1959 / Audiobook / 221 pages / USA
****
Most of PKD's novels are too chaotic in their stream-of-consciousness padding to deploy premeditated twist endings, but this prescient Mandela Effect novelisation is a notably coherent exception. Seeming like a low-budget Eye in the Sky most of the way through, the reveal cements it as an early classic.
1962 / Audiobook / 240 pages / USA
***
These multiple choice alternative histories are more credible and intricate than your average PKDystopia, and I was more interested in the setting than the political plot. Not sure why the occupying Japanese get the 'Jap' moniker while their Nazi buddies are more respectfully referred to as 'Germans' though.
Philip K. Dick, Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb1965 / Audiobook / 222 pages / USA
***
This post-nuclear soap opera featuring talking animals and psychic cyborg thalidomides is more Thundarr than Threads, but feels more Twin Peaks than anything. As well as much like Dick's own Deus Irae, which I would have recognised as a knock-off if I'd been reading these the right way around.
1964 / Audiobook / 192 pages / USA
**
One of the more outwardly satirical entries in the canon with its literal puppet presidents, though the fascist dystopia is too grim to permit chuckles. Because it was a short story stretched out to novel length, he throws in customary sci-fi digressions like telekenesis and time travel, with some extraterrestrial non sequiturs for good measure.
Philip K. Dick, The Crack in Space (a.k.a. Cantata-140)
****
Not one I've seen mentioned among the canonical favourites, I found it a more satisfying and sustained work than some of the more freeform novels Dick brainstormed out to the word count in the rest of the decade. The colonial and racist themes barely count as allegories, since they're explicitly called out, but they're more successful here than in his clumsier later attempts to cover similar ground. The imaginative solutions to the population crisis would have made a decent short story, but it's the twist involving a megalomaniacal space pimp that makes it one of the better novels.
