Martian Time-Slip

Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick (Ballantine Books, 1964)

Martian Time-Slip examines the loss of the secure sense of self. I suspect most of Dick’s novels grapple with that subject. This is only the second Dick novel I’ve read and I am willing to acknowledge that this is a significant gap in understanding American science fiction.

The book has the feel of dry, water-rationed, suburban California in the early 1960s, the time and place of its writing. Through the bored housewives and isolated housing, the reader can nearly feel the untrustworthy veneer-thin surfaces of everyday things. Only the native Martians, the Bleekmen, who recall the aborigines of Australia, seem fully rooted in reality.

Housewife Silvia Bohlen uses phenobarbital to ease her dusty, dreary life. Arnie Kotts’ vindictiveness and greed energize him through his day, yet he sees little of what goes on around him. Norbert Steiner, purveyor of nostalgic delicacies from Earth, truffles and caviar, visits his institutionalized autistic son, and then decides to kill himself.

Drugs, alcohol, and too much psychoanalysis (says I, with tongue only partially in cheek) leave these and several other characters vulnerable to the loss of sense of self. Manfred Steiner, the autistic boy, may be experiencing “a derangement in the sense of time,” according to his doctor. The time-slip affects several characters, but Manfred most of all. One particularly horrific dinner party is described in turn by several viewpoint characters, before, during, and after the time the actual party takes place. Some of the characters view the party through a haze of drugs, or hallucinations, or psychotic episodes. The result is powerful and affecting.

A note on the edition: The Library of America has now issued three omnibus collections of Philip K. Dick novels. Jonathan Lethem selected the novels and wrote notes for each volume. Physically, the books are excellent in every way, including a highly readable font. Seek out all three.

Links:
A view of Philip K. Dick’s Mars, courtesy of a recent dust storm in Australia.
Philip K. Dick boxed set from The Library of America or Amazon.
Matthew Cheney at Mumpsimus: Dear Library of America...

Past Master

Past Master by R.A. Lafferty (Ace Books, 1968), published as part of editor Terry Carr’s seminal Ace Science Fiction Specials series.

R.A. Lafferty’s first novel, Past Master, is by turns fascinating and something of a mess. Hundreds of years in the future, the rulers of Astrobe, a world whose utopian ambitions have gone askew, send for a leader from the past to help them through their crisis. A jeremiad against a false utopia, the story is told with great energy, invention, and humor.

The leader they chose is scholar and statesman Thomas More, author of Utopia (1516). Lafferty’s great achievement here is that his portrait of More is a persuasive one. His More is a man of human failings and misconceptions, and, at the same time, bright, commanding and charismatic. Lafferty’s expert use of archaic English adds subtle shadings to his recreation.

More’s concerns, utopianism and Catholicism, are the twin concerns that thread through the novel. Is the impulse toward utopia creative or destructive? Can the Catholic Church endure and remain relevant across the centuries? These questions are explored, yet no easy answers can be expected.

Lafferty gathers together a strong supporting cast of characters and, alas, does little with them. The storytelling sags in the middle. It seems rushed in places and then it is slowed by overlong rants.

There are several marvelous set pieces, chief among them the interstellar journey that brings Thomas More to Astrobe. The problem for science fiction authors attempting to portray interstellar travel is not in coming up with the latest flim-flammery of an idea for an engine, but in convincing the reader that a journey that encompasses vast time and space has occurred. Lafferty's “passage dreams” concept is one of the most successful I have encountered at communicating that entire subjective lifetimes are passing during the journey.

It’s hard to resist interpreting Lafferty’s skepticism of the status quo as particularly relevant to the 1960s, when the book was originally published. Little that has occurred in the years since should diminish our distrust.