books

Notes

1. Dick wrote We Can Build You in 1962 but the book wasn't published 'til 10 years later, causing some critical misreading of how it reflected growth or changes in the author's thinking. For example, Patricia Warrick considers it an inferior treatment of "...an idea [of a human becoming an android] that apparently remained in Dick's mind after he finished the superb Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" (p. 209, Philip K. Dick, edited by Olander and Greenberg, 1983).

2. Clues that it's an earlier novel: much of the action centers around an American small business struggling to stay afloat, with "Organization Man" themes redolent of the '50s and Dick's mainstream novels of that time. By the late '60s, psychedelia had happened and Dick had gone full blown cosmic.

3. It's unusual for being written in the first person. More typical is the well-constructed beginning that goes off the rails halfway through, into personal hypochondriac maundering.

4. The plot of the first half: an electric musical organ company builds an animatronic robot of Edward M. Stanton, Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of War, as a prototype, then follows it with a lifelike, walking, talking, reasoning Lincoln. Although the simulacra think and feel with their "ruling monad brains" the same way their predecessors did they are typically callously referred to as "the Stanton" and "the Lincoln" by the narrator and other characters. A Howard Hughes style industrialist takes an interest in the simulacra because he wants to use them as fake companions to encourage people to immigrate to the Moon, where he owns the majority of the land. The builders of the sims wrestle with losing their creations in the face of a lucrative buy-out. The Lincoln and the Stanton become active advisors within the "start up."

5. The narrator, Louis Rosen, an employee of the organ company, falls in love with Pris Frauenzimmer, the 19-year-old-going-on-40 cured schizoprenic who designs the outer shells of the sims. She is a typical Dick female, a highly intelligent ball crusher. Perceiving the industrialist as a rival for Pris' affections, Louis flips out midway through the book and tries to kill him. The remainder of the narrative describes Louis' experiences in a state psychiatric facility. Dick drops the android plot after the attempted murder.

6. A charitable reading of the book (which Warrick and others have suggested): Louis has turned into a machine and Dick typically subverts the mechanics of the sci fi potboiler to explore the psyche of the human android. Louis, however, is probably the least cold, the least logical, character in the book--he is a sloppy emotional mess from page 1--and Dick lays no foundation for an excess of logic sending him over the edge. An uncharitable reading: Dick needed to wrap up the book to get paid and found it easier to write 80 pages about his own mental health and women problems than to work out the rest of the plot, and no one would read this dime novel anyway.

7. Still vital are the ever-surprising uses of the Lincoln and the Stanton as characters: the former grave but given to annoying reading aloud from children's books, which he finds fascinating, the latter decisive in business matters but mysterious as to ultimate goals--too bad we never find out what they might be. As with much Dick, there's an intriguing novel in here waiting to be written. A debate between the industrialist and the Lincoln about what it means to be human anticipates the trial of Data in Star Trek TNG's "The Measure of a Man" episode by some 25 years. Rather unlike Star Trek is the endless bickering between Louis and Pris, showcasing the author's urbane, melancholy humor. At one point they check into a motel, feinting sexual interest back and forth. Pris suggests going out for corn beef sandwiches. A page or two later, during a lull in their sparring, Louis says "It's too late for kosher corned beef anyhow. I don't mean too late in the evening. I mean too late in our lives."

Related: Lies, Inc. (aka The Unteleported Man).

"Digital books bought for the Kindle are sent to it over a wireless network. Amazon can also use that network to synchronize electronic books between devices — and apparently to make them vanish."

The "apparently" was inserted due to the Times' squeamishness about making a direct statement. Books were deleted from people's Kindles. Everyone is noting the irony that the books were Animal Farm and 1984, which Amazon didn't have the e-rights to.

As a past recipient of censorship by Amazon, yrs truly can only imagine how the Red (Bush supporting) company will use the synchronization feature to mess with blogs people subscribe to on their Kindles.

Folks, there is a great reading device out there--it's called the general purpose computer. This whole fetish for dedicated hardware (iPods, etc.) is a bad way to go.

