Dr. Futurity by Philip K Dick (1960)

In “Dr. Futurity”, Dr. Jim Parsons is pulled from his time in the early 21st century into a future society where strict laws govern birth and death. In the future races have been eradicated, but people are grouped into arbitrary tribes by birth, and hardly anyone survives past their thirties. People willingly die if they are even slightly imperfect, and groups of teens, a sort of Hitler youth called stupos, regularly eradicate political or social dissidents. Parsons, it turns out, has been brought to this time by a group of people who hope to use their time travel technology to remove the 500 year rule of European whites by returning to 1579 and assassinate Sir Francis Drake.


After the shifting worlds of “Eye in the Sky,” the plot of Dr. Futurity” feels like a step back for Dick, and that’s because it is. While it was published in 1960, Dick wrote it seven years earlier. Still it’s cleverly plotted, especially the twists in time. Dick’s books after the late 60’s seem to relax and leave the plotting to the characters, but even these earlier, more heavily plotted books show that he had a knack for storytelling. In this one Dick has enough knots that Parsons ends up occasionally becoming his own antagonist.

In particular, I liked the descriptions of the lost places to which Parsons’ accidental journey take him. After he arrives in the future, he is banished to the labor colonies on Mars, but escapes due to a mysterious time-traveling rocket, which takes him to a dying planet. On it he finds a plaque with his name, and then he recognizes the planet:

“Gazing up at the sky he saw a shape half-lost in the haze. A gray disc sailed beyond the clouds...He studied the face of this moon. The worn surface. The moon was Luna...That had not changed; the patter on its visible side remained the same. This was not Mars. It was Earth."
“Here he stood on his own planet, on the dying, ancient Earth. The waterless last age. It had, like Mars before it, ended in drought and weariness. With only black sand-flies and lichens...His name, the final written words. To survive man, when everything else had gone.”

A similar passage occurs when he’s marooned in North America 1579 near Tomales Bay, California. Dick seems to both fear and idealize what it would be like to be alone in the world.

“Dr. Futurity” also has the one of my favorite PKD names: Al Stenog. While the group who brought Parsons from the past is lead by a matriarch called Loris, Al Stenog is the government office whom we discover is opposing her. Often times Dick’s names are fairly transparent: Dr. Bloodmoney, Dr. Todt (German for death). Horselover Fat is a character whose name is a tranliteration of “Philip Dick”. But, Al Stenog? I guess Dick though that a court stenographer was a petty official, and made that a name.

The inside flap of the 1960 Ace Double edition:

He has a moment of shattering, blinging terror...Where was he? Why was he here? Had somebody brought him here, dumped him off at this spot for a reason?
Suddenly Dr. Jim Parsons realized that he had not been dumped on a new world -- but into a new time. In seconds he had traversed centuries...but why?
How could he escape the time he was in? How could he avoid the terrible role that the Wolves of the future had chosen him to execute? There was no way out, for even death was humbled before the inexorable web of destiny.

"Time Out of Joint" by Philip K Dick (1959)

In the movie The Truman Show there's a scene where Truman, the unsuspecting subject of a living TV show, witnesses a Klieg light falling from the "sky", smashing onto the street. It's a surprising scene, even for someone who has seen the movie. That scene, however, also has to pay its respects to Philip Dick's "Time Out of Joint," a book that was written nearly forty years earlier with a scene even more chilling and amusing.

It's a beautiful day in 1957. Ragle Gumm is having a picnic beside the public swimming pool at the park with his neighbor's wife, a "trollopy, giggly ex-highschool girl who's married to an eager-beaver type." They hang out at the pool and talk, then Ragle decides to trudge up the hill to the soft drink stand to get a Coke. He waits in line while some kids get their ice cream, and then steps up to order.

Ragle laid down his fifty-cent piece on the counter.
"Got any beer? He said. His voice sounded funny. Thin and remote. The counter man in white apron and cap stared at him, stared and did not move..The fifty-cent piece fell away, down through the wood, sinking. It vanished...The soft-drink stand fell into bits...In its place was a slip of paper. He reached out his hand and took hold of the slip of paper. On it was printing, block letters. "Soft-Drink Stand."

