De Rerum Natura deals with the fleeting nature of life, but certain passages have been altered to indicate a philosophy of immortality. They eventually realize only the books bound in wub-fur have been changed. The wub is a native Mars creature, generally agreed upon to be pretty stupid, that is nearly impossible to kill, but when it does die the pelt continues to live. Through the books it is communicating this message of eternal life. Based on all this Mr. Masters calls his lawyer and updates his will. He wants his coffin after he dies to be lined in wub-fur. 

Dick returns here to the theme of one of his earliest stories: never underestimate a wub.

Cast of characters

• Barney Masters – president of Obelisk Books
• Mr. Brandice – member of Watchmen Over Distortion and Forged Artifacts Generally
• Jack Snead – Obelisk’s copy editor
• Luther Saperstein – business agent for the firm Flawless, Incorporated that procures the wub-fur

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On Mars this survey team finds abandoned cities and resources that have been mined and completely depleted. They uncover reports though that the Martians discovered a lush, green planet to escape to just like the humans hope to do. The team wants to follow them there, confident they can overtake anyone if necessary, until they realize this new verdant planet is the one they came from and already destroyed.

Cast of characters

• Halloway, Young, Van Ecker, Carmichael, Doctor Judde, Captain Mason – the survey team exploring Mars

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A low-budget short movie based on “The Crystal Crypt,” which I have yet to see, was released in 2013. Find out more here.

Cast of characters

• Bob Thatcher – Martian posing as a Terran 
• Mara, Ralf Erickson, Jan – the three saboteurs 

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Douglas Quail dreams of an exciting trip to Mars, but since he can’t afford it on his Earth salary he settles for the next best thing, a session at Rekall, Incorporated which promises to implant a memory of a visit to Mars indistinguishable from the actual experience. During the procedure we find out he’s already been to Mars as an undercover agent after which his memory was wiped. Once aware of the truth he has to deal with the Interplan officers who want him dead.

Anyone who has seen Total Recall knows the premise. The Schwarzenegger movie, another of Dick’s best-known adaptations, heads off in a different direction from the telegraphed ending of the short story. I understand the interest in an updated film that differs from the Paul Verhoeven 90s time capsule, but watching the 2012 remake starring Colin Ferrell is a boring chore.

Again (as he did in The Penultimate Truth) Dick makes use of the real-life address of his literary agent at 580 Fifth Avenue in New York, this time as the main barracks of Interplan.

Cast of characters

• Douglas Quail – our protagonist
• Kristen Quail – Douglas’s wife
• McClane – Rekall, Inc. supervisor
• Lowe – Rekall, Inc. technician

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After being swindled by one of these carnivals and losing most of their crops, members of a Martian settlement vow to get back at the next carnival that drops in. When another traveling sideshow visits they put their plan into action. A boy with psychokinetic powers cheats to help them snag a big prize, but the tiny figurines they win turn out to be an army of robots that soon take over their land like a plague.

The UN assumes the robots were meant for something else and that the Martian colonists thwarted some grand nefarious carny plan by winning that game. But then the next traveling carnival arrives with more rigged games, including one with a prize of homeostatic traps that would capture the robots previously let loose, and Fred and the others just can’t seem to grasp the cycle of loss they are caught up in.

Cast of characters

• Bob Turk – member of the Martian settlement
• Hoagland Rae – the Martian settlement’s leader
• Fred Costner – a young boy from the Martian settlement with psychokinetic abilities
• Tony Costner – Fred’s dad
• General Mozart, General Wolff  – UN officers

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When Milt travels back to Earth after his successful Martian terraforming project he finds his suspicions confirmed. The Proxmen have constructed an elaborate illusion that life on Earth has continued so they can lure the human engineers back to their home planet in order to now terraform it for Prox, since the oceans were vaporized during the war.

Milt eventually resigns himself to this reality and heads back to Mars with a kitten, the titular precious artifact which is itself part of the Prox simulation, something Milt doesn’t recognize.

Cast of characters

• Milt Biskle – a terraforming engineer on Mars
• Dr. DeWinter – Milt’s psychiatrist
• Mary Ableseth – Milt’s tour guide companion back on Earth

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On an expedition rounding up Martian animals Captain Franco encounters the wub, a pig-like creature he intends to eat even after it turns out to be an intelligent form of life with a tendency toward philosophical discussion.

Cast of characters

• The wub – a pig-like telepathic extra terrestrial
• Captain Franco – a wrangler of alien lifeforms
• Peterson, Jones, French – crew members aboard Franco’s ship

The post Beyond Lies the Wub appeared first on the world Dick made.

Back on the real Earth the pre-cog employees at P. P. Layouts try to determine which consumer goods will be popular so that they can be minified and sent to Mars for the colonists to use in their Perky Pat environments. This balance is upset when the industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from the Proxima system with a potent new drug that he plans to market to the colonists as a more effective escape from the drudgery of Mars.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch remains my favorite PKD book even after having read them all. You might assume it was inspired by the use of LSD, but Dick claims to have not yet tried that particular drug at this point in his life. Instead, fueled by large quantities of amphetamines, he wrote this during an incredibly prolific two-year period in 1963-64 when he also wrote some of my other favorites including The Game Players of Titan, Now Wait for Last Year, The Simulacra and Clans of the Alphane Moon.

