"You must die," the dark man said. "Then you will be reborn. Do you see, child?""Yes," Manfred said. And then he fled into the blackness of the future . . . -p.0"Rains are falling from me onto your valuable persons," he called to them, the proper Bleekman greeting in the Bleeky dialect. (..) Rising to his feet slowly, the young Bleekman male genuflected and said in a wavering, frail voice, "The rains falling from you wonderful presence envigor and restore us, Mister." -p.27/28"One thing, when you hear about a suicide, you can be sure the guy knows this: he knows he's not a useful member of society. That's the real truth he's facing about himself, that's what does it, knowing you're not important to anybody. If there;s one thing I'm sure of it's that. It's nature's way--the expendable are removed, by their own hand, too. So I don't lose any sleep when I hear of a suicide, and you'd be surprised how many so-called natural deaths here on Mars are actually suicides; I mean, this is a harsh environment. This place weeds out the fit from the unfit. (..) Now this guy--" (..)"Steiner," Anne said."Steiner!" He stared at her. "Norbert Steiner, the black-market operator?" His voice rose."He sold health foods.""That's the guy!" He was flabbergasted. "Oh, no, not Steiner." Good grief, he got all his goodies from Steiner; he was utterly dependent on the man. -p.53"Listen, Anne, you have to knuckle down what you call masculine domination and let my people edit what you write. Honest to God, it does more harm than good--I hate to say this to your face but it's the truth. You're a worse friend than you would be an enemy, the way you go about things. You're a dabbler! Like most women. You're--irresponsible." He wheezed with wrath. Her face showed no reaction; what he said had no effect on her. -p.54He himself had had a psychotic interlude, in his early twenties. It was common. It was natural, And, he had to admit, it was horrible, It made the fixed, rigid, compulsive-neurotic Public School seem a reference point by which one could gratefully steer one's course back to mankind and shared reality. It made him comprehend why a neurosis was a deliberate artifact, deliberately constructed by the ailing individual or by a society in crisis. It was an invention arising from necessity."Don't knock neurosis," Silvia had said to him and he understood. Neurosis was a deliberate stopping, a freezing somewhere along the path of life. Because beyond lay--Every schizophrenic knew what lay there. And every ex-schizophrenic, Jack thought, as he remembered his own episode. -p.65He knew that: once, he had been able to establish the order of things in space and time; now, for reasons unknown to him, both space and time had shifted so that he could not find his bearings in either one. -p.68"Yes, Little Jackie, it has to be.""What you ought to be teaching," Jack said, "is, how do we--""Yes, Little Jackie," Kindly Dad interrupted him, "it has to be." And as it said this, a gear-tooth slipped in the glare of Jack's trouble-light, and a phase of the cycle repeated itself."You're stuck," Jack said. "Kindly Dad, you're got a worn gear-tooth.""Yes, Little Jackie," Kindly Dad said, "it has to be.""You're right," Jack said. "It does have to be. Everything wears out eventually; nothing is permanent. Change is the one constant of life. Right, Kindly Dad?""Yes, Little Jackie," Kindly Dad said, "it has to be."Shutting off the teaching machine at its power supply, Jack began to disassemble its main-shaft, preparatory to removing the worn gear. -p.74"I know goddamn well that your religion teaches that you can foretell the future, and what's so peculiar about that? We've got extra-sensory individuals back Home, and some of them have pre-cognition, can read the future. Of course we have to lock them up with the other nuts, because that's a symptom of schizophrenia, if you happen to know what that means.""(..) it is the savage within the man.""Sure, it's the reversion to primitive ways of thought, but so what, if you can read the future?" -p.80"Entire psychoanalysis is a vainglorious foolish-ness.""How zat, Helio?""Question they never deal with is, what to remold sick person like. There is now what, Mister." "I don't get you, Helio.""Purpose of life is unknown, and hence way to be is hidden from the eyes of living critters. Who can say if perhaps the schizophrenics are not correct? Mister, they take a brave journey. They turn away from mere things, which one may handle and turn to practical use; they turn inward to meaning. There, the black-night-without-bottom lies, the pit. Who can say if they will return? And if so, what will they be like, having glimpsed meaning? I admire them.""Kee-rist," Arnie said, with derision, "you half-educated freak-- I'll bet if human civilization disappeared from Mars you'd be right back there among those savages in ten seconds flat, worshipping idols and all the rest of it. Why do you pretend you want to be like us? Why are you reading that manual?"Heliogabalus said, "Human civilization will never leave Mars, Mister; that is why I study this book.""Out of that