It turns out that this isn't Ragle's first experience with this problem. He has a collection of other scraps of paper, "Factory Building", "Bowl of Flowers." These slips of reality are so valuable to Ragle that when his nephew finds a couple more in a hole in a vacant lot, he offers to buy them from the boy. He has also been hearing the engines of distant jet planes when there aren't any, and the little crystal radio in the fort in the back yard picks up people talking about him, Ragle Gumm.

One possible reason people might be talking about his is his modest level of fame. On a daily basis Ragle submits his entry for the game in the newspaper called Where-Will-The-Little-Green-Man-Be-Next? He's succesful enough that he's the Grand All-Time Winner, national champion for two straight years.

"For each day's contest the newspaper presented a series of clues, and these always got read by him as a preliminary to the task of solving the problem itself. The problem, of course, was to select the proper square from the 1,208 in the form. The clues did not give any help, but he assumed that in some peripheral fashion they contained data, and he memorized them as a matter of habit, hoping that their message would reach him subliminally -- since it never did literally."

But the episodes with physical objects suddenly dissolving into words can't be explained by his celebrity.

Instead, slowly, Ragle Gumm learns that many people around him in the world know something that he doesn't. Like in the Truman Show, it's the opposite of secret knowledge - - a vast conspiracy to keep him uninformed. Instead of living in 1957, he finds artifacts, strange magazines from 1997. Once Ragle is convinced that there's something wrong with the world, he and his brother-in-law attempt to leave town, but just like in "The Cosmic Puppets," a series of everyday, but strangely sinister events conspire to keep the two men from escaping.

"Time Out of Joint" is one of my favorite PKD novels. Written within the first decade of Dick's career, it has all the elements you'll find revisited in later novels: paranoia, apocalyptic worlds, shifting realities, false leaders and even time travel. The time travel is more metaphoric than actual, but the novel does an excellent job easing you into a comfortable suburb of the 1950s and then slowly tearing away the wallpaper to discover a disturbing reality. The characters seem more natural than in some of Dick's other books (where they tend to lecture or jump to odd conclusions).

At this point, I'll disclose a major plot point, so this is a logical place to stop if you haven't yet read the book.

Ragle eventually escapes, only to learn that the year is 1998 and he has been living in a manufactured environment called "One Happy World." He is a world-famous weapons tycoon, but he has become psychotic under the strain of a solar civil war. Colonists on the Moon want to become independent from Earth, and although Earth has all the resources, the colonists have the advantage when sending down the bombs. Ragle was helping to defend the Earth, but in his insanity he retreated to the safer world of his childhood. The other townspeople were either hypnotized into believing the delusion, or were willing agents of the government. The fictional newspaper game was really a construct provided by the Terran government to engage Ragle in defending against the bombs. The book ends with Ragle Gumm resolving to support the separatists, while his fictional brother-in-law sides with the Terrans.

The paranoia in the game "Find the Little Green Man" still translates to today. I could easily see someone thinking that "Angry Birds" is a secret attempt to crowdsource prediction of the next terrorist attack.

In later books Dick often mentions the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, a sort of oracle for answers and introspection.  In this case, I have to wonder if some of the names and phrases for the newspaper game were chosen by Dick using the I Ching. For example, one clue is "A swallow is as great as a mile." Also the names, "Lucky Penny Grocery," "One Happy World."

If you've never read PKD, then start with "Time Out of Joint"

From the back cover of the Dell 1979 edition:

The Bum. Ragle Gumm had it easy, living with relatives and making enough to get by on just by doing newspaper puzzles -- and winning all the time. He had to admit he was essentially a bum...but a happy one.
But then...a refreshment stand disappeared in front of his eyes and a slip of paper inscribed SOFT DRINK STAND fluttered down...messages about him came in on his nephew’s crystal set...and a tattered old magazine he found featured things he knew had never existed -- such as a supposedly famous actress named Marilyn Monroe...
Ragle Gumm knew that either he was going mad... or the universe was.

