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

Dick wrote We Can Build You in 1962 just after writing the Hugo Award-winning The Man in the High Castle, although it took ten years before someone agreed to publish this one as a book. He was attempting to blend his mainstream ambitions with elements of broader science fiction, and it’s unfortunate this style of his was rejected by so many publishers, since he wouldn’t attempt another hybrid like this until his last book, the excellent Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

We Can Build You is one of only a handful of books he wrote in first person, this one told from the point of view of Louis Rosen, co-owner of a company called MASA Associates that decides to build functioning simulacra of Civil War participants for a reenactment. They only get as far as creating a simulacrum of Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edward Stanton, and then later Lincoln himself, before they get tangled up with the businessman Sam Burrows.

Burrows has speculated on land on the moon, and he wants to take MASA’s idea and build simulacra for his lunar property, thinking that people would be more willing to immigrate there if they already had neighbors, even if those neighbors weren’t real. In the meantime, Louis becomes fixated on Maury’s mentally ill daughter Pris, and eventually Louis has a mental breakdown himself when Pris leaves to join up with Burrows.

Dick would tackle the idea of human vs simulacra, although in a much different way, in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? written five years later. In that one he repurposes the names Pris and Rosen which he often did when one of his books went unpublished.

Cast of characters

• Louis Rosen – our protagonist. Co-owner of MASA
• Maury Frauenzimmer – Louis’s business partner in MASA
• Bob Bundy – MASA’s electronics genius
• Jerome Rosen – Louis’s father
• Chester Rosen – Louis’s brother
• Edward Stanton – Lincoln’s Secretary of War during the Civil War and MASA’s first simulacrum
• Abraham Lincoln – MASA’s second simulacrum
• Pris Frauenzimmer – Maury’s eighteen-year-old mentally ill daughter
• Sam Burrows – multi-millionaire and lunar land speculator
• Dr. Horstowski – Pris’s and later Louis’s psychiatrist
• Colleen Nild – Burrows’s secretary
• Dave Blunk – Burrow’s attorney
• Silvia Devorac – crusader opposing the slum-like Green Peach Hat housing project owned by Burrows
• Dr. Nisea – Louis’s psychiatrist at the Federal Bureau of Mental Health
• Dr. Shedd – Louis’s psychiatrist at the Kasanin Clinic

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was the first Philip K. Dick book I read and a great introduction to his work. If you’ve seen Blade Runner then you are familiar with the plot: the bounty hunter Rick Deckard must retire the Nexus-6 androids (the most advanced models yet!) who have escaped from Mars and returned to Earth.

The most notable missing storyline in the movie adaptation has to do with the animals. Due to nuclear fallout after a world war living animals are incredibly rare. They are seen as status symbols and their cost is recorded in a constantly-referenced catalog called Sydney’s Animal & Fowl. This aspect of the book isn’t even really a subplot but more like the main plot line, since Deckard is hunting the androids for the bounty so he can buy a living animal to replace the electric sheep he has at the beginning of the story.

Otherwise Blade Runner is more or less faithful to the novel with some things necessarily streamlined. The terms “blade runner” and “replicant” are unique to the movie, and the ambiguity at the end about whether Deckard is human or not was invented by Ridley Scott and the screenwriters.

Dick declined to write a novelization of Blade Runner which would have netted him something like $400,000. Instead he got $12,500 for rereleasing Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? under the Blade Runner name and artwork while he completed The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. I imagine anyone expecting the grittiness of the movie probably didn’t know what to make of the Penfield Mood Organ in the first chapter, one of the funniest parts of the book.

Cast of characters

• Rick Deckard – our protagonist
• Iran Deckard – Rick’s wife
• John Isidore – a “special” damaged by the nuclear fallout. Jack Isidore is the name of the protagonist in Confessions of a Crap Artist
• Wilbur Mercer – figurehead of the Mercerism religion that preaches empathy
• Buster Friendly – host of a tv and radio show called ‘Buster Friendly and His Friendly Friends’
• Harry Bryant – SF police inspector
• Eldon Rosen – head of the Rosen Association which manufactures the Nexus-6
• Rachel Rosen – a Nexus-6 android
• Max Polokov – a Nexus-6 posing as a Soviet cop
• Pris Stratton – a Nexus-6 who is the same model as Rachel Rosen
• Hannibal Sloat – Isidore’s employer at the ‘Van Ness Pet Hospital’ which actually repairs mechanical animals
• Luba Luft – a Nexus-6 posing as an opera singer
• Garland – a Nexus-6 posing as a police inspector
• Phil Resch – a SF bounty hunter
• Ray and Irmgard Baty – the last two Nexus-6 androids

Other things to know

• Voigt-Kampff Scale – the empathy test designed to expose the androids

Set in 2041. I never realized, before I started reading a lot of PKD books back to back to back, how fascinated he is with Nazis and World War II Germany.

