Dick's futuristic worldview occasionally reflects the time of its creation. The United Nations, for instance, is a major power in the story, while one of the background subplots revolves on a proposed plan to close down the special needs children's camp which strikingly is named after David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding prime minister. But his core ideas and characterization remain transcendent; even if some of the jargon employed to explain the psychological ideas seem a bit dated. His Martian desert society has more than a trace of the American West -- right down to land grabs and exploitation of the indigenous population -- with a satirical overlay of good ol' twentieth century alienation.

In one memorable sequence, Jack is called to the colonists' Public School to do some repair work; the building turns out to be staffed entirely by androids. The malfunctioning unit, the Angry Janitor, is designed to teach children to respect property. "Very righteous type, as the Teachers go," Jack notes, understandably uneasy about the human-seeming mechanisms. To Jack, whose first schizophrenic breakdown led to his questioning the living reality of everyone around him, the imitation humans prove particularly repellent.

As a science-fiction writer, Dick never saw the same level of public success in his lifetime as Ray Bradbury or Robert Heinlein. His writing intentionally lacks either the self-conscious poesy of Bradbury or the entrepreneurial optimism of Heinlein. Where the latter liked to pepper his works with ultra-competent spokesmen, for instance, Dick made his heroes struggling craftsmen. Where Bradbury honed his writing to make it moodily evocative, Dick maintained a fairly plain writing voice - the better to throw both his readers and characters when all of their assumptions about where the story's going are shown to be inadequate. For many s-f readers of his day, Dick was too beyond the fringe to suit their reading tastes. Happily, time has proved this visionary writer's salvation.

(Next: Dr. Bloodmoney, Or How We Got Along After the Bomb.)