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Philip K. Dick Galactic Pot-Healer (Unabridged)
The Glimmung wants Joe Fernwright. Fernwright is a pot-healer - a repairer of ceramics - in a drably utilitarian future where such skills have little value...
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Philip K. Dick Martian Time Slip (Unabridged)
On the arid colony of Mars the only thing more precious than water may be a ten-year-old schizophrenic boy named Manfred Steiner...
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Gollancz Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (Gollancz SF S.)
Pages: 368, Paperback, Gollancz
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£7.19
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Gollancz The World Jones Made (Gollancz SF S.)
Pages: 208, Paperback, Gollancz
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Voyager The Zap Gun
Pages: 256, Paperback, Voyager
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Voyager The Divine Invasion
Pages: 272, Paperback, Voyager
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Voyager Clans of the Alphane Moon
Pages: 204, Paperback, Voyager
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Gollancz The Simulacra (S.F.Masterworks S.)
Pages: 320, Paperback, Gollancz
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Voyager The Game-players of Titan (Voyager Classics S.)
Pages: 224, Paperback, Voyager
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Cosmos Books,US The Androids Are Coming: Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, and More
Pages: 184, Paperback, Cosmos Books,US
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Oxford University Press Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: 1800 Headwords (Oxford Bookworms Library)
Pages: 122, Paperback, Oxford University Press
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£4.35
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Penguin Books Ltd The Man in the High Castle (Essential.penguin S.)
Pages: 256, Paperback, Penguin Books Ltd
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Orion Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?
Pages: 224, Paperback, Orion
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Bloomsbury I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey Into the Mind of Philip K. Dick
Pages: 336, Hardcover, Bloomsbury
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Gollancz Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
<I>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?</I> is a book that most people think they remember, and almost always get more or less wrong. Ridley Scott's film <I>Blade Runner</I> took a lot from it, and threw a lot away; wonderful in itself, it is a flash thriller where Dick's novel is a sober meditation. As we all know, bounty hunter Rick Deckard is stalking a group of androids returned from space with short life spans and murder on their minds--where Scott's Deckard was Harrison Ford, Dick's is a financially over-stretched municipal employee with bills to pay and a depressed wife. In a world where most animals have died, and pet-keeping is a social duty, he can only afford a robot imitation, unless he gets a big financial break. The genetically warped chickenhead John Isidore has visions of a tomb-world where entropy has finally won. And everyone plugs in to the spiritual agony of Mercer, whose sufferings for the sins of humanity are broadcast several times a day. Prefiguring the religious obsessions of Dick's last novels, this asks dark questions about identity and altruism. After all, is it right to kill the killers just because Mercer says so? --<I>Roz Kaveney</I>
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Gollancz In Milton Lumky Territory (Gollancz SF S.)
Pages: 320, Paperback, Gollancz
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Gollancz Mary and the Giant (Gollancz SF S.)
Pages: 240, Paperback, Gollancz
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Gollancz Minority Report (The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick)
Pages: 384, Paperback, Gollancz
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Gollancz A Maze of Death (S.F.Masterworks S.)
Pages: 192, Paperback, Gollancz
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Gollancz We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick)
Pages: 400, Paperback, Gollancz
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Gollancz Confessions of a Crap Artist (Gollancz SF S.)
Pages: 256, Paperback, Gollancz
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Voyager The Cosmic Puppets
Pages: 143, Paperback, Voyager
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Gollancz Eye in the Sky (Gollancz SF S.)
Pages: 320, Paperback, Gollancz
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Gollancz Galactic Pot-healer (Gollancz SF S.)
Pages: 192, Paperback, Gollancz
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Gollancz Solar Lottery (Gollancz SF S.)
Pages: 192, Paperback, Gollancz
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Gollancz Now Wait for Last Year (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
Pages: 240, Paperback, Gollancz
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Penguin Books Ltd The Man in the High Castle (Penguin Modern Classics)
Pages: 272, Paperback, Penguin Books Ltd
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Gollancz Three Early Novels: The Man Who Japed, Dr. Futurity, Vulcan's Hammer
Pages: 422, Paperback, Gollancz
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Gollancz The Penultimate Truth (S.F.Masterworks S.)