book," Arnie said, "you better be able to tune up my goddamn harpsichord or you will be back in the desert, whether human civilization stays on Mars or not.""Yes sir," his tame Bleekman said. -p.81Contemplating Dr. Glaub sitting opposite him, Jack Bohlen felt the gradual diffusion of his perception which he so dreaded, the change in his awareness which had attacked him this way years ago in the personnel manager's office at Corona Corporation, and which always seemed still with him, just on the edge.He saw the psychiatrist under the aspect of absolute reality: a thing composed of cold wires and switches, not a human at all, not made of flesh. The fleshy trappings melted and became transparent, and Jack Bohlen saw the mechanical device beyond. Yet he did not let his terrible state of awareness show; he continued to nurse his drink; he went on listening to the conversation and nodded occasionally. Neither Dr. Glaub nor Arnie Kott noticed.But the girl did. She leaned over and said softly in Jack's ear, "Aren't you feeling well? (..) Let's get away from them." the girl whispered. "I can't stand it either." (..) She tapped Jack on the arm and rose to her feet; he felt her light, strong fingers, and he, too, rose. -p.94Presently they stood on the rainbow bridge, over the water. In the water fish slid about, luminous and vague, half-real beings, as rare on Mars as any form of matter conceivable. They were a miracle in this world, and Jack and the girl, gazing down, both felt it. And both knew they felt this same thought without having to speak it aloud."It's nice out here," Doreen said finally."Yeah." He did not want to talk."Everybody," Doreen said. "Has at one time or another known a schizophrenic . . . if they're not one themselves. It was my brother, back Home, my younger brother.""I'll be O.K.," Jack said. "I'm O.K. now.""But you're not," Doreen said."No," he admitted, "but what the hell can I do? You said it yourself. Once a schizophrenic, always a schizophrenic."He was silent, then, concentrating on the gliding, pale fish. -p.95"Let's go back to the Willows," he said. He was very hungry, and it would no doubt be a bang-up meal.Doreen said, "You're a brave person, Jack Bohlen.""Why?" he asked."Because you're going back tot he place that troubled you, to the people that brought on your vision of, as you said, eternity. I wouldn't do that, I'd flee.""But," he said, "that's the whole point; it's designed to make you flee--the vision's for that purpose, to nullify your relations with other people, to isolate. If it's successful, your life with human beings is over. That's what they mean when they say the term schizophrenia isn't a diagnosis; it's a prognosis--it doesn't say anything about what you have, only about how you'll wind up." And I'm not going to wind up like that, he said to himself. Like Manfred Steiner, mute and in an institution; I intend to keep my job, my wife and son, my friendships--he glanced at the girl holding on to his arm. Yes, and even love affairs, if such there be.I intend to keep trying. -p.97"A good luck charm," Jack said to the girl.Shivering, she said, "It's awfully ugly.""Yes," he agreed, "but it's friendly. And (..) we do pick up other people's unconscious hostility.""I know. The telepathic factor. Clay had it worse and worse until--" She glanced at him. "The paranoid outcome.""It's the worst thing about our condition, this awareness of the buried, repressed sadism and aggression in other around us, even strangers. I wish to hell we didn't have it; we even pick it up from people in restaurants--" He thought of Glaub. "In buses, in a theater. Crowds." -p.98A fine, deep, subtle, highly invigorating compensation. In his wallet he had Doreen Anderton's address and phone number. Should he call her tonight? Imagine, he thought, finding someone, a woman, too, with whom he could talk freely, who understood about his situation, who genuinely wanted to hear and was not frightened. It helped a lot. -p.101Ten minutes later he was on his way, flying the bright and shiny Yee Company repairship through the night sky of Mars, to Lewistown and Arnie Kott's mistress. -p.102Doreen groaned, turned over, sat up. In the dim light of Arnie Kott's master bedroom, she sat palely translucent, tucking her hair back from her eyes and yawning. One strap of her nightgown slipped down her arm, and Arnie saw with appreciation her high, hard left breast with its gem of a nipple set dead-center.Gosh, I really got a gal, Arnie said to himself. She's really something. (..)"How can you be tired?" he asked her. "You ain't done nothin' but lie. Isn't that so? Is lying there so hard?"She eyed him narrowly. "No more," she said."What?" he said. "You kidding? We just begun. Take off that nightgown." Catching it by the hem he whisked it back up once more; he put his arm beneath her, lifted her up, and in an instant had it off over her head. He deposited it on the chair by the bed."I'm going to sleep," Doreen said, closing her eyes. "If you don't mind.""Why should I mind?" Arnie said. "You're still there, aren't you? Awake or asleep--you're plenty there in