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• "The Cosmic Puppets" by Philip K Dick (1957)

“Eye in the Sky” by Philip K Dick (1957)

“Eye in the Sky” is Philip K. Dick’s first novel to really express the reality-bending genre that he eventually comes to command.

Eight visitors to a Bevatron site in Belmont, California have an accident when a scaffolding collapses, and they fall sixty feet to the floor below, passing through the beam of the particle accelerator on the way to the ground. One of those visitors, Jack Hamilton, has just been fired from his job at the guided missile plant because the military staff fear his wife Marsha may have Communist sympathies.

When he awakes he finds himself in the hospital along with the other victims of the accident: Marsha, McFeyffe the head of security at the missile plant, Bill Laws, the Negro tour guide, Mr. and Mrs. Pritchet and their son, and Miss Joan Reiss. Luckily no one is hurt badly so they return to their homes, only to discover that the world has strangely changed.

They slowly discover that the world is now directed by a deeply involved god. Physics, electronics, even economics work based on the grace of the One True God of (Tetragrammaton). More grace means your car works. Loss of grace means that boils are visited upon your person. The ruler of this world is Horace Clamp, prophet of the One True God in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

After some adventures, and a face-to-eye encounter with (Tetragrammaton), Hamilton learns that this world is the creation of Arthur Silvester, one of the other people involved in the accident. Together with the other members of the group they render Silvester unconcious in the (Tetragrammaton) world, and awake in a new world, which is again a shared hallucination, or perhaps truly another dimension.

The new world is created by Mrs. Edith Pritchet, who is willing to banish from existence anything that offends or causes problems, starting with sex and ending with Helium, Neon, Nitrogen, and air. Naturally, after that everyone dies and they pass on to the next world, a place brimming with menace, rigid and harsh, that of the paranoid Miss Joan Reiss.

An especially memorable scene is when the cheerful prostitute/waitress Silky from previous worlds has been transformed into an ominous spider-like thing lurking in her den in the basement of the Hamilton's ranch house. Of course everyone is armed in this world, so they try discuss killing Miss Reiss, fulfilling her paranoia. There's an eerie scene where the group turns into blood-sucking aliens under the paranoid gaze of Reiss, just before she dies.

The final world is a police state, clamping down on the unruly masses of looters and rioters who prowl the streets. As Bill Laws says, it's "the Communist idea of America - gangster cities, full of vice and crime." McFeyffe, the security officer,, claims that this world is Marsha Hamilton's vision and it was only through the accident with the bevatron that Jack Hamilton learns about his wife's true beliefs. But, when Jack knocks her unconscious they learn the world comes from McFeyffe's mind. He is the true Communist sympathizer.

After finishing the book, it’s interesting to re-read the beginning and realize that it’s an inherent problem not being able to fully understand what someone else is thinking. This is what gets Jack fired -- because they can’t tell what Marsha is thinking. Yet, once we start living within people’s minds, we realize the restrictions, the horror, the fascism that could be in any one of us. The idea for “Eye” probably came from an event that occurred in Dick’s life. According to Wikipedia, “in 1955, he and his second wife, Kleo Apostolides, received a visit from the FBI, which they believed to be the result of Kleo's socialist views and left-wing activities. The couple briefly befriended one of the FBI agents.[24]”

Dick didn’t invent shared alternate realities. According to a biography of Dick called “To The High Castle” by Gregg Rickman:

“The roots of [“Eye in the Sky”] are in the "group mind" of such stories as Damon Knight's "Four In One" (1953), a story Dick is on record as admiring; and Fredric Brown's "What Mad Universe" (1949), a tale of bizarre realities alternate to our own, figments of one man's imagination... Ever the craftsman, Dick told Ed Meskys in the early 60s "how it was important to maintain the pace of the book by making each adventure shorter than the one before it."

But it’s easy to see how he took to this idea. Subsequent novels of his often involved groups of people sharing a hallucination, sometimes by accident as in “Eye”, and sometimes on purpose, as in the Perky Pat layouts of “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.”

