Martian Time-Slip in Philip K Dick

Jul 10, 2012 Chloe rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: scifi-fantasy

Summer seems to have finally been coaxed into sticking around in the Pacific North-West and has roused my abiding love of quick and easy beach reads from its den of slumber. Because, really, what would summer be without some mind-bending science fiction? Far less entertaining, at the very least. So is it really any wonder that when I saw the sun rising above Mt. Hood at an especially clear 5:30am the other day I took it as a sign that it was finally time to read the second volume in the Library Summer seems to have finally been coaxed into sticking around in the Pacific North-West and has roused my abiding love of quick and easy beach reads from its den of slumber. Because, really, what would summer be without some mind-bending science fiction? Far less entertaining, at the very least. So is it really any wonder that when I saw the sun rising above Mt. Hood at an especially clear 5:30am the other day I took it as a sign that it was finally time to read the second volume in the Library of America's Jonathan Lethem-curated collection of Philip K. Dick works, Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s.

The first entry in the collection, Martian Time-Slip is an early work of Dick's, written concurrently with his most-renowned read, The Man In The High Castle, and features all the paranoia and fractured narration I have come to know and love from Dick. Set on a recently-colonized Mars that seems to be falling apart faster than it can be put together, Martian Time-Slip strikes me as the Dick read most overtly concerned with the author's own fragile state of mind.

Jack Bohlen is an exceptionally skilled repairman who had immigrated to Mars following a minor schizophrenic breakdown wherein he saw his manager as a mechanical doppelganger infested with rot and contagion. Having fled to Mars he attempts to live a calm and orderly life free from the pressures that he thinks led to his initial psychotic break. Apparently in this future, one in five humans exhibit schizophrenic tendencies and very few are able to lead normal lives (though there is a disconcerting conflation between autism and schizophrenia throughout the book that I am hoping is simply due it being written in 1962 and the limited understanding psychology had of these two ailments at the time).

Through a typically convoluted series of events, Jack gets dragged into a plot hatched by Arnie Kott, leader of a Union settlement who is seeking to keep his grip on power as the UN on Earth makes Martian colonization more of a priority, to use an autistic child from a psychiatric facility to look through the veils of time into the future so as to position himself to best enrich himself. Then the wild ride commences in earnest. The boy, Manfred Steiner, is indeed capable of seeing through time, but can not vocalize his visions due to experiencing time out of sync with his fellow humans, so broadcasts his visions into Jack's fragile head, making him experience Manfred's very dark vision of reality and leading Jack back into the morass of mental illness he had hoped to escape.

This is the first book I've read where Dick's very legitimate concerns about his own mental state get much ink space. Of course things get especially twisted in his later writings like Radio Free Albemuth and V.A.L.I.S., but this read seemed to be one of the first times Dick tried to wrestle with his own sanity. The idea of sinister mechanical humans replacing the real thing is one that Dick has used repeatedly, most successfully in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Likewise, the time-out-of-joint recounting of events that he used to great effect in Ubik seems to have been first pioneered in these pages. Still, despite the fun I had with this story, it is not hard to see why Lethem did not include it in his first LOA collection. It's a must-read for hardcore Dick aficionados, but for those with a passing interest or who are only beginning to enter Dick's fractured and confusing world, they would be better off starting with the aforementioned Man in the High Castle, Ubik, or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. ...more

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Feb 26, 2008 Kersplebedeb rated it really liked it

Shelves: science-fiction

Ableism, colonialism, cronyism and time distillation... never let it be said that the fucker was not a fucking genius. The book that made me worry about ending up in an old age home.

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