the flesh, and how.""Ouch," she protested."Sorry." He kissed her on the mouth. "Didn't mean to hurt you."Her head lolled; she actually was going to sleep. Arnie felt offended. But what the hell--she never did much anyhow."Put my nightgown back on me," Doreen murmured, "when you're through.""Yeah, well I'm not through." I'm good for an hour more, Arnie said to himself. Maybe even two. I sort of like it this way, too. A woman asleep don't talk. That's what spoils it, when they start to talk. Or make those moans. He could never stand the moans. He thought, I'm dying to get results on that project of Bohlen's. I can't wait; I know we're going to hear something really downright wonderful when we do start hearing. The closed-up mind of that kid; think of all the treasures it contains. Must be like fairyland, in there, all beautiful and pure and real innocent.In her half-sleep Doreen moaned. -p.112/113"Bruno Walter conducting. A great rarity from the golden age of recordings."A hideous racket of screeches and shrieks issued from the speakers, like the convulsions of corpses. He shut off the tape transport."Sorry," Arnie Kott muttered.Wincing at the sound, Jack Bohlen sniffed the woman's body beside him, saw shiny perspiration on her upper lip where a faint smear of her lipstick made her mouth look cut. He wanted to bite her lips, he wanted to make blood, there. His thumbs wanted to dig into her armpits and make an upward circle so that he worked her breasts, then he would feel they belonged to him to do with what he wanted. He had made them move already; it was fun. -p.134You shouldn't be so passive, Jack. You're letting your life be shaped by chance, and for God's sake-- don't you recognize that passivity for what it is?"After a pause he said, "I suppose I do." (..)"You're talking as if this meeting with Arnie can't be altered by anything you do--and that's a deep regression on your part from adult responsibility and maturity; that's not like you at all." (..)Getting out a manila envelope, Jack reached into it and drew out the picture of the buildings which Manfred had drawn. (..)"That's an evil and sick drawing," she said in a voice almost inaudible. "I know what it is. It's the Tomb World, isn't it? That's what he's drawn. The world after death. And that's what he sees, and through him, that's what you're beginning to see. You want to take that to Arnie? You have lost your grip on reality; do you think Arnie wants to see an abomination like that? Burn it.""It's not that bad," he said, deeply perturbed by her reaction."Yes, it is," Doreen said. "And it's a dreadful sign that it doesn't strike you that way. Did it at first?"He had to nod yes."Then you know I'm right," she said."I have to go on," he said. "I'll see you at his place tonight.""Goodbye, Jack," Doreen said, accompanying him to the door. Her large dark eyes were heavy with despair. "There's nothing I can say to stop you; I can see that. You've changed. You're so less--alive--now than you were just a day or so ago . . . do you know that?""No," he said. "I didn't realize that." But he was not surprised to hear it; he could feel it, hanging heavy over his limbs, choking his heart. Leaning toward her, he kissed her on her full, good-tasting lips. "I'll see you tonight."She stood at the doorway, silently watching him and the boy go. -p.138/139/140the utter alienation of perception from the objects of the outside world, especially the objects which matter: the warmhearted people there. And what takes their place? A dreadful preoccupation with--the endless ebb and flow of one's own self. The changes emanating from within which affect only the inside world. It is a splitting apart of the two worlds, inner and outer, so that neither registers on the other. Both still exist, but each goes its own way.It is the stopping of time. The end of experience, of anything new. Once the person becomes psychotic, nothing ever happens to him again.And, he realized, I stand on the threshold of that. Perhaps I always did; it was implicit in me from the start. -p.143She wished, fervently, that she had something creative or useful or exciting to do that would fill up the long empty afternoons; she was bored to death with sitting in some other woman's kitchen drinking coffee hour after hour. No wonder so many women had affairs. It was that or madness."If you're limited to your husband for emotional experience," June Henessy said, "you have no basis of judgment; you're more or less stuck with what he has to offer, but if you've gone to bed with other men you can tell better what your husband's deficiencies are, and it's much more possible for you to be objective about him. And what needs to be changed in him, you can insist that he change. And for your own part, you can see where you've been ineffective and with these other men you can learn how to improve yourself, so that you give your husband more satisfaction. I fail to see who loses by that." Put that way, it certainly sounded like a good healthy idea for all concerned. Even the husband benefited. -p.146"You must die," the dark man said to him in a far-off voice. "(..) There is nothing for you as you are now, because something went wrong and you cannot see or hear or feel. No one can help you. Do you see, child?" -p.166To him, Doreen said in a rapid whisper, "Jack, you must remember, you've got friends. I'm your friend, Dr. Glaub called--he's your friend." She looked into his face anxiously. "Will you be O.K.?"