Surprisingly, the moment that Dick started to find his own genre was when he decided to give up writing science fiction. The biography “Divine Invasions” by Lawrence Sutin has this passage:

"Eye" established Phil, at age 28, as one of the very best young sf writers. As a practical matter, however, ACE paid only a flat rate of one thousand dollars for Phil's SF novels -- with future royalties very much in doubt. There were other avenues to bolster his SF income. Phil recalled being offered, around 1957, a job writing radio scripts for the Captain Video program... But beyond economics, Phil wanted to break through into the mainstream so badly he could taste it.And so, in 1957, just as the glowing reviews of EYE were pouring in, Phil informed Wollheim and Boucher --...--- that he was giving the field up to devote himself full time to mainstream novels.

Unluckily for Dick, but luckily for his fans, his next novel “Mary and the Giant” was rejected by publishers so he returned to writing science fiction.

From the back cover:

Here is a heady jest, the first book since Fredric Brown’s “What Mad Universe” in which, within the plot’s legimate framework, anything - but anything can happen.
This glorious jape is, briefly, the story of an accident to a bevatron, in which eight people, in falling a considerable distance, pass through the highly energized beam. They recover and return home, sharing the feeling that something is vaguely amiss; but when an irreverence gets you a mysterious nip in the leg, and a lie brings a plague of locusts, the feeling gets less vague. From there it takes off madly, in wild hyperbolic sweeps of unabashed imagination. Two guys ride to heaven on an umbrella, and there’s a house which eats people. Characters are killed, and restored for the next go-round to try it over. The earth comes to an end more than once.
It’s worth eleven times the price and all your rereading time. I like it. -- Theodore Sturgeon

“The Cosmic Puppets” by Philip K Dick (1957)

In "The Cosmic Puppets" Philip K Dick explores the good and bad things about living in a small town, while telling the story on an epic scale.

While on vacation, Ted Barton decides to visit the small town of Millgate, Virginia where he grew up, and hasn’t seen since he left 18 years ago. When he arrives, to his surprise, the town is not at all as he remembered it. Normally this would be a story about the loss of small-town life due to freeways and modernization in America, but this is PKD writing. Ted discovers that nothing in the town is where he expects it, and even the newspaper office says that he, Ted, died at age 9. Before the story moves into Twilight Zone territory, we meet two children, Mary Meade and Peter Trilling, both of whom have strange powers to communicate with the insects and spiders, and to animate lumps of clay. Ted stays at Peter’s mom’s boarding house, while Mary’s father Dr. Meade treats mysterious patients in the hospital. As the plot evolves larger gaps begin to appear in Millgate’s facade. Ted realizes he’s a pawn in a cosmic battle ground fought in his home town.

Dick seems to have a good tempo in this book. In his later books the dialogue tends to be jumpy, almost manic. This book only has a few sections like that, and that’s toward the end, just before the climax. Instead, the plot evolves languidly, accurately reflecting the pace of life in a small town of the 1950s. Perhaps that’s the most gripping part of the story, the casual way that a normal visit “home” turns into a nightmare, and then a cosmic battle ground.

Dick does a wonderful job of personifying the cosmic forces at work in this book. I put the two children, Mary and Peter, in the same category as the legendary characters in Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods.” But more than just the characters, Dick endows the town itself with cosmic echoes. The barrier at the edge of town is so iconic. You want to leave the small town, but something always seems to stop you. Later, the movie “Tremors” would take this idea and multiply it by five.



Despite the title and the theme, the "Cosmic Puppets" is more about a man who misses his childhood and is trying to reconcile his memories of the past with the present, than about the gods as they fight. Although the book was published in 1957, Dick wrote “Cosmic Puppets” in 1953, when he was only 25, but he’d already graduated from college, been married twice and divorced once. He was born in Chicago, hardly a small town, but left when he was only five. Despite the fact that the small town in the story is most likely imagined, I can see how Dick must have felt old enough to be nostalgic about his youth. I like the way he describes the reconstruction of the city park with the cannon, as Ted tries to remember each aspect of the park back into existence, the greens unfold with the dawn. It’s almost pastoral.

