meanwhile, Rick Deckard and his wife, Iran (inspired by Nancy), are having hard times and take recourse in Penfield mood-organ settings such as 888: "The desire to watch TV, no matter what's on it." Deckard has a crisis of conscience, leading to a soulless affair with andy Rachael Rosen (in the film, Deckard and Rachael overcome their differences and fall in love). Both Deckard and Isidore fall into "tomb world" despair due to their failure to touch the heart of an andy. Both are restored by the salvific intervention of Wilbur Mercer (left out of the film), who is contacted by gripping "empathy box" handles (cf. "The Little Black Box" [1964] and the empathic Ludens Maze in The Zap Gun). Mercer is exposed by TV personality-jerk Buster Friendly as being none other than two-bit actor Al Jarry (a tribute to pataphysician Alfred Jarry). It doesn't matter: Agape surmounts surface trappings. The Phildickian neologism kipple- accumulating junk that exemplifies "the final disorder of all forms"debuts here (it was coined by Phil's friend Miriam Lloyd). Androids is one of Phil's best. Rating: 9.

43. The Glimmung of Plowman's Planet (w. 1966, p. 1988 in Britain by Gollancz as Nick and the Glimming). A boy and his family fight for freedom and dignity on a strange new colony planet. Glimmung, intended as SF for children, was originally rejected by twenty publishers. Back in 1962, a juvenile SF novel outline, The Thrasher Bashersschoolboys ward off an alien invasion-also went unsold. Glimmung has its charms-primarily, the odd fauna of Plowman's Planet, to which boy hero Nick and family emigrate because an overcrowded Earth slights human dignity and makes pets illegal. Horace the cat (named for Phil's cat Horace Gold) and Nick fight for the forces of light (led by the "printers," shapeless creatures who duplicate all physical forms) against the forces of darkness (led by Glimmung). Glimmung's festering spear wound recalls the Fisher King of the Grail legend. Rating: 2 for adults, _7 for kids.

44. Ubik, originally titled Death of an Anti-Watcher (w. 1966, p. 1969). See Chapter 7. Rating: 10.

45. Galactic Pot-Healer (w. 1967-68, p. 1969). The semidivine alien Glimmung has summoned a motley band of unemployed Earth artisans, including pot-healer Joe Fernwright, to the remote Plowman's Planet to raise the sunken cathedral Heldscalla from the dark sea Mare Nostrum. But the Glimmung asks for more than mere manual skills from his followers: He demands faith, and it is faith that Fernwright most desperately lacks. See Chapter 7. Phil frequently disparaged Pot-Healer in later years. Unfairly, I would contend. Pot-Healer is a gem, a finely crafted, ironic, and delightfully ludicrous parable of little craftsman Joe Fernwright's path toward, and fall from, deliverance from his isolated, meaningless life. The Glimmung (who bears little relation to the deity of the same name in The Glimmung of Plowman's Planet, above) may not rival in profundity and power fellow divinely charged forces in such works as Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, and Valis, but then again, none of them have the Oz-like bluster and fun (and Phil loved the Oz books as a child) of the semi-all-powerful Glimmung. If Chesterton had written SF, it would have read like this. Rating: 8.