(..) "Are you two just going to sit there necking and whispering? I don't feel good." (..)Leaning toward Jack until her lips almost touched his, Doreen whispered, "I love you."He tried to smile at her. But his face had become stiff; it would not yield. "Thanks," he said, wanting her to know how much it meant to him. He kissed her on the mouth. Her lips were warm, soft with love; they gave what they had to him, holding nothing back. Her eyes full of tears, she said, "I feel you sliding away farther and farther into yourself again.""No," he said. "I'm O.K." But it was not so; he knew it."Gubble gubble," the girl said. -p.167They sipped wine from long-stemmed glasses. (He had brought the glasses, too.) Silvia lay back against the couch, her eyes half-closed. "Oh, dear. This is like a fantasy. It can't really be happening.""But it is." Otto set his glass down and leaned over her. She breathed slowly, regularly, as if asleep; but she was watching him fixedly. She knew exactly what was going on. And as he bent nearer and nearer she did not stir; she did not try to slide away. (..)a little later on, when they had moved from the living room to the bedroom with its window shades pulled down, the room in unstirring gloom, silent and receptive to them, made, as he well knew, for just such happenings as this."Nothing like this," Silvia murmured, "has ever happened before in my entire life." Her voice was full of contentment and acquiescence, as if emerging from far away. "Am I drunk, is that it? Oh, my Lord. (..) I know it isn't real. So how can it matter, how can what you do in a dream be wrong?" -p.173/174He had sat, he realized, in Arnie Kott's living room again and again, experiencing that evening before it arrived; and then, when at last it had taken place in actuality, he had bypassed it. The fundamental disturbance in time-sense (..) In any case, there was no way that it could be restored. For it now lay in the past. And a disturbance of the sense of past time was not symptomatic of schizophrenia but of compulsive-obsessive neurosis. His problem--as a schizophrenic--lay entirely with the future. -p.174"His thoughts (..) are as clear as plastic to me, and mine likewise to him. We are both prisoners, Mister, in a hostile land." At that Arnie laughed loud and long. "Truth always amuses the ignorant," Helio said. (..)"The rhythms. (..) Great prose establishes a cadence which attracts and holds the boy's wandering attention.""Why does it wander?" "From dread." "Dread of what?" "Of death. (..) This boy experiences his own old age, his lying in a dilapidated state, decades from now, in an old persons' home which is yet to be built here on Mars, a place of decay which he loathes beyond expression. In this future place he passes empty, weary years, bedridden--an object, not a person, kept alive through stupid legalities. (..) To escape from his dread vision he retreats back to happier days, days inside his mother's body where there is no one else, no change, no time, no suffering. The womb life. (..) Mister, he refuses to leave that dear spot.""I see," Arnie said, only half-believing the Bleekman."His suffering is like our own, like all other persons'. But in him it is worse, for he has his preknowledge, which we lack. It is a terrible knowledge to have. No wonder he has become--dark within.”"Yeah, he's as dark as you are," Arnie said, "and not outside, either, but like you said--inside. How can you stand him?""I stand everything," the Bleekman said."You know what I think?" Arnie said. "I think he does more than just see into time. I think he controls time."The Bleekman's eyes became opaque. He shrugged. (..)"you black bastard; (..) He was trying to halt time.” -p.179/180I must see the bright normal reality once more, where there is not this schizophrenic killing and alienation and bestial lust and death.Help me get away from death, back where I belong once more -p.209
One of the many, many things I love about Philip K. Dick is how he can make fantastic science fictional scenarios into studies of utter human banality (and yes, despair) but still make me want to live in them. Martian Time-Slip, for instance, also feels like it could, and likely would, be marketed nowadays under a title like Real Housewives of Mars. Except they're mid 20th century type housewives, so they actually, you know, fix lunch for their children and whatnot.