Here is the summary from the back cover of the Mariner, 2012 edition:

“The Cosmic Puppets” begins like an episode of “The Twilight Zone” and then ramps up the strangeness and fantasy to epic levels. Because the mystery is about more than one man or one town -- this is a battle between gods.
Following an inexplicable urge, Ted Barton returns to his idyllic Virginia hometown for a vacation, but when he gets there, he is shocked to discover that it has utterly changed. The stores and houses are all different, and he doesn’t recognize anybody. The mystery deepens when he checks the town’s historical records...and reads that he died nearly twenty years earlier. As he attempts to uncover the secrets of the town, Barton is drawn deeper into the puzzle, and into a supernatural battle that could decide the fate of the universe.

"The Man Who Japed" by Philip K Dick (1956)

"The Man Who Japed" is set in a world similar to "The World Jones Made." Philip K Dick has imagined a world after the apocalypse of the 1970's, where society was rebuilt based on a philosophy of MoRec, which made peace and prosperity compulsory, promoted by an early leader named Major Streiter. MoRec stands for Moral Reclamation, an ultra-conservative and puritanical process of limiting cultural expansion and only providing new ideas through carefully groomed channels. Now, in the early 22nd century, Alan Purcell runs an agency that provides MoRec campaigns to the Telemedia, the government-run television network. Unfortunately, one day Purcell wakes to find that he may have japed the statue honoring Major Streiter by cutting off its head, and repositioning the body so it appears to be playing football with itself.

While authorities search to discover who japed the statue, Purcell is approached to be the new head of Telemedia. Confused by his actions, and by the opportunity, he visits the Resort, a shadowy part of society that provides psychiatric care. When he tries to fire his doctor, they kidnap him and take him to another planet. He escapes, returns to his job, but is ultimately undone by his failure to follow MorRec.

The central question for Allen to grapple with is: Why did he jape the statue of Major Streiter?

“Japed” introduces one of Dick’s favorite secondary themes: that of the oppressive apartment building. In the first chapter we meet the Purcells in their little apartment that reconfigures itself based on the time of day and programming on the tapes. Space is at a premium in greater New York, and their apartment has been handed down from Purcell's father to Allen, so even though it’s small, it’s a treasure.

Unfortunately, the residents also have to deal with the prying eyes of the MoRec busybodies who police behavior in the building. Mrs. Birmingham, is the building warden, and she also employs juveniles - robotic earwig-like sleuths, about a foot and a half long, that slide along floors and walls and record incidents of anti-social behavior. Several times in the book Purcell attends one of the weekly block meetings where Mrs. Birmingham and other officials confront malcontents with their misdeeds and either issue warnings or fines, or evict the tenants from the building. The way Dick develops this threat in this and other books, I don’t have to wonder about his feelings toward landlords.

Since this is science fiction, Dick adds in some flying cars. Like in "The World Jones Made," and many of the PKD novels that follow, transportation technology allows people to travel across the world in an hour or so. Purcell visits his friends in Hokkaido, which is sort of a sleazy area beyond the reach of MoRec due to the residual radiation there. His friends Gates & Sugarmann aren't precisely described, but their lifestyle sounds like it could be either bohemian, or intellectual, or maybe they’re just beatniks from the 50's. Purcell says he finds their ideas stimulating, full of Goethe and jazz and prisms, which provides new themes for Moral Reclamation.

Psychology is another common theme in Dick’s work. In “Japed” it manifests as The Health Resort, a less-than respectable place to get psychoanalysis. Psychiatry of any kind is looked down upon in MoRec, but the government permits some licensed individuals to practice, mostly as a way to weed out the psychotic individuals from MoRec society. Purcell approaches the Resort in an attempt to discover why he japed the statue, and meets Gretchen Malparto and her brother Dr. Malparto. For vague reasons the two Malpartos drug Purcell and ship him off to the Resort planet called Other World.