Dick threw nearly everything he could think of into this one. The main storyline has an concept similar to The Penultimate Truth involving a simulacrum of the President, although the rest is stuffed with multiple subplots that include psionics, Neanderthals and an attempt to cure Hitler by sending a psychoanalyst back in time.

This novel has a million characters to keep track of, but the anxiety-causing commercials that buzz around like flies, used-car salesman who sell jalopies that travel to Mars and primitive alien life forms used on Earth as components in recording devices are all great.

The conclusion focuses on the least interesting subplot as a group of Neanderthals called chuppers from some different branch of the evolutionary tree gather around a television and watch as Homo sapiens destroy themselves in a war. The few Homo sapiens in the room with them have the grim realization this is the moment the chuppers have been waiting for. Just short of a classic as it doesn’t all come together in the end.

Cast of characters

• Richard Kongrosian – a Soviet pianist who plays Brahms and Schumann with his mind
• Dr. Egon Superb – a psychoanalyst
• Bertold Goltz – head of the Neo-nazi group Sons of Job
• Wilder Pembroke – commissioner of the National Police
• Rudolf Kalbfleisch – the current der Alte. A simulacrum
• Nicole Thibodeaux– the First Lady. Has a stature greater than the president in their matriarchal society
• Emil Stark – Prime Minister of Israel
• Janet Raimer – Chief White House talent scout
• Garth McRae – Assistant State Secretary
• Harold Slezak – White House A & R secretary
• Hermann Göring – founder of the Gestapo, commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s successor in World War II
• Vince Strikerock – works for Karp u. Sohnen
• Chic Strikerock – brother of Vince. Works for Frauenzimmer Associates.
• Julia Applequist– ex-wife of Vince Strikerock
• Maury Frauenzimmer – Chic’s boss. Owner of Frauenzimmer Associates
• Felix and Anton Karp – father and son owners of Karp u. Sohnen
• Ian Duncan – aimless member of the Abraham Lincoln apartment building
• Al Miller – Ian Duncan’s former friend and jug band partner. Works for Loony Luke’s jalopy business
• Patrick Doyle – skypilot for the Abraham Lincoln apartments
• Edgar Stone – scheming member of the Abraham Lincoln apartment building
• Nat Flieger – works at Electronic Musical Enterprise
• Jim Planck – employee of EME
• Leo Dondoldo – owner of EME
• Molly Dondoldo – Leo’s daughter

Other things to know

• USEA – United States of Europe and America
• McPhearson Act – outlaws the practice of psychoanalysis in favor of drug therapy
• der Alte – German for “the old man.” The president. Has been a simulacrum for the last fifty years
• Karp und Sohnen Werke – German for Karp and Sons. Built the Kalbfleisch simulacrum
• the Ges – Geheimnisträger. The upper social class. Possessors of the secret that der Alte is a simulacrum
• the Bes – Befehlträger. The lower social class
• Frauenzimmer Associates – simulacra construction company
• von Lessinger equipment – used for time travel

The Penultimate Truth is set in 2025, thirteen years after the end of World War III. Most of the population though believes the war is still ongoing and lives below ground. The war, between the Wes-Dem countries and the Russians of Pac-Peop, was fought mostly by two factions of leadies, autonomous robots that can survive the radiation from the nuclear fallout of the atomic weapons.

Those who live below ground build leadies for the U.S. war effort. Above ground, in large estates in areas of the U.S. no longer contaminated by radiation, live the Yance-men. They are responsible for continuing to propagate the lie, for those trapped underground, that the war still continues.

This is a dense book with some heavy world-building and quite a few twists and turns. We have a precog as well as some kind of time manipulation that isn’t exactly time travel, although it isn’t explained too well either. The story tends to suffer as it splits its focus among Joseph Adams, Nicholas St. James, and Webster Foote who are all broadly similar in the way of a lot of Dick’s leading men.

Part of the book is a sly commentary by Dick on the world of publishing. He sets the Agency at 580 Fifth Avenue, New York City, the address of his real-life literary agent at the time. The Yance-men, hacks who spread lies to the general population, feed their speeches to the Megavac 6-V, a computer that alters and then disseminates them through the Yancy simulacrum to the tankers. Dick is identifying as one of these Yance-men, in particular Joseph Adams, who has a crisis of confidence after he encounters the brilliant speechwriter Dave Lantano.

Cast of characters

• Joseph Adams – works for the Agency. Speechwriter for Yancy
• Nicholas St. James – President of Tom Mix
• Stanton Brose – Minister of Interior. More artiforg than man
• Dave Lantano – a Yance-man and speechwriter who acquires the land above Tom Mix near Cheyenne
• Webster Foote – a precog who runs a PI agency
• Talbot Yancy – the Protector / political and military leader on the surface. Turns out he’s a simulacrum programmed by the Megavac 6-V computer… or is he?
• Louis Runcible – an architect. Builds the conapts to house those who return above ground from the ant tanks
• Dale Nunes – Political Commissioner of Tom Mix. Human link between the underground and the Estes Park Government above ground
• Maury Souza – chief mechanic in Tom Mix. Dies from pancreatitis
• Vern Lindblom – Agency artist. Constructs the models of U.S. cities and later the artifacts planted in Runcible’s dig site in Utah
• Dr. Carol Tigh – head of the Tom Mix clinic
• Rita St. James – Nicholas’s wife
• Marshal Harenzany – top Pac-Peop military leader
• General Holt – Wes-Dem military leader

Other things to know

• Tom Mix – the name of the World War III antiseptic subsurface communal living tank established in June of 2010. These underground “ant tanks” produce leadies for the surface. Tom Mix was a silent movie star in Westerns from the early 1900s
• Wes-Dem – the Western Democracies
• Pac-Peop – the Soviets
• Leadies – robots originally built to fight WWIII
• Recon Dis-In Council – A group of leadies that form the high court of the world, above both Wes-Dem and Pac-Peop, located in Mexico City/Amecameca
• Webster Foote, Limited – London-based planetwide private police investigation agency
• Artiforgs – Arti-Gan Corporations plastic artificial organs

The first two-thirds of the book is an interesting story originally published as The Unteleported Man. It’s set in 2014. As a solution to Earth’s overcrowding humans have built unsuccessful colonies on the Moon and Mars before they discover an Earth-like planet eighteen lightyears away. This planet can be reached by a teleportation device in only fifteen minutes, but unfortunately it’s a one-way trip.

Millions emigrate there, but Rachmael ben Applebaum suspects that the messages from the planet, claiming how perfect the new settlement is, are faked. He decides to travel eighteen lightyears in his space freighter to find out the truth.

After this we have one-hundred pages of LSD-inspired craziness which Dick wrote as a part two that was inserted into the original story. If you’re wondering why Rachmael is suddenly at the settlement on Whale’s Mouth this is why. It’s fun to read as a lot of Dick’s drug-fueled paranoid visions are, but ultimately it has nothing to do with the end of the book. Rachmael returns just as suddenly to his freighter for the conclusion which wraps up the Unteleported Man story.

Cast of characters

• Rachmael ben Applebaum – son of Maury Applebaum who founded the now-defunct Applebaum enterprises
• Freya Holm – employee of Lies, Inc. assigned to protect Rachmael
• Theodoric Ferry – chairman of the board of THL
• Matson Glazer-Holliday – owner of Lies, Inc.
• Dr. Sepp von Einem – while financed by THL, he built the teleportation device capable of sending humans to Whale’s Mouth in only fifteen minutes
• Herr Horst Berthold – Secretary General of the UN
• Al Dosker – pilot provided by Lies, Inc. to get the Omphalos off of its hiding place on Luna and on its way to Whale’s Mouth
• The Weevils (Shiela Quam, Hank Szantho, Miss de Rungs, Gretchen Borbman) – the group, all supposedly sick with Telpor Syndrome and waiting to be cured, that Rachmael finds himself a part of when he gets to Whale’s Mouth
• Gregory Arnold Gloch – former UN wep-x technician. Defected to THL. Described as “being out of phase in time”

Other things to know

• Lies, Incorporated – Listening Instructional Educational Services. Some sort of police agency
• Applebaum Enterprises – company that provides travel on space freighters. Rendered obsolete after Dr. Einem built his teleportation device
• THL – Trails of Hoffman Limited. They sell Dr. Einem’s Telepor construct at retail stores on Earth
• Whale’s Mouth – the Earth-like ninth planet of the Fomalhaut system. Eighteen light years away
• Omphalos – Applebaum Enterprises sole remaining space freighter
• The True and Complete Economic and Political History of Newcolonizedland by Dr. Bloode – a multi-edition book on Whale’s Mouth that can somehow predict the future I think… not entirely certain