Going into Howie mode...

[deckardcanine]

Having finished Philip K. Dick’s melodramatically titled The Penultimate Truth, I wish to discuss my experience of the author and particularly this book.

My first taste of Dick (you know what I mean) was the short story “Colony,” in which astronauts fall prey to a rapidly multiplying master of protean disguise. It wasn’t bad for 1953 horror with a touch of kooky slapstick, but neither did it make the author stand out to me.

I later saw the two most popular Dick-based movies, Blade Runner and Minority Report. The “Colony” premise of a unicellular creature that can mimic complex machinery well enough to fool humans before eating them may sound far-fetched, but it was only the beginning (no, I’m not spoiling them). BR features androids who are athletically superior to humans and have a set 4-year lifespan, yet the authorities can distinguish them only by a psychological test. In MR, three kids from a science project gone awry can see the future, but only where it potentially includes murder. Neither of these movies puts much effort into making its premise halfway credible, even in pseudoscientific terms. Nevertheless, they’re both pretty philosophically intriguing by Hollywood standards. I imagine there’s a fair bit more to the literature itself. I’ll see about BR should I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was a present from this Christmas along with TPT.

We tend to associate him with action, but some of Dick’s best works relegate action to a minor part so as not to distract from the unique story, which takes place as much inside characters’ thoughts as outside. That’s why I got a bang out of The Man in the High Castle, which is not your everyday SF, if even true SF (an issue too sticky to delve here). It stems from the question, “What would it be like in 1962 if the U.S. had lost WWII?” A dystopia, obviously, but just as intoxicating as it is necessarily dreary. I’m so glad my Contemporary Literary Theory and American Culture professor assigned it.

Then there’s TPT, in which most people live underground while the Western democracy androids fight the commie androids – except that the war’s been over for 15 years, and an elite group is keeping them in the dark in order to live richly with no fear of war recurrence. The theme has been explored in other sources, but it feels pretty fresh here. The stressful mind explorations like in TMITHC continue for satisfying depth. There are clearly more than two sides in conflict, and it’s hard to tell what the best choice is. No unlikely coincidences. So far, so good.

After a few dozen pages, a certain unfavorable quality unfolds. The character of Webster Foote has an extra neural knob that lends him pre-cognitive hunches. Nothing as severe as the pre-cogs in MR, but it seems superfluous here. It serves to let him figure conspiracies out a little faster than normal people. To me, that’s not so much an SF innovation as a cheap escape for an amateur mystery writer. Still, I wasn’t reading primarily for the mystery, so I remained undeterred.

Then, on page 147 of 191, the loose ends come together rather quickly, and I get the impression that haste made waste. Foote theorizes, correctly of course, that the strange David Lantano has a time machine, which has affirmably been invented as a war weapon but exists in short supply. I don’t believe that time travel, particularly backwards, will ever be anywhere close to possible, and so I don’t really welcome it in “serious” SF. To make matters much worse, Lantano isn’t just a challenging, era-hopping menace (or Machiavellian savior, if you will). He is a Cherokee from the 15th century, now 600 years old, whose features noticeably oscillate from youthful to elderly.

The book has a pretty good ending, neither too neat nor too unhappy, but sometimes a good ending isn’t enough to prevent a soured opinion. It wouldn’t be nearly so bad if the cartoony premises came before I’d finished 75% of the story. I like to know the level of realism near the outset. Imagine if Foundation suddenly introduced a mutant like Nightcrawler. Wouldn’t it be jarring? If a non-serial book could be said to jump the shark, that’s what I sensed here.

I feel a little hypocritical. My favorite SF story of all time, Tad Williams’s Otherland, has a hard-to-swallow premise at the core of its mystery which is revealed very late in the 3,000-page series. The difference is that Williams does his best to make it believable and appreciable, and none of the characters are taking it more in stride than the reader. Besides, when I’ve loved almost every line of the story, it’s hard to let that one detail get in the way of my overall opinion.

And just for the feeling of completion, let me rant about the editing. I usually have no problem with semicolons and even like them, but this book really does use them too much, a problem I didn’t see in TMITHC. It’s one thing to have them amid informal syntax to reflect the characters’ thought formations, but when someone starts a spoken sentence with “By the way,” it should never be followed immediately by a semicolon. Also, the proofreading got seriously sloppy in the second half of the book, as when the italics used to mark a character’s precise thoughts ran a few lines too long. I wonder if the editor simply lost interest after a while. Would that editor agree with me that it wasn’t one of Dick’s better efforts?

I still intend to read DADOES. I just need a break from Dick.

Comments

[billis.livejournal.com]

I've read most of Dick's readily available books- and you're right TPT is pretty unexceptional. DOADOES is better, but really not strong all the way through either. Many of his other books are more interesting, just about every volume re-published by Vintage has some merit. There usually seems to be an arc to Dick's books, in that he elaborates on the possibilities up to a certain point in the book, usually around 1/2-2/3, and then proceeds to his "wrap up" mode. I think that the "elaboration" part of his arc is the great part, while the "wrap up" section tends to be less satisfactory. Not all of the books follow this pattern, but often you reach a point in the book that you can sense that PKD has lost interest in writing the book.