Pages: 320, Paperback, Gollancz
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Orion Minority Report
Pages: 304, Paperback, Orion
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Gollancz The Cosmic Puppets (Gollancz SF S.)
Pages: 144, Paperback, Gollancz
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Gollancz Time Out of Joint (S.F.Masterworks S.)
Pages: 224, Paperback, Gollancz
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Gollancz Five Great Novels: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep, Martian Time Slip, Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, A Scanner Darkly (Gollancz SF S.)
Pages: 841, Paperback, Gollancz
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Voyager We Can Build You
Pages: 256, Paperback, Voyager
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Gollancz Valis (S.F.Masterworks S.)
Only Philip K Dick could produce a novel as comically disturbing as <I>Valis</I> (1981), grappling with troubled, off-sane episodes of his own life and triumphantly resolving them through SF. <p> Early in 1974 Dick felt a pink beam flashing through his head, a religious experience--or mild stroke--which inspired him to write his vast theological Exegesis. In <I>Valis</I> the pink beam illuminates Dick's mentally unstable friend Horselover Fat; Philip is Greek for lover of horses and Dick is German for fat. <p> Dick's alter ego Fat duly creates the weird Gnostic theology of the Exegesis, with its visions of salvation from the insane side of reality--the Empire, whose Black Iron Prison cages us all. The Empire never ended. Also there's a three-eyed race among us and all time between AD 103 and 1974 may be a divine illusion... <p> The resulting debates between Fat and friends, including Dick, are often hilariously insane. It's clear that Fat is deluded--until they all see the SF movie <I>Valis</I>, whose rock star actor-director suggests David Bowie in <I>The Man Who Fell To Earth</I> and which uncannily features Exegesis code phrases, timeslips, third eyes, early Christian symbols and pink beams. <p> Maybe the film's Vast Active Living Intelligence System, a satellite which controls minds via lasers, is the same as the messiah imagined by Fat? Naturally he and friends contact the director, leading to an unexpected interview with VALIS itself. <p> Dick was the supreme SF master of booby-trapped reality and <I>Valis</I> celebrates his own escape from the trap that claimed him in 1974. Chilling, moving and acknowledged by the <I>SF Encyclopedia</I> as the finest novel of Dick's last years. --<I>David Langford</I>
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Voyager Our Friends from Frolix 8
Pages: 216, Paperback, Voyager
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Bloomsbury I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick
Pages: 336, Paperback, Bloomsbury
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Titan Books Counterfeit Worlds: Philip K. Dick on Film
Pages: 320, Paperback, Titan Books
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Gollancz Minority Report (Gollancz SF S.)
Pages: 304, Paperback, Gollancz
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Lulu.com How Much Does Chaos Scare You?: Politics, Religion, and Philosophy in the Fiction of Philip K. Dick
Pages: 248, Paperback, Lulu.com
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Gollancz The Biography of Philip K. Dick (Gollancz SF S.)
Pages: 352, Hardcover, Gollancz
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Overlook Press,U.S. What If Our World Is Their Heaven?: The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick
Pages: 204, Paperback, Overlook Press,U.S.
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Underwood Books Inc Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick
Pages: 288, Hardcover, Underwood Books Inc
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Vintage Books USA The Man Who Japed
Pages: 176, Paperback, Vintage Books USA
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Gollancz Paycheck
Pages: 320, Paperback, Gollancz
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Gollancz The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (S.F.Masterworks S.)
Pages: 320, Paperback, Gollancz
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Gollancz Paycheck (Gollancz SF S.)
Pages: 304, Hardcover, Gollancz
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Gollancz A Scanner Darkly (Film Tie-in) (Gollancz S.F.)
