the world Dick made

I’m going out on a limb to say Dick has a bitter and cynical view of marriage and relationships. In The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, Leo Runcible bickers with his alcoholic wife Janet, and Walter Dombrosio fights viciously with his wife Sherry.

Runcible and Dombrosio, neighbors in the small California town of Carquinez, don’t like each other. When Dombrosio invites his black mechanic over for dinner, it costs Runcible, the local realtor, a sale. Runcible retaliates by calling the police on Dombrosio when he sees him driving drunk, and Dombrosio loses his license. Dombrosio then plants a fake fossil of a Neanderthal skull on Runcible’s land which Runcible tries to exploit for the publicity until he realizes he’s been had. It turns out Dombrosio dug up the malformed skull from the unmarked grave of someone who lived in old Carquinez several generations ago. These chupper-jawed people resembled Neanderthals because of a deformity caused by poisoned water in the area. At the end of the story, Runcible invests everything he has in order to fix the tainted Carquinez water supply.

Dick filled this novel with thoroughly unlikable people. Dombrosio rapes his wife in order to get her pregnant so she can no longer work, because it insults his manhood or something to have her support him after he quits his job. He also throws a chair at her, but they stay together. The 1950s were messed up.

Dick wrote this one in 1960, and it was the first of his unpublished mainstream novels to be published after he died. He would reuse the idea of the Neanderthal chuppers in one of the many subplots of The Simulacra.

Cast of characters

• Leo Runcible – realtor in Carquinez
• Janet Runcible – Leo’s wife
• Walter Dombrosio – package designer at the Lausch Company
• Sherry Dombrosio – Walt’s wife
• Norm Lausch – owner of the Lausch Company
• Chuck Halpin – Walt’s black mechanic
• Michael Wharton – a fourth grade teacher and fossil enthusiast
• Seth Faulk – reporter for the Carquinez newspaper
• Tom Heyes – Carquinez veternarian
• Dr. Freitas, Jack Bowman & Dudley Sharp – University of California anthropologists investigating Runcible’s skull

Dick would go on to do a much better job with a female protagonist in his last book The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

In Mary and the Giant, twenty-year-old Mary Anne jumps from job to job and man to man trying to figure out her life in the small California town of Pacific Park. She first has a fling with the black singer Carleton Tweany before getting involved with recently-arrived Joseph Schilling who has decided to open a record shop.

It’s creepy for fifty-something Schilling to have an interest in Mary Anne, but she seems to be a willing participant in the relationship until she begins to act like he’s a monster, even though he’s the only somewhat sympathetic person in this otherwise dismal book.

By the end of the story Mary Anne decides to run off to San Francisco with the idiot piano player Paul Nitz, and in the last chapter we see they started a family.

Cast of characters

• Mary Anne Reynolds – our protagonist. A twenty-year-old girl
• Joseph Schilling – businessman who opens a record store in Pacific Park
• Max Figuera– Schilling’s business partner
• David Gordon – Mary’s fiancé
• Taft Eaton – owner of the Lazy Wren bar
• Paul Nitz – pianist at the Lazy Wren
• Carleton B. Tweany – black singer at the Lazy Wren
• Ed and Rose Reynolds – Mary’s parents
• Beth and Danny Coombs – a couple who follows Schilling to Pacific Park. Beth had a brief affair with Schilling in the past
• Chad Lemming – a local folk singer
• Leland Partridge – hosts a party for music wholesalers in San Francisco
• Sid Hethel – an obese composer at Partridge’s party

Dick wrote the mainstream novel Humpty Dumpty in Oakland in 1960. It was published after he died, in 1986.

Al Miller, a used car salesman on a lot next to Jim Fergesson’s auto repair garage, has to figure out what to do with his life when the old man decides to sell the shop and retire. Through the businessman Chris Harman, Jim finds out about an investment in an auto repair business in the expanding area around Marin County. Paranoid Al, convinced Harmon is a crook and a swindler, does all he can to sabotage Jim’s plans.

Dick has a tendency toward over description in these mainstream books. I prefer his sci-fi when he can get a trip done with something like ‘the flapple flew from San Francisco to New York in an hour’ instead of this where he spends five pages on the old man’s uninteresting drive on the highway out to Marin County.

The book picks up once it focuses more on down-on-his-luck Al rather than Jim Fergesson. It’s not bad, but just like The Broken Bubble, there isn’t a whole lot to recommend.

Cast of characters

• Jim Fergesson – owner of an auto repair garage
• Lydia Fergesson – Jim’s wife
• Al Miller – runs Al’s Auto Sales next to Jim’s garage
• Julie Miller – Al’s wife
• Mrs. Lane – a black realtor helping Al find a new spot for his auto lot
• Chris Harmon – runs Teach Records. Suggests that Jim invest in a new repair shop in Marin County
• Bob Ross – works for his father-in-law Chris Harmon
• Boris Tsarnas – Jim and Lydia’s lawyer
• The Dolittles – middle-class black family. Mrs. Dolittle rents to Al and Julie

The Broken Bubble is a mainstream novel Dick wrote in 1956, although it wasn’t published until 1988 after he died.

