Phillip K. Dick has been on my "must read" list for probably around two decades now, maybe longer. Sometimes I just don’t know how I let these things slip by me, but time passes, my list grows. And grows. And grows. And I fear I will never complete it. Which is ultimately a good thing, because I cannot die until I have read every book ever written.
I was thrilled to see Lies, Inc sitting on the shelf of a rather limited small-town book-dealer, at a time when I was desperate for good reading material. I snatched it up greedily and thought “This is my chance”. It didn’t disappoint, and Phillip K. Dick is very deserving of his reputation as one of Science Fiction’s best.
Lies, Inc was written in 1964, an extended version of an earlier novella entitled The Unteleported Man. In 1964, the world’s population was 3.276 billion, and in this novel Dick imagined a dystopian future where the world was overcrowded, the cities claustrophobic and hive-like, the people alienated and miserable — at a population of 7 billion. Which is nearly where we are now. Needless to say, we do have a bit of space left, so he may have miscalucalated his numbers, but one can nonetheless see his intentions.
Anyone dissatisfied with his lot on this future Terra can, however, escape, and for a very small fee at that. A planet has been discovered in a distant star-system that is capable of sustaining life. Thus far, 40 million people have emigrated to the colony known as Whale’s Mouth. Here you can own your own farm or orchard, have a large home, plenty of breathing room, raise a family in a safe, clean environment. Here you can have it all, here you can have paradise. With just one catch. The teleportation machine designed to deliver you to your new home is one-way only. Once you get there, you can’t come back.
Rachmael ben Applebaum worries about this. What if someone wants to come back? What if not everyone is as happy as they seem in the advertisements? So he builds a ship with the intention of making the 18-year journey by space to the Whale’s Mouth, just to see if anyone does. He enlists the aid of Lies, Inc, the company with the untrustworthy name, the third-largest corporation on Earth. Its motives in helping him — he has little money after all — are unclear. But in a world where corporate power is political power (sound familiar?), you can bet Lies, Inc aren’t playing for small change.
From these simple beginnings the novel Lies, Inc escalates into a hallucinatory whirlwind of conspiracy, corporate plots, political rebellion and secrets behind secrets behind secrets.
The main character of Rachmael ben Applebaum is a slightly dull, slightly neurotic everyman, but with a lofty vision. He isn’t entirely likable; at times so unobtrusive it seems he could fade away without notice. This in itself gives a great deal of power to this book, that this fading nobody struggles to do something big, something perhaps noble, something worthy of notice.
The other characters are almost puppet-like, which is apt for this novel. Their strings are pulled by events greater than themselves, by corporate entities more powerful than themselves, and sometimes even the movers, the pullers of strings, seem caught in the rapid current of schemes gone out of control.
Phillip K. Dick was a paranoid man and one might say his mental idiosyncrasies are our good literary fortune, because he could spin a beautiful conspiracy. Lies, Inc demands attention of its readers, because it tends to jump back and forth in time, back and forth in dimension, back and forth between illusion (or is it?) and reality, but it is well worth the effort, and the final revelations pack a hell of a wallop.
"A sinister cabal of superior writers."
Article comments
1 - Thomas M. Sipos
I've read four Dick books.
The Divine Invasion remains my favorite, alhough even more than The Man in the High Castle, the story fragments toward the end, ignoring the plot and making things up, seemingly arbitrarily. Dick is hard to understand. Yet I enjoy him nonetheless, partially because I like his nodescript, unassuming main characters.
Have also read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (very good) and Martian Time-Slip (fairly good). The later had an interesting take on autism.
2 - Che
I read "The Divine Invasion" just after reading Lies. I thought it was fantastic. I've also since read 'Minority Report', and I'm still trying to figure out how Dick packed more meaning into a short story of just a few pages than Hollywood did into a 2 hour movie. But thats hollywood for ya - sucking the meaning out of everything.