The Game-Players Of Titan (2001) - Plot & Excerpts
Philip K. Dick's 10th novel, "The Game-Players of Titan," was originally released in 1963 as an Ace paperback (F-251, for all the collectors out there), with a cover price of a whopping 40 cents. His follow-up to the Hugo Award-winning "The Man in the High Castle," it was one of six novels that Phil saw published from 1962-'64, during one of the most sustained and brilliant creative bursts in sci-fi history. Like so many of the author's works, the action in "Game-Players" transpires on a futuristic Earth (around the year 2225, if I read between the lines correctly) that has been laid waste by war and hard radiation. Here, it has been 130 years since mankind fought the vugs of the Saturnian moon Titan to a stalemate, and now an uneasy peace of sorts reigns, while the fortunate landowners of the depleted, sterile society play a game called Bluff and wager gigantic chunks of real estate at the table. When we first meet the book's central character, Pete Garden, a suicidal, 150-year-old landowner, he is sorely upset due to his recent loss of Berkeley at that night's game...not to mention the lose of his 18th wife! And Pete's lot is soon to get a lot worse, when the newest member of his playing group is abruptly murdered, Pete's memory is blanked out, and suspicion falls squarely upon him. And that murder rap just opens up an ever-widening labyrinth of political intrigue and escalating paranoia for the poor, befuddled character.I must say, this is one of the wildest, most imaginative, most way-out Dickian jaunts that I have ever encountered...perhaps too much so, for its own good. The book is filled with all kinds of interesting touches, from talking cars, tea kettles and bathroom cabinets to the fascinating sequence in which a telepath examines the mind of a "pre-cog." Many of Phil's pet interests, such as opera, cigars and divorce (Phil would ultimately marry five times) are given an airing, and there is much humor to be had, as well. For example, the car that Joe Schilling, Pete's best friend (a bearded manager of a classical music store, as Phil had been in the early '50s, and a clear stand-in here for the author), drives, is a riot, responding to its owner's commands with comments such as "Up yours." The book has a typically large cast (47 named characters, including the 16 in Pete's Pretty Blue Fox game-playing group); some human, some vugs, and many with ESP-type abilities. Those vugs, by the way, are silicon based, Phil here beating "Star Trek"'s Horta to the silicic punch by a good four years! Typical for a Dick novel, the book is compulsively readable and brimming with ideas. And as for Dick's favorite theme, that of the elusiveness of objective reality, boy, does this novel deliver in spades, and then some! And that is part of the problem.In this book--where the vugs are capable of mind control, and many characters lie to one another, and red herrings abound, and in which Pete Garden takes so many pills with his booze that he has psychotic episodes--it really is impossible to tell what's what. To make matters even more confusing, the vugs are capable of appearing human and some can even teleport Earth folk instantaneously to Titan or to some in-between limbo state. In short, readers will be hard put to ever know what is real, who is what, where we are or whom we can trust. It is Dick at his most paranoid and extreme, and although it does make for fun reading, I'm not sure that the whole thing hangs together logically, or whether the motivations of several characters are consistent. Heck, this is a murder mystery in which the identity of the killer is never even revealed (!) ,and in truth, as the novel progresses, that issue becomes increasingly unimportant. I was ultimately left unsure, by the book's conclusion, if several characters were actual vugs or merely humans being controlled by vugs. Those vugs, by the way, are never adequately described by Phil; he just tells us that they are "amorphous" and have pseudopods. Six feet tall or six inches? Who knows? And although Dick's novel ends happily, for the most part, the author seems unable to resist throwing in some downbeat ambiguity in the final pages. This is clearly a book that could have seen a sequel, a common temptation for sci-fi writers and one that Phil, amazingly, never succumbed to. In all, a highly readable and entertaining novel from Dick's middle period, if a bewildering one.