Mind- and reality-bending drugs feature again and again in Philip K. Dick's hugely influential SF stories. <I>A Scanner Darkly</I> is the novel that cuts closest to the bone, drawing on Dick's own experience with illicit chemicals and on his many friends who died through drug misuse. Nevertheless it's blackly farcical, full of comic- surreal conversations between people whose synapses are partly fried, sudden flights of paranoid logic, and bad trips like the one whose victim spends a subjective eternity having all his sins read to him, in shifts, by compound-eyed aliens. (It takes 11,000 years of this to reach the time when as a boy he discovered masturbation.) The antihero Bob Arctor is forced by his double life into warring double personalities: as futuristic narcotics agent Fred, face blurred by a high-tech scrambler, he must spy on and entrap suspected drug dealer Bob Arctor. His disintegration under the influence of the insidious Substance D is genuine tragicomedy. For Arctor there's no way off the addict's downward escalator, but what awaits at the bottom is a kind of redemption--there are more wheels within wheels than we suspected, and his life is not entirely wasted. In a just world this harrowing novel, the 20th selection in the Millennium SF Masterworks, would have matched the sales of <I>Trainspotting</I&g t;. --<I>David Langford</I>
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Vintage Books USA The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings
Pages: 384, Paperback, Vintage Books USA
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Penton Overseas Inc Martian Time-Slip
One of the stand-out novels in Philip K. Dick's career of wildly reality-bending SF, <I>Martian Time- Slip</I> (1964) convinces by placing its insanities in a quiet, even domestic context. Here colonised Mars has a flavour of grubby, struggling 1950s suburbia, where money (not to mention water) is in short supply, jobs are insecure, the humour's mostly black, and small tragedies like one minor character's suicide cause far-ranging ripples. The good old human comedy of lies, power-play, real-estate deals and extramarital naughtiness continues as ever--all distorted by the real SF factor, an autistic child's dislocated sense of time. In one memorable scene he sketches the glorious new Martian housing project just being planned ... but as it will look a century later, a decayed slum. So powerful are this boy's visions of nightmare futures that they suck in other people and infect them with sick images of the gubbish worm, an appalling symbol of entropy. Gubbish devours beauty and reduces language itself to meaningless gubble-gubble. The very human and occasionally even likeable villain Arnie Kott plans to exploit this time-twisting ability, whereupon things become very tangled indeed. Another worthy reissue in the Millennium SF Masterworks series, which has yet to pick a single dud. --<I>David Langford</I>
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Citadel Press The Collected Stories of Philip K Dick: The Eye of the Sibyl Vol 5
Pages: 395, Paperback, Citadel Press
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Citadel Press The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick: Second Variety Vol 3
This second volume of the collected stories of one of the most influential of all science fiction writers gathers 27 stories from August 1952 to April 1953. In this extraordinarily creative period Dick produced a seemingly endless stream of breathtakingly audacious ideas, delving ever deeper into what would become major themes of his career: alienation and the nature of humanity. In Second Variety Hendricks and the Russian soldier Tasso fight a desperate battle for survival in a relentless future war against machine foes. Dick commented that here my grand theme--who is human and who only appears as human--emerges most fully. The story is a taut, Cold-War-era ancestor of <I>The Terminator</I>. In 1976 Dick wrote For me 'Human Is' is my credo. Lester is an emotionless workaholic devoted to making poisons for the military. When he returns from Rexor IV a literally changed man his wife faces a unique decision. The final story Prominent Author is an ingenious tale of instantaneous transport with strange repercussions in time. Still subversively shocking it points to the theological explorations which became increasingly important in Dick's later writing. <p> With an introduction by Norman Spinrad and brief notes this collection is an opportunity to follow the development of a writer from dazzlingly original newcomer to a master of science fiction. While Ray Bradbury's <I>The Golden Apples of the Sun</I> (1953) reshaped the short story to his own poetic ends, Dick was rapidly turning the genre inside out. --<I>Gary S. Dalkin</I>
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Citadel Press The Philip K.Dick Reader
Pages: 426, Paperback, Citadel Press
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Vintage Books USA The Crack in Space
Pages: 192, Paperback, Vintage Books USA
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Vintage Books USA Dr. Futurity
Pages: 176, Paperback, Vintage Books USA
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Vintage Books USA Vulcan's Hammer
Pages: 176, Paperback, Vintage Books USA
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Vintage Books USA Lies, Inc.