The interlude on the Resort planet seems a lot more interesting than most of the talky parts. It's during this section that Purcell sees his imagined perfect world disappear, and his house dissolves, foreshadowing a similar scene in “Time Out of Joint.” I have to laugh when I read the section where Dr. Malparto gives Purcell the battery of Psi tests. This is so funny, I can almost picture it as a cartoon. He starts by determining whether Purcell may have precognition, telekinesis, telepathy, or other unnatural abilities. Soon the list is veering toward the absurd: Ability to contact spirits of the dea. Capacity to transmute lead into gold. Ability to create rain of vermin and/or filth.

Gretchen asked: “Can you kindle fire? Can you slay seven with one blow? Can your father lick my father?”

Obviously, this book comes from a younger Philip Dick, having fun while writing. The book is funny, with the title word, "japed" itself being funny. The word “jape” means to jest or to joke.

The ending is interesting, but so very frustrating. Contrast the monolithic events of MorRec vs the million feeds of the Internet. Dick is looking at culture from the point of view of 1955, which had a top-down method of disseminating news and fashions. How could he have imagined that only 50 years later nearly everyone would be able to write articles or create videos that would be accessible anywhere on the planet? The Man Who Japed is set in the year is 2114 AD -- will there ever come a cataclysm to bring back the monolithic cultures?


Here's the description of the book from the inside flap of the 1956 Ace Double edition:

War and famine on earth had been abolished by Moral Reclamation, and now peace and prosperity were compulsory. And the Morec block committees, robots peeping-Toms, and youthful goon squads made sure everybody “enjoyed” it.
It was allen Purcell’s job as the new Director of Entertainment and Propaganda to keep the people in sober thought channels. Only someone was playing pranks -- publicly, secretly. Such humor was dangerous -- and the heretic had to be stopped at all costs! And then Purcell realized that the mad japer was familiar to him - as familiar as his own face in the morning shave-mirror!
As frightening as Orwell’s 1984, “The Man Who Japed” is a social satire on the world of tomorrow that is as timely as today.

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• The World Jones Made - Philip K Dick (1956)

The World Jones Made - Philip K Dick (1956)

Philip K Dick's “The World Jones Made” (1956) is an odd book.  Taken simply, it tells the story of a man who is born with the special ability to see exactly one year into the future.  This means that Floyd Jones knew of life before he was born, even before he was conceived.  He also sees his death, and the year of decay that comes after his death.  Normally this would be a sufficient one-trick pony for any sci-fi writer of the 50’s to hammer out a quick book, but Dick seems to want to do more.

In the novel Jones becomes leader of a semi-patriotic group who is literally trying to keep the aliens out of the US.  The aliens, called drifters, aren’t exactly invading, more like dropping in, but the followers of Jones take it upon themselves to form vigilante squads to burn and destroy them.  The story is mostly told from the viewpoint of Doug Cussick, an agent of Fedgov charged with maintaining the principles of relativism, “a moral and ethical philosophy that states everyone is free to believe what they wish, as long as they don't make anyone else try to follow that principle.”  Of course, Jones clashes with Fedgov because he knows the future, and is trying to convince others of his ability.  Jones becomes a Hitler-like figure, leading crowds of gray shirts in riots against Fedgov. The story is also book-ended with scenes of a small group of genetically engineered humans.  These humans think they are mutants, and ostensible Fedgov is protecting them against people like Jones who want to destroy outsiders, but it turns out in the end they have a much stranger destiny.

This is Dick’s second published novel, and like many of the books to follow, taking drugs plays a large part in the book, although I’m not sure it affects the plot much.  Like most of Dick's stories, the characters take away from the technology, but he still manages to fill the edges with lots of understated technology.  In "Jones" the futuristic cars help the characters jump from continent to continent, making the entire world their playground.  In one night Cussick and his wife see an opera in their hometown of Vienna, then fly to San Francisco to watch a hermaphroditic sex show and heroin and other drugs.

I'm not quite sure of Dick's ideology in this story.  He contrasts Jones' certain vision of the future and his fanatic vigilante followers with a government that wants to enforce equality and diversity at all costs, even at the risk of stifling individuality. Maybe he was making a statement about Fascism vs Communism, but then Dick adds the drifters and the manufactured mutants, and the allegory seems to shift and fall apart like so much wet paper mache.

