A crew of explorers from Earth looking for a planet to colonize seem to have found a so-called Garden of Eden. That is until Major Lawrence Hall’s microscope tries to strangle him. Soon after corresponding reports pour in of other crew members being assaulted by inanimate objects in the same way.

They eventually figure out Planet Blue is home to a hostile native life form that can perfectly mimic non-biological items. The only chance of escape without inadvertently bringing this murderous bugger along is to board a rescue ship sans all their clothing. Too bad in the hubbub of getting naked no one considers the life form can mimic the rescue ship too.

In 1956 this story was adapted for NBC’s X Minus One radio series.

Cast of characters

• Major Lawrence Hall 
• Lieutenant Friendly 
• Commander Stella Morrison
• Captain Taylor – attacked by a rug
• Lieutenant Dodds – attacked by his gloves
• Corporal Tenner – attacked by a safety mat
• Captain Unger – swallowed up by his car
• Gail Thomas – presumably killed by her uniform
• Corporal Hendricks – swimming with Gail Thomas when she disappears
• Captain Daniel Davis – captain of the nearest Terran cruiser

I was surprised I enjoyed rereading The World Jones Made, since I don’t remember thinking too much of it the first time around. Maybe I’ve built up a tolerance for Dick’s writing which has never been particularly great.*

Jones, a precog who can see one year into the future, is an interesting character in a world ruled by relativism where all absolute thought, in an effort to stamp out extremism and war, is forbidden. With his apparent proof of certainty, Jones becomes a demagogue, whipping his followers into a frenzy against the threat of amoeba-like aliens that have started to land on Earth. When it turns out these alien drifters are mostly harmless, something Jones didn’t initially know with his limited view into the future, he martyrs himself so as to blame his death on the relativists before he would have been exposed as a fraud.

The book’s two storylines don’t come together very well. The mutants being engineered to survive on Venus don’t have much to do with what is going on with Jones, but even Dick admitted the book would have been stronger if he had found a way to tie those two threads together.

*for example: moist skin, moist ground, moist legs, moist sack (don’t ask), moist car (how?), moist skin (again), moist breath, moist fog, moist atmosphere, moist hay, moist lips, moist lips (again) and moist air.

Cast of characters

• Floyd Jones – a precog who can see exactly one year into the future although he lacks the ability to change the future when it happens
• Louis, Frank, Vivian, Garry, Dieter, Irma, Syd – mutants engineered to survive on Venus who live in a moist refuge in San Francisco
• Doctor Rafferty – oversees the refuge
• Doug Cussick – member of the secret service
• Nina – Cussick’s wife
• Pearson – security director of the Baltimore secret service
• Max Kaminski – Cussick’s senior political instructor
• Hyndshaw – a traveling salesman who picks up Jones when he is hitchhiking
• Tyler Fleming – a young member of the secret service

In A Maze of Death a group of strangers all receive job transfers to a remote planet and await instructions as to the purpose of their colony. We have a mystery on our hands when those instructions don’t arrive, and the members of the group are murdered one by one.

The LSD-inspired plot that follows has a great ending when we find out the colonists have been in a simulated reality all along. They are actually crew members of a ship stranded with no hope of rescue, and so they enter these computer-created artificial worlds again and again, with an amnesia of their actual plight, in order to pass the time before their inevitable death in space.

The religion they all follow in their invented world was generated by the ship’s computer. It resembles Christianity, although with a logic based on the existence of a physical God.

Cast of characters

• Ben Tallchief – Delmak-O’s naturalist
• Seth Morley – Delmak-O’s marine biologist
• Mary Morley – Seth’s wife
• Betty Jo Berm – Delmak-O’s linguist
• Bert Kosler – Delmak-O’s custodian
• Maggie Walsh – Delmak-O’s theologian
• Ignatz Thugg – Delmak-O’s thermoplastics expert
• Milton Babble – Delmak-O’s doctor
• Tony Dunkelwelt – Delmak-O’s photographer and soil-sample expert
• Glen Belsnor – Delmak-O’s electronics specialist and the group’s leader
• Roberta Rockingham – Delmak-O’s sociologist
• Susie Smart – Delmak-O’s clerk
• Wade Frazer – Delmak-O’s psychologist
• Ned Russell – Delmak-O’s economist

Other things to know

• How I Rose From the Dead in My Spare Time and So Can You – their religion’s holy book written by Communist theologian A. J. Specktowsky
• The Intercessor – a Christ-like manifestation of the deity
• The Mentufacturer – the God-like manifestation of the deity
• Walker-on-Earth – the ‘Holy ghost’ manifestation that completes the deity’s trinity
• Form Destroyer – the yin to the deity’s yang

The Divine Invasion has a funny set up. We find out Herb Asher was killed in an accident but is in cryonic suspension awaiting an organ transplant that will revive him. The Cry-Labs warehouse is close to an FM radio tower, and so as Asher dreams and relives the events leading up to the accident he also hears a faint muzak version of Fiddler on the Roof that no one else can hear. This gag comes up again late in the book during a farcical encounter with a cop when Asher isn’t sure what reality he is in.

Other than these brief moments The Divine Invasion is a mostly humorless story about a woman on a faraway colony planet who is impregnated by Yahweh who was driven there from Earth in 73 A.D. She travels back to Earth along with the Joseph stand-in Herb Asher and a reincarnated Elijah so that her soon-to-be-born son Emmanuel can overthrow Earth’s ruling powers and save mankind… or something along those lines.