Is the world of Perky Pat the same world from The Crack in Space? Who knows, but while in the mind of Walt, one of the colonists catches Jim Briskin, everyone’s favorite newsclown (or maybe just mine), on TV.

Cast of characters

• Barney Mayerson – a pre-cog. Head of pre-fash marketing at  P. P. Layouts
• Roni Fugate – a pre-cog. Barney’s assistant and mistress
• Leo Bulero – chairman of the board at P. P. Layouts
• Emily Hnatt – Barney’s ex-wife
• Richard Hnatt – Emily’s current husband
• Palmer Eldritch – the interplan industrialist who returns from Proxima
• Sam Regan, Mary Regan, Tod Morris, Norman Schein, Helen Morris, Fran Schein – Mars colonists
• Allen and Charlotte Faine – disc jockeys in a Mars satellite
• Felix Blau – head of the police agency
• Dr. Wily Denkmal – runs an E therapy clinic in Germany

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In this phildickian future of 1994 we learn the frightening statistic that one out of six people suffers from some form of schizophrenia. We also learn that someone with autism is trapped in a world they perceive as moving so quickly they can see into the future. Amid rumors of the UN’s interest in some Martian land for new settlements, Kott schemes to use Bohlen (a ‘former’ schizophrenic) and Bohlen’s connection to his young autistic neighbor Manfred to get a jumpstart on the competition and claim the land for himself.

This book is one of my favorites. The description of Jack’s first schizophrenic episode as a young man is terrifying, as is the entropic, “gubble gubble” world of Manfred as it encroaches into the minds of everyone around him.

Along with Dick’s ideas concerning autism, nothing about the planet in Martian Time-Slip suggests an attempt at rigorous science. PKD’s Mars features flowing water (although it’s scarce), breathable air and an indigenous population of natives called Bleekmen who were on the planet when Earth colonists arrived.

In the hard science fiction novel Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson named the 39.5 minutes of non-time between midnight and 12:01 when the clocks are stopped on Mars in order to simulate an even 24-hour day the ‘Martian time-slip’ as an homage to Dick’s book.

Cast of characters

• Jack Bohlen – our protagonist. A service repairman on Mars
• Silvia Bohlen – Jack’s wife
• David Bohlen – Jack’s son
• Leo Bohlen – Jack’s father. A land speculator from Earth
• Mr. Yee – Jack’s employer
• Arnie Kott – president of the Water Workers’ Local
• Anne Esterhazy – Arnie’s ex-wife. Circulates a political newsletter for women
• Norbert Steiner – Jack’s neighbor and dealer in black-market food
• Otto Zitte – a black marketeer
• Manfred Steiner – Norbert’s autistic son in Camp B-G for anomalous children
• Dr. Glaub – a psychotherapist
• Doreen Anderton – Arnie Kott’s mistress and Jack’s lover

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Once again we have an old man kept alive by artiforgs, although the description of 130-year-old Virgil Ackerman as a slight, hermaphroditic creature is almost the exact opposite of how Stanton Brose is described in The Penultimate Truth. Rich men like Ackerman build simulated worlds on Mars to recreate their childhoods down to the smallest detail. It doesn’t have much to do with the rest of the story, but it’s still hilarious as Dick calls them regressive babylands.

Dick is airing out some issues with women with this book. His scheming, mentally unbalanced Kathy Sweetscent is one of the most caustic depictions of a wife that I can recall in any of his novels. The whole thing is ultimately about whether our protagonist, the unfortunately named Eric Sweetscent, will stay with his wife or not, even though he knows she is destined for the psychiatric hospital.

At one point it seems we will have yet another simulacrum of an authority figure just like in The Penultimate Truth and The Simulacra, (in this case one of the UN Secretary General), but that turns out not to be the case.

Some unexpected twists and a well-rounded world leader in Gino Molinari make this one worth the read.

Cast of characters

• Virgil Ackerman – founder of Tijuana Fur & Dye Corp
• Dr. Eric Sweetscent – artiforg surgeon who works for Virgil Ackerman
• Katherine Sweetscent – Eric’s wife who works for TF&D as an antique collector
• Bruce Himmel – quality control inspector at TF&D
• Jonas Ackerman – Virgil’s great-grandnephew
• Phyllis Ackerman – Virgil’s great-grandniece. On TF&D’s board of directors
• Gino Molinari – aka “the Mole”. Terra’s supreme elected leader and commander of its armed forces in the war against the reegs
• Minister Freneksy – Prime Minister of Lilistar
• Christian Plout – host of the JJ-180 drug party
• Marm Hastings – a San Francisco Taoist
• Harry Teagarden – chief of the Mole’s medical staff
• Mary Reineke – the Mole’s eighteen-year-old mistress
• Roger Corning – a ‘Starman
• Don Festenburg – advisor/speechwriter for Molinari
• Bert Hazeltine – representative of the Hazeltine corporation where JJ-180 is made

Other things to know

• Lilistar – dominant military power in the galaxy. Terra is their ally in their war against the reegs
• Reegs – creatures from Proxima at war with the ‘Starmen from Lilistar

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