Philip K. Dick, Clans of the Alphane Moon1964 / Audiobook / 192 pages / USA
**
I enjoy unhinged psychedelic PKD, so had high hopes for this tale set in an extraterrestrial madhouse that casts telepathic slime mould as a supporting character. Unfortunately, it falls back on simplistic caricatures of mental illness and our main story is a dull domestic dispute with no likeable side to root for.
Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch1965 / Audiobook / 278 pages / USA
****
Someone's taken LSD. Casually dropping satirical and ingenious ideas all over the place, this disorienting trip across space, time and mind would be one of Dick's best, if Ubik hadn't refined it.
1965-66 (collected 1967) / Audiobook / 176 pages / USA
***
This Cold War satire is possibly the 'zaniest' PKD outing, but it's no Robert Sheckley. Our everyday hero is a clairvoyant womanising comic artist, and that blend informs the style. I never fully got into it.
1964 / Audiobook / 174 pages / USA
***
Like many (most? all?) PKD novels expanded from short stories, I feel I'd rather be reading the concise originals than this weird mash-up. It's conventional for these things to go off the rails as the story gets developed/padded, but this lost me when it brought in bizarrely low-key time travel schemes and inexplicable immortality. The 1984 stuff's all good.
1964 / Audiobook / 100 pages / USA
***
"A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!"
Don't believe everything you see in the brochure. Skilfully written to fit existing magazine art, PKD's shortest novel about a shady cover-up was later expanded/ruined as Lies, Inc.
Don't believe everything you see in the brochure. Skilfully written to fit existing magazine art, PKD's shortest novel about a shady cover-up was later expanded/ruined as Lies, Inc.
Philip K. Dick, Lies, Inc.
1964-? (published 2004) / Audiobook / 202 pages / USA**
I need to refrain from making assumptions that I've read the maddest or trippiest Dick novel any time one turns out a bit weird, but it's surely justified here. The long-gestating expansion of his 60s novella The Unteleported Man, that PKD insisted was necessary but that never saw publication in his lifetime, the full version wasn't published until 20 years after his death. The new material is a literal acid trip that interrupts the decent story for half the book. I don't really know what to make of it, but it's no 2001.
