Eye in the Sky (Ace 22386)

It starts innocently enough: A group of tourists are marveling at the invention of a machine called the Bevatron. Suddenly the machine goes haywire (for you gamers out there, imagine the first scene of Half-Life), destroys the walkway high above the machine (where the tourists are) and gravity does the rest. The next part is weird, which in any PKD book world be normal, I guess. The tourists, having been zapped by the Bevatron are now stuck in a fantasy world that is being generated by one of the members of the tour group--they have no idea who. In that regard there is a slight mystery element to this novel. In each world the tourists are now tourists yet again, although this time they are tourists within the worlds that someone else has created. One lady is extremely paranoid in real life, resulting in her fantasy world where everything is out to get you (the house scene is wonderful!). Then there is another lady that abhorrs everything bad in real life. In her fantasy world there are no ants, there are no speed bumps. If it annoys or bothers her she won't allow it to exist. It was an eye-opener reading about how others view the world and what the world would be like if they could have their way. It makes me glad that I live in a world where I can walk into my house and not be afraid of it trying to literally eat me.

What more could you expect from Philip K. Dick? Even the title "Eye in the Sky" holds different meanings depending upon how you look at it. In this story where religion and reality mutate from one person's mind to the next, we are confronted with the question of what is real. Is the world around us just in our minds? or is it in someone else's mind? A God-fearing zealot? A paranoiac? And, of course, religion comes into it, as the question of God vs. Ego rises all the way to the top. All the way to the title, in fact. "Eye in the Sky", as a title, is visualized in the book when two characters ascend (Marry Poppins-like, on an umbrella) to heaven to find themselves floating before a giant eye. That alone, to me, opens up a barrel full of questions about how our desire to look into the sky and find God shapes what we see. But then, being Philip K. Dick, the twist goes further, and we then discover that the eye is not in the protagonists' mind, but in someone else's... There isn't enough room to ask (or attempt to answer) all the questions that book will raise, which is why it is an absolute marvel of fiction. One thing that I like about Dick in general is that his books are shorter than most that fall into the genre of science fiction. They are easy to read, are finished quickly, but they raise questions that will leave you thinking long after you've put the book down. In "Eye in the Sky" my original criticism was that the end came a bit abruptly and was non-conclusive. But then I figured it out, and now I cant stop thinking about how clever and appropriate the conclusion of the story really is.

The first few pages of the book set the tone: since Marsha Hamilton challenges the 'reality' as considered by the official authorities (she seems to have ties with communists), she is deemed 'dangerous'. Meanwhile, the main ideas behind the plot clearly make 'Eye in the Sky' a variation on Plato's allegory of the cave: after an explosion at the Belmont bevatron, eight people are knocked uncounscious; as each person slowly regains consciousness, they all experience his/her world of opinions and preconceptions. The first is the fanatical, manichean world of an old soldier. The eight characters are akin to Plato's prisoners, both physically (they lie down in the bevatron, numb and motionless) and mentally (they go through successive worlds of unstable appearances). But most of them are prisoners who hope to free themselves from their chains: although some don't mind these subjective worlds at first, they frequently acknowledge the urgent need to wake up and escape this unpredictable cycle. Reading the book, some might come to the conclusion that Dick's point of view is relativist, and that `reality' seems to take the form of our varying perceptions and thus can't be pinpointed in absolute terms, but I'd argue that he's not satisfied with such an easy way out. Some of the characters certainly aren't: after escaping these subjective worlds of fantasms, they aren't perfectly comfortable with the physical world either and want to change it. In the end, Dick doesn't provide definitive answers as to what reality is, but by challenging preconceived - and mainly physical - notions of reality, this book acts as a detoxifying antidote; the exact same way he described his own work in his Exegesis.

My favorite PKD book was Time Out of Joint--not any more! This is a tremendous effort and isn't dated in the least. The ideas expressed in here seem to have been written for the US social situation of 1997, not 1957. I think PKD was looking into the future.

By Chance I found this book in a used book store, and i feel blessed... As far as i know it's been out of print forever.... but get them to reprint it, it's worth it. This is a stunning novel, by far Dick's Best..... far better than any of the popular ones (Valis, Do Androids..., A Scanner Darkly,etc.)If you see it, get it......