Lies, Inc.: A Novel

Unlike a lot of PKD fans I really like this book. I've read the original novella (The Unteleported Man) once and the 1983 Berkeley version (also titled The Unteleported Man) with the additional 1965 chapters included, three times. I am a hard core Philip K Dick fan having read most of his novels, stories and a couple of volumes of his non fiction, as well as two biographies. He was a genuis for writing mind blowing novels that posed fundamental questions were "What is Real?" and "What is human?" The hard sciences didn't really interest him nearly as much as philosophy, theology and politics. At the same time his work blends the comic, the absurdist and the surreal in very strange and wonderful ways. For those new to PKD I would recommend starting with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Now Wait for Last Year, The Martian Time Slip, The Man in the High Castle, or Ubik. If you like those you might enjoy LIES INC. as well. Or if you want to dive right into his most bizzare and experimental work, go right ahead. Actually the previous version, "The Unteleported Man", was one of the first I read by Dick. And I've always enjoyed the second portion (here inserted into the orginal novella instead of tacked on at the end as it was previously)which consists of an interstellar war fought with psychedelic drugs and time warping weapons, cephalopod-like alien invaders, murderous androids, diabolical nazi scientists, and multiple paraworlds. Several explanations are offered as to the reasons behind the unfolding events. All of them are contradictory and none of them difinitive.

i really don't want to give away too much in respect for all those who haven't read the book yet. just this: written between WWII and the german reunion in '89, the story confronts the reader with a very frightening and amazingly visionary view of a possible future world. i personally found it most fascinating, including its weird detour into psychedelic paraworlds. the only negative aspect i feel i should mention here are the annoyingly numerous grammatical and spelling mistakes whenever dialogs or narrative is in german language - as a native speaker, i really got tired of stumbling over them, and i think it's a pity the editor - vintage books - didn't have a translator check the foreign language in the story for the sake of its overall quality and credibility ... given the fact that this is not the first edition of the story, and there is an existing german translation for cross-checking! other than that, it's a great and very consuming book.

To control the aggressiveness of citizens living on top of one another in crowded file cabinets like anthills in overpopulated urban regions, Lies Incorporated uses computer software to keep people sublimely quiet. A metropolis is simply an industrial work zone with contented "prisoners". The only escape from this drab existence is through the services of Trails of Hoffman, Inc. who can teleport a person to the paradise colony planet Whale's Mouth, but this is a one way ticket. The Lies Incorporated SubInfo computers perform an unnatural act for them by transmitting a ton of data on the Oakland, California rat population to Rachmael ben Applebaum, who knows something is not right. Rachmael begins questioning "truths" now that he sublimely has become the rat expert. He wonders about the Utopian alternative and soon has evidence that the happy crowds are a sham, a galaxy con game. He plans to become THE UNTELEPORTED MAN and illegally take a spaceship to the planet to ask who wants to come home.This futuristic dark vision that is mindful in many ways of 1984 is actually a rewriting of Philip K. Dick's 1960s novella. THE UNTELEPORTED MAN. The deceased author paints a future with little hope except for the utopian colony that proves to be even more dismal than the hopelessness on earth. The vivid descriptions such as bits of a cheeseburger not a whole cheeseburger provides quite a landscape. Rachmael is a terrific champion while the intergalactic con game is brilliantly done. Fans of exciting but bleak science fiction thrillers know that Philip K. Dick has been one of the greats and that is no lie or computer generated "truth".Harriet Klausner

The first half of this novel was originally published in book form in 1966 under the title The Unteleported Man. Dick expanded the novel, and its presently published form as Lies, Inc. (2004 edition), represents his intentions for its final form. The first half was a fairly routine political intrigue set in a world where much of Earth's population is emigrating via teleportation to a distant planet. The second half has only a tenuous relationship to what proceeded it and is the most bizarre piece of writing that Dick ever produced. It is an account of what happens to the main character when he gets hit by an LSD dart: he experiences a series of psychedelic "paraworlds," or different classes of hallucinated realities experienced in altered states of consciousness. This second half spins so far out of both the author's and the reader's control that the sense of objective reality dissolves altogether. We are immersed in total insanity. So it becomes a trip in a very real sense-but forget about any satisfaction from the artistic unity or structure. There isn't any.

Philip K. Dick's "Lies, Inc.," now published in its complete form for the first time after making the rounds as "The Unteleported Man," is a baffling book combining Dick's penchant for creating well-realized alternate timelines, his frequently expressed cynical views of a bleak future, and a foray into a delusional, drug-induced (?) world that will leave readers scratching their head for some time.Like most of Dick's works, the back cover blurb barely scratches the surface of what we can expect. Sure, all of the facts are true enough, but as readers familiar with Dick know, all is not as it seems.In fact, "all is not as it seems" is a major, all-consuming theme in Lies, Inc. It is the theme that drives the narrative forward, setting in motion a chain of events - some of them wholly unreal - that leads us to an unusual conclusion. And just as the main character questions the reality presented to him, when done reading the book, some readers may wonder just how much of what they read was as it appeared.Roughly halfway to two-thirds of the way through Lies, Inc., the story takes an abrupt left turn, delving into a world of paranoia, drugs, hallucinations, alien creatures and alternate worlds. It is a perplexing turn, written in a hazy, meandering manner. And just as suddenly we are plunged back into the story as we left it, the narrative not missing a beat. The nature of the diversion - what it means to the narrative, what events were actually taking place and which were delusions, whether any of it really happened at all, and what the POINT was - is puzzling, because Dick provides us with no answers. Whether that is a strength or a weakness depends on your tolerance for having unanswered questions dangled before you.By the end we circle back to the main narrative, nary a mention of the drug-induced diversion, and we finish the story. Baffling, but wholly satisfying as a read.Taken as a whole, Dick has certainly given us better, but when Lies, Inc. shines, it does so brightly. It is a worthy read for any fan of his work, though newer readers might be inclined to start with a more accessible book, such as "The Man Who Japed" and "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep."