Book Review: "Now Wait for Last Year" by Philip K. Dick

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -  Philip K. Dick

It’s hard to relate how strange it feels to be immersed in a Philip K. Dick novel. In both subject matter and style, he’s a very eccentric writer. At his best, his books are journeys into paranoiac alternate realities, containing one plausible mind-bending idea after another, but you still have to forgive him a lot – his awkward turns of phrases, the continually jumping from one topic to another, his obsessions with overbearing, bitchy women, etc. In addition, he fancies himself an experimentalist. This means that many of the bizarre and silly things that occur in his books are often the result of him “playing” with form rather that extensions of his sometimes poor writing.

But I’m selling him short. Now Wait For Last Year is a good novel. It tells the tale of Eric Sweetscent, an artiforg (artificial organ) surgeon working for Gino Molinari, the leader of the Earth, who has allied with the wrong group of aliens in a struggle for control of the galaxy. Most of the book centers upon Molinari’s efforts to keep these alien “allies” from overrunning the earth forces by sacrificing his health. But, this being Dick, it also deals with misadventures with JJ-180, an instantly addictive drug that causes you to slip backwards or forwards in time. These two threads twist around each other in bizarre ways as Dick creates a multi-layered reality that leaves you standing on unsteady ground, never knowing who – or what – to trust.

Dick loved chaos, and was one of the first proponents that the future will basically be an extension of the present with all of its political quagmires, shoddy craftsmanship, and corrupted power structures – but with cooler technology. He also insisted that the fake had as much validity as the real. In other words, he felt that the social fantasies that we make up in our heads end up replacing our reality, leading to some serious disconnects when we do abut up against “reality.”  He combines these ideas together in a heady brew that – like his best novels – lead you to false conclusions and uncertainty so that you acutely experience the same feelings as the protagonist as he struggles with political, emotional, and temporal problems. For this reason, I don't want to give too much away about the plot since to do so would rob you of this experience.

Having said that, I was surprised at how powerful and deep Now Wait for Last Year is – it carries real psychological heft. Dick’s novels at times go too far, leaving you with shallow characters and tinny prose, but not here. For instance, the mutually destructive relationship between Sweetscent and his wife Kathy is compelling because you can tell that Dick has lived it (he was married five times in his short life). Similarly, the oppressive nature of the book's military situation drives its characters towards the darkness: when Sweetscent meets up with Molinari for the first time, they bond over their “yearning for death. [They] could envision it as a release—the only dependable release that existed…” p. 56

I loved the trip of Now Wait For Next Year, but it’s hard for me to recommend to people because it was such a bizarre experience. If you’re interested in Dick, you might do best to read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep or Martian Time-Slip first. Or you can wait for the movie!

Cross posted on Reading, Running and Red Sox.

First Lines of "Now Wait for Last Year"

"The apteryx-shaped building, so familiar to him, gave off its usual smoky gray light as Eric Sweetscent collapsed his wheel and managed to park in the tiny stall allocated him. Eight o'clock in the morning, he through drearily. And already his employer, Mr. Virgil L. Ackerman, had opened TF&D Corporation's offices for business."

- Philip K. Dick, Now Wait for Last Year.

Tackling one of the last well-regarded PKD books I haven't yet read, in advance of the upcoming movie. The first lines already are reminiscent of his other books: The put-upon narrator, the bizarre words, phrasings  and names, and the throw-away scifi elements, devoid of any glamour. I'll let you know how it turns out.

The Top SciFi and Fantasy Novels?

So NPR recently polled its readers for the 100 best scifi/fantasy novels, and published the results here. These types of exercises are pretty meaningless in that they are highly dependant on the people that respond (have internet access at home, have time to kill, are fans of the genre and poll host, etc.) but I’ll bite and offer some reactions:

- There’s no way that you should combine SciFi and Fantasy together. While there are sometimes some blury lines between the two, most often books fall hard to one side or another of this line. The survey would have been MUCH more relevant if the had been sepearated – even if to the top 50 in both.