* So maybe it's really more like Mad Men on Mars.At any rate, these housewives and their husbands live in United Nations-controlled human colonies clustered around the canal systems of a Mars that is not too terraformed (I'm still not sure if an atmosphere has been induced, or if neighborhoods are domed or what, but they're not walking around in pressure suits anyway), but is habitable enough to where everybody has a vegetable garden and even attempts a flower bed here and there, with varying success. No lawns, though. That would be a suicidal waste of water, a lawn would. Just like it is somewhere else, although so far our climate has been forgiving enough to tolerate a certain amount of waste. Sort of. For now.But water isn't really the issue in Martian Time-Slip. It's preciousness is perhaps a symptom of the larger issue, namely that it's really, really tough to live on Mars -- especially if you insist on trying to replicate the suburban California lifestyle of the mid-twentieth century. It allows certain types of people to seize and wield an almost despotic power, and that type of person is the repairman. Hence all-powerful on this world is the Water Workers' Union and its leader, one Arnie Kott, who lives like the ruler of an ancient Wittfogelian hydraulic empire, or at least like the Dean of the Air Conditioner Repair School on Community. When life utterly depends on gadgets, you utterly depend on the guy who can keep the gadgets working. Or the water flowing. Kott is, kind of, both.But this is not enough. When is it ever? For Kott's path has crossed with Jack Bohlen's, and Jack is the nexus of a whole lot of intrigue, for all that he's kind of a nebbish himself. Jack's father, see, is at the spearhead of the next big wave of land speculation on Mars, and stands to make a killing if his inside information is correct. And Jack himself is a talented repairman and also, importantly, a recovering schizophrenic, and Kott has become convinced that exploiting certain fanciful traits of schizophrenics is the key to his next move: outmaneuvering speculators like Jack's father.But it's not Jack himself with the talent required; Jack is just to be the builder of the machine that can connect an autistic child, Manfred Steiner, with Kott, and let Kott see what he believes Manfred sees. For in this novel, everyone is pretty sure that the autistic are the way they are because they experience time profoundly differently from the rest of us. To the autistic, in this novel, the rest of us are sped up like a life-long time-lapse film. And, as we learn from Manfred's point of view interludes, to him the rest of us are sped up towards decrepitude, decay, gubbish, like in all of those little films Oliver and Oswald are making in Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts/Thus Manfred sees into the Tomb World familiar from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and other Phildickiana, which, interestingly, one of the minor characters immediately recognizes. We're all living in it; we've just deluded ourselves that we look and feel alive and whole and undecayed. But deep inside us are the bacteria that will rot us from the inside out once our bodies can no longer fight off that action.I really, really hope that this is not the world that actual autistic spectrum sufferers experience, because it sounds like a never-ending horror. As explained by one of the Bleekmen, an aboriginal Martian race so closely related to humans it's been decided that the two races come from the same colonizing stock from millions of years ago: "This boy experiences his own old age... decades from now in an old persons' home which is yet to be built...a place of decay which he loathes beyond expression. In this future place he passes empty, weary years, bedridden -- an object, not a person, kept alive through stupid legalities." That's pretty much everyone's nightmare, isn't it? And Manfred lives it all day long, if the Bleekmen are to be believed.How all of this comes together to blow up in the lives of Arnie Kott and Jack Bohlen is ponderous and depressing and terrifying and awe-inspiring and, as is usually the case with PKD, a complete joy to read. Martian Time-Slip as a novel title seems toward the beginning to refer to a account of man-hours worked on Mars, a slip of paper on which an employee records his time, which is pretty nifty for a little science fiction story right there, but then the other meaning of slip, as one does on a banana peel, comes into play and what SJ refers to as the "Dick Click" happens and it all turns into a marvel.I spent a little chunk of time just now trying to imagine how someone might go about presenting this story on film, and all I could think of was we'd need Richard Linklater and his roto-scoping again, because we would need a visual ghost of Manfred's awful reality sort of steroscopically overlapping the rest of the visual and auditory presentation. And now, even though it would be ugly and frightening and soul-destroying and brain-punishing, I want to see that film very badly indeed. Although I just did, in my head while I read the book. So why do I feel this way?Ah, PKD.*Note, I have never actually watched an episode of any of those shows, so I'm just guessing that their stars don't really do any traditionally "housewifey" things based on the promos I occasionally see for them. If I'm wrong, well, mea culpa. I guess. I'm a misanthropic hater of the glass teat and I don't really care.