From Salon letters about the Air France/Brazil crash:

somthing stinks
"The captain of a Spanish airliner claimed to have seen "an intense flash of white light" in the area where the plane was lost"

Yeah, 'cause no-one would EVER describe a flash of lightning as "an intense flash of white light".

You do love your conspiracy theories.

-- Lynx

Move along
The "white light" was probably just the people of the future travelling back in time to harvest the passengers, since they were going to die anyway.

They obviously need to re-seed humanity with people who haven't yet ceased being able to reproduce due to pollutants and whatnot. I think this was the subject of a documentary film.

See--much more plausible than "lightning." Who ever heard of lightning occuring in a thunderstorm?

-- Kevin C

@Kevin C
Not quite a documentary film. A terrific science fiction short story by John Varley that was published in a compilation called "The Persistence of Vision". Great book, by the way. I'm pretty sure that they didn't put out a flash of light, though. The whole point of the kidnapping was to do it secretly because if anybody found out the entire thing would not have happened.

-- jebldmm

Had not heard of the Varley yarn. The short story was "Air Raid," and the ideas were developed in the novel Millennium, made into a movie with Kris Kristofferson. Here's the Wikipedia synopsis of the book:

Millennium features a civilization that has dubbed itself "The Last Age". Due to millennia of warfare of every type (nineteen nuclear wars alone), the Earth has been heavily polluted and humanity's gene pool irreparably damaged. They have thus embarked on a desperate plan; time travel into the past, collect healthy humans, and send them to an uncontaminated planet to rebuild civilization.

The time travelers can only take people that will have no further effect on the timeline - those who have vanished without a trace, or died without being observed - otherwise they would be changing the past, which risks a temporal paradox and perhaps even a catastrophic breakdown of the fabric of time. Though they collect everyone they can, they exert a great deal of effort on those destined to die in various disasters such as sinking ships and crashing airplanes (and once a century of Roman soldiers lost and dying in the North African desert). As such incidents leave no survivors to report interference and change the timeline, they can freely remove the living but soon-to-die victims, and replace them with convincing corpses they have manufactured in the future.

The novel deals with several of the raids, their inevitable discovery in the present day, and the fallout that results from changes to the present day reverberating into the future.

Crops of various book jacket art, found on the web.
I like all the emotion in these: the nervous expression of the man contemplating his skull-double outside the black hole; the shadowy giant coming between the guy with the futuristic Sta-Prest collar and his agonized woman; the mighty thrust of the cosmic bowler toward three grim, middle aged, hovering clone faces.
People say science fiction is an art for adolescent boys but that's only a way of minimizing the extreme psychic discontinuities it reveals.

...such as it is. The RE/SEARCH book by Vale and Juno on the bottom of the stack is top-notch, if you can track down a copy. Interviews, reviews, excerpts, illustrated with infra-red filtered photos of bleak industrial and desert landscapes.

Those enjoying the antics of the Dharma Initiative on Lost might get a kick out of Rushing to Paradise, a politically incorrect fable of what happens when a fanatic liberal activist suddenly has infinite funding for research on a Pacific island (hint: she becomes another Pol Pot). If you've never read Ballard I swear by Concrete Island, The Crystal World, High-Rise, and his breakthrough autobiography Empire of the Sun (sentimentalized by Steven Spielberg, what a surprise).

Rest in peace, Jim. Another guy the gatekeeper literati didn't know what to make of, adored by artists, filmmakers, etc.

Update: Not that Ballard necessarily wanted past the gate. As Simon Reynolds notes in a Salon obit: "There's an impulse among some Ballard fans, especially those who are 'proper' literati themselves, to elevate Ballard and argue that his work transcends the ghetto of genre fiction. Although Ballard occasionally expressed frustration with SF's pulpy aura, and later in his career wrote novels that fell outside its parameters, he generally was content to situate himself in the genre and loudly championed its potential. 'I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature,' he once declared, '... all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to SF ... No other form of fiction has the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone the future.'"