Book Review: Philip K. Dick - Five Novels of the 1960s and ‘70s by Philip K. Dick, Jonathan Lethem (Editor)

"We who read science fiction," Philip K. Dick wrote in 1981, a year before his death, "read it because we love to experience this chain-reaction of ideas being set off in our minds by something we read, something with a new idea in it; hence the very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create — and enjoy doing it: joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness."

But what of those who write science fiction? Anyone familiar with Dick’s contributions to science fiction — the bulk of 100 stories and 44 novels in a genre he reluctantly acquiesced to after his early mainstream literary aspirations didn’t pan out — knows this was a totemic visionary who gave as good as he got, and then some, with not just the final ingredient of newness in his works, but with sustained force and startling originality from the start. Political, sociological, metaphysical, and theological themes are threaded throughout his works, while Dick drew upon his own life experiences with drug use, paranoia, reported schizophrenia, and mystical insights — experiences that seemed to constitute a mindset from which, as Dick wrote in 1980, “The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It's not just ‘What if’ - it's 'My God; what if’ - in frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming."

So to speak. Though Dick wrote his fair share of pulp magazine stories when he was getting his start in the 1950s, any of the standard-issue SF trappings with alien life forms, zap guns, and planetary colonies were curtailed by the overriding emphasis — especially as Dick evolved into a full-time novelist into the ‘60s and ‘70s — on humanity and the nature of reality, no matter how wild the possibilities.

And so the haunting Martian Time-Slip (1964), which kicks off The Library of America's publication of Philip K. Dick: Five Novels of the 1960s and ‘70s, the companion volume to 2007’s Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s, may constitute a misnomer in search of a fantasy, as the Martian angle is largely relegated to a setting on the colony of Mars as Dick uses extraterrestrial real estate scams, politics, and murder to infiltrate the mysteries of being, while the same moment in time is played over and over again, each time shown from a slightly different standpoint. Which interpretation of reality is real?

Article Author: Gordon Hauptfleisch

Gordon Hauptfleisch is a Blogcritics Books Editor, freelance writer, and book reviewer for San Diego Union Tribune Books (R.I.P.). For many years he worked in and managed bookstores and record stores, and most recently was purchasing manager for San Diego Technical Books. …

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