A San Francisco radio DJ and his ex-wife get involved with a teenaged married couple, and in a subplot, a woman lets herself get kicked around inside a plastic ball for the amusement of some drunk optometrists at a convention party.

It lacks a hook to get excited about, although the relationships felt real. Maybe a touch melodramatic at times but definitely not terrible like I kind of expected.

Cast of characters

• Jim Briskin – radio DJ for KOIF. Jim Briskin is also the name of the news-clown in The Crack In Space
• Patricia Gray – Jim’s ex-wife
• Bob Posin – salesman for KOIF
• Art Emmanual – eighteen-year-old married kid befriended by Jim
• Rachel – Art’s wife
• Ferde Heinke and Joe Mantila – Art’s friends
• Ludwig Grimmelman – mid-twenties. Head of some kind of revolutionary group that Art and his friends belong to
• Luke Sharpstein – owns Looney Luke’s Used Car Lot. This character was repurposed for The Simulacra
• Nat Emmanual – Art’s older brother. Owner of Nat’s Auto sales.
• Hugh Collins – wealthy San Francisco optometrist
• Tony Vacuhhi – Bob Posin’s acquaintance
• Thisbe Holt – the girl in the plastic bubble at Hugh Collin’s party

Dick began Deus Irae in 1964 and collaborated on it with Roger Zelazny on and off for the next twelve years before it finally was published in 1976.

A religion called the Servants of Wrath springs up after a nuclear war wipes out most of the planet’s population. The followers worship the destroyer who has come to Earth in the form of Carl Lufteufel, the man responsible for the bombs.

Tibor McMasters, an armless and legless man very similar to the phocomelus Hoppy Harrington from Dr. Bloodmoney (except that Tibor’s cart is pulled by a cow), is hired to paint a church mural featuring Lufteufel for the Servants of Wrath. He sets off on a pilgrimage, followed by Pete Sands, across the post-apocalyptic wasteland in order to find Lufteufel and take a photo of him to reference for the mural.

Cast of characters

• Father Handy – father in the Servants of Wrath church
• Tibor McMasters – limbless artist who paints the SOW church mural
• Pete Sands – Christian church member
• Dr. Jim Abernathy – Christian priest in Charlottesville
• Lurnie Rae – SOWer who decides to join the Christian church
• Carl Lufteufel – Deus Irae. The God of Wrath. Former Chairman of the Energy Research and Development Administration who was responsible for the nuclear war
• Jackson and Earl Potter – lizard-like mutants Tibor meets on his journey
• Jack Schuld – a hunter who says he is tracking Lufteufel but turns out to be Lufteufel himself
• The Great C – a computer out in the post-apocalyptic wasteland that captures passerby and dissolves them in underground vats of acid

The Zap Gun eventually won me over with its loopy charm. In 2004 Wes-bloc and Peep-East are locked in a cold war, but they only pretend to build the weapons that keep the other countries at bay.

Weapons fashion designers on both sides create sketches while in a trance-like state. The public believes these sketches are used to construct lethal weapons, but in reality the designs are just turned into consumer gadgets and toys. When aliens attack, the two sides must join together to find a real weapon that can save Earth.

Dick wrote The Zap Gun while he was also writing The Penultimate Truth. In that one he identified with the Yance-man speechwriter hacks, and in this one he writes about Lars Powderdry who has a deep-seated fear he will enter one of his drug-induced trances, return without anything to show for it and be discovered as a fraud.

A lot of the Vintage paperbacks feature the Village Voice blurb that calls Dick the poor man’s Thomas Pynchon. I’d say this is Dick at his most Pynchony with all the goofy names (Surely G. Febbs, Lars Powderdry, Dr. Todt aka Dr. Dead in German) and a plot with an off-kilter sense of humor that takes a while to sort out.

Cast of characters

• Lars Powderdry – our protagonist. A weapons fashion designer for Wes-bloc
• Lilo Topchev – Peep-East’s weapons fashion designer
• Dr. Todt and Elvira Funt – Lars’s medical team
• Maren Faine – Lars’s mistress
• General Nitz – the Commander in Chief on Natsec’s board
• Marshal Paponovich – Soviet Marshal and head of SeRKeb
• Don Packard – a KACH-man
• Surely G. Febbs – the newest concomody on the UN-W Natsec Board
• Pete Freid – ranking engineer at Lanferman Associates
• Aksel Kaminsky – a Soviet official
• Jack Lanferman – owner of Lanferman Associates
• Vincent Klug – toymaker who tries to convince Lanferman to partner with him on  prototypes
• Major Geschenko – head of the Soviet KVB surveillance team
• Ricardo Hastings – a so-called war veteran who traveled back in time from 2068

Other things to know

• Wes-bloc – the Western nations
• Peep-East – the Sino-Soviet bloc of countries
• KACH – a planet-wide private police agency
• SeRKeb – Peep-East’s governing body
• UN-W Natsec – the governing board of Wes-bloc
• Lanferman Associates – the firm that produces prototypes from Lars’s trance sketches
• pursaps – pure saps or poor saps. The majority of the public
• cogs – the cognoscenti. The ruling class who know the truth about the “weapons”