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1964 - Year in SF&F: Reviews



THE WONDER TIMELINE: SF&F RETROSPECTIVE
Read other issues here

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Philip K. Dick
"The Penultimate Truth" (nv)
(exp. from "The Defenders")
(based on "Mold For Yancy")
© Galaxy, Jan 1953
book: Belmont, 1964
--/ third place apocalyptic sf novel
--/ wonder award
--/ idea award


"The Penultimate Truth" is a sharp Cold War nightmare, which greatly influenced me when I read it in my youth. It could be a "quintessential" paranoia premise: The world's population lives underground in small factories called 'Tanks'. They are making complex robots to fight World War III above. Information about the war comes to them from - yes, robots again, of course. So, it turns out the war finished ten years ago. And the robots are enjoying country estates, in the meantime trying to keep humanity locked up "for its own good". This novel has a darker feeling than the original story "The Defenders". It also contains my single "most-loved" idea - breaking out of the confining world into the great wide open - so this explains such a high rating, too.
review: 04-Jul-06 (read in 1986)

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Philip K. Dick
"UBIK" (nv)

(based on "What the Dead Men Say")
© Worlds of Tomorrow, Jun 1964
story: The Preserving Machine, 1969
novel: Doubleday, 1969
--all time sf novel : 1987 Locus /37
--sf novel : 1998 Locus /43 (tie)
--/ second place sf novel
--/ idea award
--/ wonder award
--/ adventure award
--/ style award
--/ shock value

Philip K. Dick loved to play with reality: what it might be, what it could be, and how it could be twisted and warped. Ubik, which was published in 1969, is a perfect example of Dick at his most playful, wild, and enjoyable – all the while having an obvious blast playing his might be, could be, and twisted and warped reality games.

At first Ubik is a science fiction drama, with Dick’s signature surreal details and devices: a Machiavellian fight between two powerful organizations in a technologically advanced North America.

Then, as they say, things get weird – as weird as only Dick can make them. Escaping a bomb blast on the moon, the main characters soon begin to see the world -- their reality -- fracture and break. It takes them a while, but eventually they figure out that they are all in suspended animation, in half-life, and that they are being snuffed out one by one by a powerful being – and that the only thing that might save them is a weird, and ubiquitous, substance called UBIK.

But even though UBIK is a very strange book it still is immensely readable, which demonstrates Dick’s tremendous talent. All too often bizarre is simply an author’s excuse for chaos, where meaning and characterization gets tossed for cheap surreal details. But that’s never true for Dick and absolutely not true with UBIK: things get very bizarre in the book but never as the expense of the core principles of a great book: characters, story, description, and so forth.

Ubik is pure Dick, and a must-read: a wonderfully bizarre adventure that’ll make you stare at the wall for hours and wonder, as Dick surely did, about what’s really on the other side of it.

Review by author M. Christian
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