Martian Time-Slip

So maybe Dick's vision of the future was wrong, and his grasp of Martian geography was weak. Well, Shakespeare gave a seacoast to Bohemia and Italian names to Danes, and it didn't hurt his reputation!This is one of PKD's best novels, from the decade when he cranked out one mindbending book after another. His best traits are all here: the intensely human characters; the grounding of the fantastic plot in practical, real-world concerns; the questioning of our everyday concepts of time and space; the deft use of multiple perspectives and shifting time-schemes; and the abundant humor.PKD disliked being stranded in the pulpy ghetto of "sci-fi," but I think it worked to the reader's gain. Although his work has something in common with the American techno-paranoid school (Pynchon, Vonnegut, DeLillo), its honesty and lack of deliberate cleverness render it superior in my view. His unnerving excursions into the human psyche bring to mind Georg Buechner's comment, "Man is an abyss, and I get dizzy when I look therein!"

Remember those swashbuckling Mars adventures by Edgar Rice Burroughs? Remember those terrifying, unconquerable Martians from War of the Worlds? We are not talking about those Martians here. The Martians and the humans in this novel are quite ordinary, often weak, and occasionally nuts. You want space opera, go watch Star Wars again.On this Mars, our hero is a traveling repairman with a schizophrenic past. Our villain is the president of the plumber's union. Our damsel in distress is the villain's mistress, but she falls in love with the schizophrenic anyway. The prize everyone is after is an autistic adolescent so terrified of physical contact that he can't see one person touch another without seeing them both decay on the spot. And the character who triumphs at the end does so not because he's got a bigger gun, but just because he has compassion for a group of weak, dying Martian natives who can't possibly do him any good. Never mind your typical SF novel, this isn't your typical novel of any sort, or your typical anything.That's PKD for you - he takes you on a seemingly normal science fiction trip and immediately turns everything inside out. That's part of what makes him brilliant. The other part is that he understands all his characters, which is to say all human types, including the greedy and self-serving ones. (This empathy for all types of people is all the more remarkable when you consider that his previous book, The Man in the High Castle, won a major award and he still couldn't get a hardcover book contract.) The schizophrenic, the union leader, the autistic kid, the mistress - all they want is to be loved, like you and me. Unfortunately, some of them (and some of us) learn that fact too late.Of course, if one is living in a world where your choices are overpopulation and madness or emigration to Mars and endless struggle - a world in which mental illness is as frequent as the common cold, in which psychiatrists earn a living by replacing their patients at social functions instead of treating them - in a world like that, it's all too easy to overlook love and compassion. That any of these characters manage to find, feel and express love is little short of a miracle. You read Martian Time-Slip and, after you're finished saying "What a weird story," you feel better about being human.Martian Time-Slip is without question one of PKD's best works. It has an entertaining and exciting story, it's full of intriguing ideas handled well, there's a nice balance of humor and intensity, and I promise you've never met characters like these before unless you've been reading PKD for a while. Which isn't a bad idea, by the way. He's a good tonic for the modern man and woman, beset from all sides by forces they don't understand but somehow able to stand up and take care of their friends at the same time, like these characters do.Benshlomo says, The greatest triumphs are the small ones.

Philip Dick, like most science fiction writers, wrote enough action-oriented novels and stories to satisfy die hard genre fans, but anyone who has read Dick's work carefully knows that he came to be less concerned with action-adventure and more with very human issues. In Martian Time Slip, teaching androids are used in schools, one character is suspected of being able to see into the future, and, of course, the backdrop is Mars. Dick, though, uses this science fiction setting to explore aspects of the human condition, such as isolation, suffering, greed, hopelessness and cruelty, through the eyes of a number of characters who are all rendered with compassion despite their obvious shortcomings. The basic plot revolves around the efforts of Arnie Kott, a bullish big fish in a small pond, to determine if an autistic child named Manfred Steiner can see the future. It is then Kott's intention to use that knowledge to further his own self interests. Drawn into this story are several others that Kott needs to carry out his plan, and it is through their perspectives, their personal struggles that may not even peripherally relate to Kott's scheme, that the novel derives its impact. One section of the book, in fact, recounts a single evening from four different points of view. It's an amazing display of technique that seems a natural development in the telling of the story and manages to challenge the reader's own opinions about the characters involved. The novel's background detail is convincing as well, from the way Mars' relatively few surviving aboriginal inhabitants are portrayed as a race doomed long before humanity arrived, now lingering until probable eventual extinction, to the desolate nature of Mars itself and the attitudes and practices that have been transplanted from Earth. Much like the excellent Dr. Bloodmoney, which would appear the following year (1965), Martian Time-Slip is an ensemble story in a landscape that offers little hope aside from the comfort and love of other living beings which, I would like to believe, is what Dick is saying is the only hope of any consequence.

Dick is the only author whose works literally force me to put the book down from time to time, for fear that reading one more sentence will send me to the insane asylum forever. Not Stephen King, Clive Barker, or even H.P. Lovecraft can approach the depth of cosmic horror which Dick so modestly invites us to stare into. And yet, there is no pretension here; Dick sympathizes with his innocent protagonists, giving us a straightforward account of their daily struggles to lead normal lives. This is one of the most heartbreakingly hilarious SF novels ever written, with plenty of mind grenades that will detonate in your head long after you've finished the book.

For me, the questions the novel asks (and leaves for readers to answer) are: what is archetypal memory? Does the world have its own memory? We are the aboriginal people of Earth, do we therefore have a memory of it encoded into our souls? Did the Native Americans have a memory/dream/spirit-connection to North America that we somehow psychically grafted onto our own souls when our ancestors migrated here? (why IS America so different from other counties?--all of the collective archetypal memories augmenting our individual selves?) The dream-time/touchstone of this incredible novel are the native Martians, to whom Dick continually returns as a narrative device, after describing the strange autistic children. The Martians are the indigenous people, the first inhabitants, who have such strange, distant ways. The autistic children, then, are the first generation of "martians", they are being "assimilated" into the spirit-connection, the soul, the archetypal memory of the planet. (Much as we say we want immigrants to "assimilate" and learn English.) The children literally experience time and space differently than Earth-born humans! They are not "autistic", they are "becoming Martians"! That is why the last chapters are so extraordianry.The basic question: If we went to another planet, or moon, or galaxy, and stayed, what would happen to our minds?I have read most of Dick's work; I mourn his passing and that we will never see his like again.