- Nice to see that enough other people like Neil Stephenson that four of his books made the cut. Having said that, as pure SciFi, The Diamond Age (#75) is 1000% better than Snow Crash (#26). The Diamond Age is a trip because it combines stunning ideas, excellent writing, and believeable words together while continually pulling the rug out from underneath you, so that the world at the end of the novel is completely transformed from the world at the beginning. It's a hell of a lot of fun! Snow Crash feels like Neuromancer-lite and is probably is more popular because it’s less complex and was his first book that propelled Stephenson into the mainstream. Cryptonomicon(#53) is an excellent, amazing read (have to read it again sometime) but it’s not strictly scifi (in this case, the book is lumped in with the genre because of his past work). Anathem (#86) was unreadably dense.

- Only one PKD (at #21)? Really? The problem here is that some of his best writing and ideas are in short stories, and he doesn’t have any truly excellent collections like Ray Bradbury (both The Martian Chronicles at #27 and The Illustrated Man at #91 helped flesh out my dreams). I would have voted for UBIK, one of the best mind-fucks of a book i've ever encountered.

- Again, suffering for being a novella rather than a novel, but Arthur C. Clarke’s
"A Meeting with Medusa" is one of the best SciFi writings I’ve come across.

- To have left Solaris off this list completely is an inexcusable oversight. To be recognized as being even remotely credible, this book really has to be in the top 20.

- Have Canticle for Libowitz (#35); haven’t read it yet. Should move it to my bedside table.

- The first Dune (#4) really is an excellent novel. It sticks with you. Haven’t read any of the sequels though.

- China Miéville should really be higher than #98.

- As much as I like William Gibson, they did him right by only including Neuromancer (#14), although I can’t imagine anyone would quibble with the Burning Chrome collection.

- A bit surprised that Stephen King’s It didn’t make the cut - I still think it's the best thing he's ever done. Can’t speak to The Stand (#25), as it’s the only major Stephen King novel I haven’t yet read. Enjoyed the Dark Tower series (#23) but it didn't blow me away.

- I’m not much of a fantasy reader, but I do enjoy some of the classics like Lord of the Rings (#1) and LeGuin’s Wizard of Earthsea. If you want a good fantasy read, pick up the old Years Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies (edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling) at your local used book stores; they were gold mines of good stories, and I still pick them up to this day to read a story or two.

Cross-posted at Reading, Running and Red Sox.

Defending the Short Story

Yesterday, Joel wrote about his dislike for stand-alone short stories, and as the two of us have discussed before, we’ll have to agree to disagree about this. To me, the best short stories are like Tapas to the full-meal of the novel. When done well, they present one of several things:

- A completely focused mood piece. Think of some of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories, capturing what it feels like to have your first girlfriend break up with you, or to be stuck with insomnia thinking about death. Other examples: Stephen King’s most excellent stories in Skeleton Crew and Night Shift.
- Pondering an idea. Perhaps done best in SciFi, these short stories present an interesting idea and the consequences of that idea. Philip K Dick was the best at this; he’d present an interesting idea that might not hold up over the course of a novel and explore it in a short story. (Note that both Total Recall and Minority Report were adapted from PKD short stories, not novels.)
- Experimenting with form, voice, etc. Authors just fucking around to see what works.

In short, I see a short story as a more informal, concentrated taste of story telling. Potentially containing the possibility of something that could be explored further, but not necessarily. (Of course, I've always been attracted to flaws more that perfection - I wrote a bit about this over here.)

I also think that there are authors that are better at novels and those that are better at short stories (and the rare few, like Stephen King, that are good at both). For instance, I love Haruki Murakami, but (after the quake excepted) his short stories are awful - he needs the space of the novel to present his themes and wandering narrators. I wonder if Ondaatje is one of this authors whose writing favors the novelistic form?

(Cross Posted at Reading, Running & Red Sox)

Quote of the Day

They knew, as Lars himself knew, that their destiny lay in the hands of halfwits. It was as simple at that. Halfwits in both East and West, halfwits like Marshal Paponovich and General Nitz... halfwits he realized, and felt his ears sear and flame red, like himself. It was the sheer mortality of the leadership that frightened the ruling circles. The last “superman,” the final Man of Iron, had been Josef Stalin. Since then—puny mortals, job-holders who made deals.

And yet, the alternative was frightfully worse—and they all, including even the pursaps, knew this on some level.

- Philip K. Dick, The Zap Gun

First Line of "The Zap Gun"

"'I'm afraid I only have a moment to talk to your viewers. Sorry.' He started on, but the autonomic TV interviewer, camera in its hand, blocked his path. The metal smile of the creature glittered confidently."
- Philip K. Dick, The Ray Gun
After reading Bolaño's "The Part About the Crimes," I needed something a bit lighter to clear my palate before tackling the rest of 2666, so I'm starting on PKD's little ditty about an arms race two 21st Century super-states where each produces a flood of terror weapons, then promptly "plowshares" them into consumer goods. Fun!

Long Lethem

The Paris Review had an impressively long interview with Jonathan Lethem right when The Fortress of Solitude came out in 2003. Fascinating stuff, especially for his insights into how he views fiction (right in line with my thoughts) and how Philip K. Dick influenced him:

Pulp SF of the 1930s magazine type is folk art. Then Dick comes along and isolates those tropes that connect it to literature, surrealism, film, comic books, rock and roll. He’s George Herriman, he’s Buster Keaton, he’s Bob Dylan. Dick discards the uninteresting stuff, the pedantic explanations, and preserves precisely the dreamlike, surrealist, evocative, paranoiac reverberations that were all I ever cared for, when I found them scattered elsewhere. I couldn’t imagine that someone else would think Dick had thrown out the wrong stuff, which is exactly what many who exalt the genre think.

If they do this sort of thing on a regular basis, I may have to subscribe!

Thoughts on Galactic Pot-healer

Philip K. Dick’s Galactic Pot-healer is not a good book. It is, however, an interesting one.
The main problem is that the book suffers from some of Dick's worst writing. Surviving on the strength of his ideas, Dick was never the best actual writer, but here his writing approaches a level of hackery not often seen in his mature novels.
GPH was published in 1969, 15 years after his first novel, and it includes some whoppers like these:

He snapped the book shut. "It's talking about itsself." Coming over to his chair, Mali bent to read the text."

Um, how can she read the book when Joe already shut it in the previous line?

At street level he straddled a cracked and unrepaired sidewalk, took a deep angry breath, and then, via his personal legs, started north.

"Personal legs?” As opposed to what, specifically?
This novel is filled with stuff like this. Dick wrote fast and furious and apparently didn't have much time for rewriting or editing... he needed the money and his ideas flew out of him as fast as his fingers could type. What’s amazing is that despite all of this, the ideas that Dick presents are fascinating, especially for his time. Here's two examples:

1. A “Padre booth” in which, for the price of a dime, you can consult with the deity of your choice. Pages 47-8
2. The SSA machine, which reads the minds of two people and then presents a picture of their potential future together. Pages 63-4

The other thing Dick's writing does is present you with deeper philosophical musings above and beyond the plot. In GPH, Jim spends a moment at the airport questioning why he's going off to another planet to help the Glimmung - a minor deity - raise an old church from the sea. But he does so by thinking:

A man is an angel that has become deranged... Once they--all of them--had been genuine angels, and at that time they had had a choice between good and evil, so it was easy, easy being an angel. And then something happened. Something went wrong or broke down or failed. And they had become faced with the necessity of choosing not good or evil but the lesser of two evils, and so that had unhinged them and now each was a man.

To me, the best parts of Dick’s writing are often not plot-oriented - and certainly isn't his prose - it's the extra things Dick comes up with as he’s telling his story.