Pages: 208, Paperback, Vintage Books USA
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Vintage Books USA Vintage PKD
Pages: 199, Paperback, Vintage Books USA
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Wildside Press Philip K. Dick High
Pages: 152, Paperback, Wildside Press
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Gollancz The Father-thing (The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick)
The 23 stories here were written 1953-4 and show one of science fiction's finest writers in prolific mastery of his craft. While Dick's deep concerns with perception, reality and the nature of humanity frequently recur he rarely fails to bring a fresh idea, a new perspective, a different twist to these very varied stories. Humour is never far away, reflecting his compassion for ordinary people battling often bizarre cosmic conundrums. Kids understand: they are wiser than adults-- Dick wrote of the title story in which eight-year-old Charles discovers that his father is something else. <p> Several of these stories are notably longer than his previous work, for Dick was developing his story-telling to the point where he would soon write his first novel, <I>Solar Lottery</I>. The writing is increasingly sophisticated: Upon the Dull Earth glitters with dark poetry, a chilling fantasy about a woman who summon angels and changes the world. It is a prelude to <I>The Twilight Zone</I> and the dreamscapes of Clive Barker and a revelation for anyone who thinks of Dick purely as an SF writer. <p> The Golden Man, a compelling thriller about a mutant on the run, caused controversy on original publication, the implication that evolution will leave us behind provoking genuine anger. Clearly Dick was forging his own path, the antithesis of the bright shining SF of the American dream. The title of one story, A World of Talent, is an apt description of the brilliance Dick poured into these amazing stories. --<I>Gary S. Dalkin</I>
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Gollancz A Scanner Darkly (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
Mind- and reality-bending drugs feature again and again in Philip K. Dick's hugely influential SF stories. <I>A Scanner Darkly</I> is the novel that cuts closest to the bone, drawing on Dick's own experience with illicit chemicals and on his many friends who died through drug misuse. Nevertheless it's blackly farcical, full of comic- surreal conversations between people whose synapses are partly fried, sudden flights of paranoid logic, and bad trips like the one whose victim spends a subjective eternity having all his sins read to him, in shifts, by compound-eyed aliens. (It takes 11,000 years of this to reach the time when as a boy he discovered masturbation.) The antihero Bob Arctor is forced by his double life into warring double personalities: as futuristic narcotics agent Fred, face blurred by a high-tech scrambler, he must spy on and entrap suspected drug dealer Bob Arctor. His disintegration under the influence of the insidious Substance D is genuine tragicomedy. For Arctor there's no way off the addict's downward escalator, but what awaits at the bottom is a kind of redemption--there are more wheels within wheels than we suspected, and his life is not entirely wasted. In a just world this harrowing novel, the 20th selection in the Millennium SF Masterworks, would have matched the sales of <I>Trainspotting</I&g t;. --<I>David Langford</I>
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Gollancz Beyond Lies the Wub (The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick)
Though best known for <I>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep</I>, the source of the classic SF film <I>Blade Runner</I>, for four decades in dozens of stories and novels Philip K. Dick turned into poetic prose the metaphysical doubt and surreal zeitgeist of the late 20th century. This volume, the first of five, finds him at the beginning of his career, just starting to develop the themes which would make him one of the most important writers of the latter half of the century. The 25 stories come with a forward by the author, an introduction by Roger Zelazny, who co-wrote <I>Deus Irae</I> with Dick, and six pages of informative notes. From the previously unpublished Stability (1947) to Nanny (1952), these are science-fiction stories, fantasies, unique gimmicks and oddities. Roog is a dog's-eye view of refuge collectors, The Preserving Machine a chill allegory on the nature of change, while the title story concerns a psychic Martian with a remarkable survival mechanism. <p>Inevitably some of the SF elements have dated, but it doesn't matter: Dick wasn't predicting the future, but shining a bright, sometimes mordant light on the baffling nature of reality. These stories still dazzle because they are mind-bendingly inventive, quirkily humorous, filled with original and startling ideas. Dick, who said he wrote about The shock of dysrecognition, was a true original, a writer who expanded to possibilities of fiction. This collection is essential reading for anyone who wants to stretch the horizons of their universe. --<I>Gary S. Dalkin</I>