The end result isn’t one of Dick’s best books.  The dialog is more stilted than in “The Solar Lottery”, and apparently Anthony Boucher called it “hasty and disappointing."  The parts that are most vivid are the visions that Jones has, first of the atomic attacks when he’s a boy, then of his death.  Personally, I enjoyed the cover art on the Ace reprint from 1980 -- I’d like to see more work by that artist.

Here's the text from the back cover of that 1980's edition:

"Jones was cursed. He could see one year into the future -- one year exactly -- but he wasn’t able to change or affect the course of events in any way... he could only watched them unfold. Jones would see the arrival of the alien organisms called drifters, and watch the waves of fear that would sweep the Earth. Then he would see himself become the leader of this movement, gathering power until he became the supreme dictator of the planet.
But would he see the true nature of the drifters and the terrible extent of their powers in time? And when he had his final visions, would Jones be able to find any chance, any way to cheat Fate?"

In an excerpt of  a review by Damon Knight in Infinity S-F, he wrote “The World Jones Made is a spectacular, brim-full grab bag of ideas. The central story concerns a new and fascinating style of conquering villain, but Dick has skillfully woven in such diverse and unlikely elements as (1) a race of artificial mutants; (2) the ‘Drifters’ -- mindless blobs of protoplasm that float in from space; (3) world peace enforced by ‘Relativism’... Uniting all this is the central idea, the tyrant who can see the future.
His name is Floyd J. Jones...To Jones, the future, one year ahead, is always more vivid than the present. The real horror of this peculiar kind of limited precognition does not appear till the end of the book...”

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The Solar Lottery by Philip K Dick (1954)

"The Solar Lottery" (1954) is Philip K. Dick's first novel, and although it has his voice, it's less like his later work, tending more toward mainstream science fiction of the fifties.  In a distant future, society is structured so that people become serfs to corporations or government offices.  An elaborate mechanism, based on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, randomly assigns the leader of the government, the Quizmaster, by selecting a citizen’s card.  If your number is chosen, then whoever owns your power card becomes president. If you happen to own your own card, then you become Quizmaster.  After the selection the former president has a chance to assassinate the new Quizmaster, and if it's successful then old president stays in power.  During this time, the new Quizmaster must learn to use the resources of the government and their corps of telepathic secret service agents, or else die.


The novel is set just as a "twitch of the bottle" chooses a new Quizmaster-- Leon Cartwright -- who belongs to a fringe organization that believes in a tenth planet - the Flame Disk.  The sitting Quizmaster, Reese Verrick initiates an assassination, only this time he has constructed the perfect assassin: an android, remotely driven by multiple people working for Reese.  

Much is made in the foreword and the blurbs on the cover about Dick’s interest in game theory, but not much information regarding game theory comes through in the book.  In the context of Dick’s other books, this is an outlier. Some elements, such as the colony on the moon, and the promised colony on the Flame Disk, foreshadow Dick’s later obsession with satellites and colonies.  Also, he obviously uses androids again in works like “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” (aka "Blade Runner").  But, for the most part, the focus is on action, and I could see this book adapted to a modern sci-fi thriller starring Matt Damon without a lot of editing.

The back of the Ace 1967 edition has an excerpt from a review from the New York Herald Tribune. I like the reference to "vintage Van Vogt", which is especially dated nowadays.

"Solar Lottery,” a first novel by one of the most striking young magazine writers, creates a strange and fascinating civilization for the year 2203, a culture based upon Heisenberg’s ideas of randomness and Von Neumann’s Games Theory, with such logical developments as public office by lottery and formal overt assassination.
Against this background two plots develop, one of intricately deadly and suspenseful palace politics, one of an ambitious effort to rediscover our sun’s once-glimpsed tenth planet...The body of the book is as elaborately exciting as vintage Van Vogt -- with an added touch of C. M. Kornbluth’s social satire.

 
 

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