It gets better in the second half when Zina transports them all to an alternate reality and there is some mystery about who/what Zina really is (Wisdom? A fairy queen? VALIS? Satan? Christ himself… which would make Emmanuel what?), but it still remains my least favorite book of the VALIS Trilogy.

Cast of characters

• Emmanuel – the reborn savior
• Elias Tate – Elijah reincarnated. Emmanuel’s guardian after Herb and Rybys die
• Herb Asher – Emmanuel’s ‘father’
• Rybys Rommey – Emmanuel’s mother
• Zina – the young girl who is Emmanuel’s friend
• Cardinal Fulton Statler Harms – Chief Prelate of the Christian-Islamic Church. Trying to use Big Noodle to verify St. Anselm’s Ontological Proof for the existence of God
• Nicholas Bulkowsky – Procurator Maximus of the Scientific Legate
• Linda Fox – intergalactic pop superstar, at least in the book’s beginning reality

Other things to know

• Christian-Islamic Church – formerly the Catholic Church
• Scientific Legate – formerly the Communist Party. One of the two ruling parties of Earth along with the C.I.C.
• Big Noodle – Earth’s great Artificial Intelligence

One of Dick’s funniest premises. Former patients of a mental hospital abandoned by Earth on an Alphane moon have established a somewhat stable class system organized by mental disorder. The clans include the Pares (paranoids), Manses (manics), Deps (depressives), Polys (polymorphic schizophrenics), Skitzes, (schizophrenics), Ob-Coms (obsessive compulsives) and the Heebs (hebephrenics).

On Earth Chuck Rittersdorf is drawn into a plot involving the Alphanes and their quest to regain control of the moon. Mary Rittersdorf, a psychologist and Chuck’s estranged wife, travels to the moon to evaluate the inhabitants. Meanwhile Chuck gets involved with Bunny Hentman, a former criminal with ties to the Alphane government, who is currently working on Earth as a TV comic. He hires Chuck as a writer (apparently the scripts Chuck writes for CIA simulacra are gut-bustingly funny), but in reality Bunny is only using Chuck because of the connection to his wife.

Chuck eventually ends up on the Alphane moon, and the story wraps up with Chuck helping to convince the clans to accept Alphane rule as long as they aren’t put back into a mental hospital. Mary and Chuck tentatively resume their relationship (I forgot to mention Chuck was trying to kill Mary all this time with the use of a CIA simulacrum) and they both have mental evaluations. Turns out Mary is a Dep, but Chuck, who has a clean bill of mental health, decides to start a new clan on the moon called the Norms.

Clans of the Alphane Moon is filled with some of Dick’s most unique characters like the Heeb mystics and the telepathic Ganymedean slime Lord Running Clam, so it’s too bad we spend most of the book with Chuck, a typically bland PKD protagonist dealing with suicidal impulses and marital problems.

Cast of characters

• Gabriel Baines – the Pare delegate
• Howard Straw – the Mans delegate
• Jacob Simion – the Heeb delegate
• Annette Golding – the Poly delegate
• Ingrid Hibbler – the Ob Com delegate
• Omar Diamond – the Skitz delegate
• Dino Waters – the Dep delegate
• Chuck Rittersdorf – our protagonist. Programs simulacra for the CIA
• Mary Rittersdorf – Chuck’s estranged wife. A psychologist
• Bunny Hentman – a TV comedian
• Jerry Feld – producer of Bunny’s show
• Joan Triste – a psi capable of rewinding time
• Lord Running Clam – Chuck’s Ganymedean neighbor
• Jack Elwood – Chuck’s CIA boss
• Roger London – Jack Elwood’s boss
• Pete Petri – Chuck’s scriptwriting coworker at the CIA
• Daniel Mageboom – the simulacrum sent to the Alphane moon with Mary
• Ignatz Ledebur – a Heeb mystic
• Sarah Apostoles – another Heeb mystic
• Calv Dark and Thursday Jones – Bunny’s writers
• RBX 303 – an Alphane connected to the Alphane government
• Patty Weaver – Bunny’s mistress

I disliked the Galactic Pot-Healer the first time I read it, even going so far as to say it was one of Dick’s worst books, but that was before I read gems like Dr. Futurity and Vulcan’s Hammer. After rereading it I will admit it’s not terrible. I love the absurdist humor, particularly Joe’s robot servant Willis, but I still get what I didn’t like about it the first time. The whole endeavor, where a group of various specialists are summoned to a planet by a powerful alien named Glimmung in order to raise a temple from the planet’s ocean, seemed ultimately pointless. I also never quite understood the Old Testament-like Glimmung.

The story was uneven, like it was a few drafts away from being great, although I’m not sure that’s how Dick worked.

Here are Dick’s own feelings about this one noted over at philipkdickfans.com:

“Sometimes it seems funny to me, sometimes it seems… stupid. Stupid. Nothing can be said for it.”

He probably put it best himself.

Cast of characters

• Joe Fernwright – the titular pot-healer
• Gauk – the soviet official who Joe plays a translation game with over the phone
• Smith – another player of ‘the game’ in New York
• Kate – Joe’s ex-wife
• Hymes and Perkin – two Quietude Civil Authority policemen
• Glimmung – the alien who wants to raise the temple of Heldscalla on Plowman’s Planet
• Mali Yojez – a marine biologist on the crew to Plowman’s Planet
• Harper Baldwin – a psychokineticist on Glimmung’s crew
• Willis – Joe’s robot servant
• Amalita – the god worshipped in the temple of Heldscalla
• Borel – Amalita’s evil sister