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Gollancz Ubik (S.F. Masterworks)
Nobody but Philip K Dick could so successfully combine SF comedy with the unease of reality gone wrong, shifting underfoot like quicksand. Besides grisly ideas like funeral parlours where you swap gossip for the advice of the frozen dead, <I>Ubik</I> (1969) offers such deadpan farce as a moneyless character's attack on the robot apartment door that demands a five-cent toll:<blockquote>I'll sue you, the door said as the first screw fell out.<p>Joe Chip said, I've never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.</blockquote>Chip works for Glen Runciter's anti-psi security agency, which hires out its talents to block telepathic snooping and paranormal dirty tricks. When its special team tackles a big job on the Moon, something goes badly wrong. Runciter is killed, it seems--but messages from him now appear on toilet walls, traffic tickets or product labels. Meanwhile fragments of reality are time-slipping into past versions: Joe Chip's beloved stereo system reverts to a hand-cranked 78 player with bamboo needles. Why does Runciter's face appear on US coins? Why the repeated ads for a hard-to-find universal panacea called Ubik (safe when taken as directed)?<p>The true, chilling state of affairs slowly becomes clear, though the villain isn't who Joe Chip thinks. And this is Dick country, where final truths are never quite final and--with the help of Ubik--the reality/illusion balance can still be tilted the other way...Another nifty choice from Millennium SF Masterworks. --<I>David Langford</I>
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Cassell military Martian Time-slip (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
One of the stand-out novels in Philip K. Dick's career of wildly reality-bending SF, <I>Martian Time- Slip</I> (1964) convinces by placing its insanities in a quiet, even domestic context. Here colonised Mars has a flavour of grubby, struggling 1950s suburbia, where money (not to mention water) is in short supply, jobs are insecure, the humour's mostly black, and small tragedies like one minor character's suicide cause far-ranging ripples. The good old human comedy of lies, power-play, real-estate deals and extramarital naughtiness continues as ever--all distorted by the real SF factor, an autistic child's dislocated sense of time. In one memorable scene he sketches the glorious new Martian housing project just being planned ... but as it will look a century later, a decayed slum. So powerful are this boy's visions of nightmare futures that they suck in other people and infect them with sick images of the gubbish worm, an appalling symbol of entropy. Gubbish devours beauty and reduces language itself to meaningless gubble-gubble. The very human and occasionally even likeable villain Arnie Kott plans to exploit this time-twisting ability, whereupon things become very tangled indeed. Another worthy reissue in the Millennium SF Masterworks series, which has yet to pick a single dud. --<I>David Langford</I>
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£5.59
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Gollancz Dr. Bloodmoney (Millennium SF Masterworks S)
Pages: 336, Paperback, Gollancz
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Gollancz Flow, My Tears, the Policeman Said (S.F.Masterworks S.)
Philip K Dick notoriously charted SF's most dangerous, booby-trapped realities. <I>Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said</I> (1974) is a relatively straightforward tale of paranoid unease at finding the world isn't what it should be. <p> Jason Taverner is world-famous for his songs and regular TV show. Thirty million people saw you zip up your fly tonight. ... It's my trademark. Although this future US is a grim police state with labour camps in Alaska and Canada, jetsetting Taverner enjoys being one of the winners. <p> Then he wakes up in a sleazy hotel room, still well-dressed and flush with money, but no longer <I>the</I> famous Jason Taverner. No ID--that's a forced-labour offence. His agent doesn't know him. Nor do his closest friends. He's even vanished from police databanks. <p> Forged documents are needed, hand-drawn by teenaged expert Kathy--one of Dick's most alarming women, a neurotic petty criminal who's also a police informer, who entraps and manipulates Taver |
