As a writer, Philip K. Dick's reputation has steadily grown since his death in 1982: a status that can only bring a sense of satisfaction to those readers who first came upon the man in cheaply glued s-f paperbacks in the fifties through seventies. Some of this cultural elevation can be linked to the writer's emergence as a source for evocative futuristic movies (Blade Runner and A Scanner Darkly arguably being the most successful attempts at putting Dick's vision on-screen), but a more recent factor has to be the re-publication of Dick's seminal novels in a tony hardbound format by the Library of America. Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s is the second volume in this series, and it's an attractive package indeed. Featured in the book: Martian Time-Slip, Dr. Bloodmoney, Now Wait for Last Year, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said and A Scanner Darkly. A heady selection, indeed - in more ways than one.
As a science-fiction writer, Dick is best-known for his reality-shifting plots (think of the "who's human and who's android" storyline of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? a.k.a. Blade Runner), which I have to admit was his most salient feature for me when I first read his books as a teenager and college student. But as a fiction writer, he also was superbly gifted as a world and character creator. The Dick protagonist is unlike the hero of any other genre work being produced at the time. A profoundly average figure, he struggles to get by in the mundane world and just barely makes it - when all of a sudden even that modicum of stability slips away and our hero finds himself scrambling to hold onto his sanity.
So let's take a look at Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s one at time. First in the set is the 1964 Martian Time-Slip. I own a copy of the Ballantine paperback of this gem, and, like so many of Dick's first publications, the cover of the novel barely gives a hint of the strangeness within it. Set in a futuristic 1980s, the novel concerns a group of settlers who are living on the Martian dessert. As with many Dick novels, the point-of-view shifts between several characters, but the central figure is a service maintenance repairman named Jack Bohlen. Jack is a schizophrenic (an affliction that Dick apparently suffered in real life) in remission who has migrated to Mars out of the mistaken belief that its simpler, less complicated society will keep him less prone to dissociative episodes. When his black marketer neighbor Norbert Steiner commits an unexpected suicide, the act has repercussions for Bohlen and other members of the Martian colony.
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