Working my way back into reading all Dick's novels again. Here is some classic Dick (ew!): the clunky exposition, the complexity of reality. This one begins and ends by concerning itself with a bevy of topics and characters: unions, autism, the education system, family life, marital infidelity, gentrification, small-time businessmen, racism, aborigines, mental illness in children, and etcetera. Martian Time-Slip begins and ends as a story about modern suburban life, and the fact that it takes place on Mars hardly matters. Of course, this being a Philip K Dick novel, things eventually take a sharp turn for the bizarre. While Dick's explanation of autism and schizophrenia might be dubious, within the context of the novel they seem most chillingly real, and the distortion and disorientating effects of time and space in one particular section are without question haunting. Our relationship between time and space, our very perception of reality, is at stake here. The struggle between conforming to society's idea of reality or falling forever inward into a vacuous psychotic black hole:"Now I can see what psychosis is: the utter alienation of perception from the objects of the outside world, especially the objects which matter: the warmhearted people there. And what takes their place? A dreadful preoccupation with- the endless ebb and flow of one's own self. The changes emanating from within which affect only the inside world. It is a splitting apart of the two worlds, the inner and outer, so that neither registers on the other. Both still exist, but each goes its own way. It is the stopping of time. The end of experience, of anything new. Once the person becomes psychotic, nothing ever happens to him again." (170)It is a frightening struggle, but one that all but disappears as the book reaches its sort-of disappointing conclusion. Or I should say the struggle is transformed, hidden but still frightening, subtle and at last confronted. Maybe I'm being too vague, but I don't want to give anything away. Suffice it to say all the weirdness falls back and at last the book offers the redemptive powers of returning to the fold, a reward that does not entirely seem genuine.There's nothing quite like a Philip K Dick character. Alienating and unlikable, they are more than mere cardboard characters but rather seem to be extensions of Dick's own mind, pros and cons of various inner arguments. That is why, perhaps, his female characters always seem a little too feminine, a little too superficially presented. One can almost imagine Dick in drag, a la Being John Malckovitch, acting out the part of a tired housewife. The proletariats and small-minded American cons go about their business as a never-objective but still distant narrator discerns their fate, and guides them to some inner revelation they always feared and never wanted to face, while all the while we are trapped with them in their minds, experiencing all their anxiety, paranoia, fears, claustrophobia.As far as Dick novels go (and keeping in mind I am reading them in order of publication) this one is remarkably stylized, with some great phrases (the sinister nonsense of gubble gubble, the "hypochondria of the machine," and it wouldn't be a Philip Dick novel if simulacra didn't get a mention) and that terrific Sound-And-Fury moment late in the novel in which one event is told multiple times from various distorted perspectives. Dick's unintentional (?) goofiness and sometimes over-the-top surrealism is probably off-putting and confusing to the uninitiated, but once you start reading more of him you come to appreciate what an amazing mind and imagination he had, even if it is perhaps a very bleak, depressing mind, and one too sure of itself and all too willing to believe its own paranoid "madness." But then again, that's part of his charm.
—Printable Tire
Another fantastic book. Martian Time-Slip deals with life in Mars, where children with autism and schizophrenia are sent to special schools where they are treated and cared for. Precognition is said to be one of the side effects of schizophrenia, and then a strange tale of altered mind states, corruption and real state scams, exploring the nature of reality, what is true, how much of the future is preordained, how much can it be tampered with, how do we relate to our world's global mind, and of course, gobble gobble.'Gobble gobble' becomes synonym with destruction, decay, the final state of everything. Time brings all matter and all life to an end, and that is the ultimate future of everything, the corruption of all that we know until there's nothing left. Martian Time-Slip has an undercurrent of horror that I found very grabbing. Entropy in it becomes a force of almost primeval evil, at least seen from our order-inclined minds, though in actuality, like death, it is the only just force, since it sees no difference between good and evil, rich or poor, sentient or inert, living or dead. PKD's descriptions of decay are engrossing and horrifying, the paranoid states and the schizophrenic stages are all rather worrying too, at least for me, seeing how characters erode degree by degree, fully aware of their break down, but unable to fight it. The end of the book is strange and terrifying on it's own. To escape one's destiny... at the end it seems like we can only escape our perceptions, though I guess a little goes a long way. The audio book is really good, the narrator, Tom Parker, has a very pleasant style and very in-character dialog reading. I enjoyed his narrative very much.
—Mina Villalobos