This is typical of a mid-level Philip K. Dick novel: not quite sociologically original or narratively innovative enough to be brilliant, but neither incoherent, sloppy, nor silly enough to qualify as a failure. The material mostly draws on obsessions and motifs that Dick has done much better with elsewhere: an emotionally detached everyman anti-hero and pawn of unseen forces, an improvised suburban post-apocalyptic society featuring swinging couples that intermingle their figurative sex games with an actual board game, and gloopy aliens who are either friends, rivals, or insinuating invaders depending on who you're talking to and what drugs you're taking. There's also telepathy, precognition, talking cars with a surprising knack for penetrating the emotional foibles of their owners, and various warpings of reality, time, space, and the rules of conventional narrative.The promising premise is that benevolent invaders from Titan are attempting to rebuild postwar earth society by replacing existing laws and social conventions with a real-life version of Monopoly in which each player's luck, skill, and ability to bluff his opponents determines who gets to own and control various earth cities, and also who gets to mate with whom (Imagine the Marshall Plan as conceived by Deng Xiaoping and Milton Bradley). Dick successfully squeezes oodles of nifty social criticism and humor out of this conceit, as well as some genuine pathos as the troubled, put-upon, occasionally suicidal hero struggles to find some human compassion in a grossly underpopulated America in which your marriage can literally end with one bad roll of the dice.But once Dick starts to pile on the layers of drug-induced hallucination, deception, telepathic shenanigans, and sudden barely-explained shifts in time and space, he falls victim to one of his usual self-detonating booby traps: every premise he had worked so carefully to establish becomes clouded with uncertainty, the goals and motivations of the characters shift from paragraph to paragraph, and the whole thing degenerates into a death-spiral of increasingly obsessive explanation and counter-explanation. It's as if one part of Dick's brain keeps getting bored and changing direction, while another part keeps trying to rationalize why it all still makes sense, like an embarrassed parent desperately attempting to explain to the teacher why his ADD-addled kid is actually very sweet.Don't get me wrong, Dick's insane need to blow up his own creations is a big part of what makes his best books and stories (Time Out of Joint, The Three Stigmata, UBIK, The Man in the High Castle, Faith of our Fathers, and many more) stunning, and for some, life-altering. It's just a question of balance. Dick's control of his own craft was always shaky, but on his best days his recklessness often produced brilliant results. Like a jazz improviser constantly going to the edge and beyond, he gives you the feeling that once he starts out, he's either going to thrill you or embarrass himself, and not knowing which you're getting is part of the fun. It's a roll of the dice, and the stakes are always satisfyingly high.
What do You think about The Game-Players Of Titan (2001)?
Checklist of common PKD novel elements present in Game Players of Titan:drug use – check!mental illness – check!flying cars – check!pre-cogs – check!con-apts – check!vid-phones – check!homeopapes – check!mass hallucinations – check!paranoia – check!psionic abilities – check!telepathic aliens – check!and of course,simulacra – check!!First published in 1963, one noticeable omission from the above list is any deep theological undertones. This is one of his more fun novels, in the category with Galactic Pot-Healer and The Crack in Space, though it also closely resembles Dr. Bloodmoney in its post apocalyptic kookiness. In this novel, Phil describes a far future Earth where we have been defeated by a race of telepathic slugs from Titan. Along with this is the fact that Earth is 99% sterile and the population is dwindling fast. Amongst the wreckage of our lost civilization is the need to play a board game (somewhat resembling Life) to trade property and wives.Wildly fantastic, subtly absurdist and altogether fun for PKD fans, Game Players of Titan is one of his better offerings. Amidst the absurd humor and nihilism is Dick’s own inimitable brand of humanistic hope for the future.I would not be surprised if this one joins the ranks of PKD stories developed into a film.
—Lyn
Not exactly what I expected with a title like that or a blurb like the one found on this 1973 printing but what I didn't expect (and don't ask me why I ignored it) was an allegory of Cold War America told through an interstellar cold war with aliens from Titan.So Dick wanted to be thought of as a literary writer not a pulpy sci-fi author, and I say fair enough as my experiences of his work so far point to the obvious conclusion that this drug fuelled writer had a lot more to say than most sci-fi writers of teh time and seemingly better tools to say it with. It's a shame that just because you write in genre fiction you are immediately dismissed as being less than Jhumpa Lahiri but sadly great ideas men (and women) will forever be faced with this off hand dismissal like so much Dan Brown on the bottom of your shoe.That being said a sci-fi novel dealing with McCarthyism et al struggles to make much of an impression on this reader nearly 50 years after its initial publication.The constant paranoia and second guessing was a little too much by the end of the novel and perhaps is a good representation of what it might have been like to live through; nobody feeling 100% comfortable in their own skin, with their neighbours and loved ones or with their governments behaviour making every action and reaction an awkward or painful one to make.
—Tfitoby
The Game-Players of Titan is a book without a solid structure, which is why it falls apart towards the end, but the first 3/4s of the book are fantastic.PKD is not at his preachiest, and there is almost no mention of religion, but The Game has taken on the importance of a religion.Humans and Vugs from Titan went to war a century ago. The Vugs won with a little help from the Red Chinese and the fact that they are all psychics. In an effort to repopulate the world they now control with its native species, the vugs institute a form of hyper-monopoly, in which real properties are exchanged, and marriages are made and broken. The goal is of course to have Luck, and by that I mean procreate. The main protagonist has been married 18 times, and never had luck. The game has been designed around the great game that the vugs play (it's something like a cross between religion, politics and football in their culture). Pete Garden and his circle eventually square off against the vugs for the fate of mankind, and to clear his name of murdering "Lucky" Luckman, the luckiest bluff player ever.
—Eric
