Kim Miller

This is a novel of quiet sanity compared to much of PKD's work. Ragle Gumm spends his day working on a daily puzzle in the local newspaper called, Guess Where the Little Green Man Will Appear Next. He lives with his sister and her husband and son. Next door lives the nuisance couple who are always visiting at inopportune times. But there are times when Ragle 'sees through to the other side of the world' and it's not like his normal reality. He worries that those moments are signs of mental illness.

The story is rather benign until the 25% mark, at which point a conversation happens between two characters who should not know each other. Their conversation points to not only a link between them but a common purpose, and that purpose concerns Ragle Gumm. From there the story darkens and the reader is slowly fed grains of the truth behind these various characters.

'Ragle' is the reverse of Elgar, the composer of the work The Enigma Variations, a musical work depicting several of his friends, but he never told anyone which variation portrayed which friend. And this is the theme that Dick follows through the novel. We slowly realise that the characters are not who they say they are, and not who Ragle believes they are. Just as The Truman Show portrayed a town set up solely to be the backdrop to one man's story, so Ragle and his daily competition is the centre of a military project that is keeping the world safe.

PKD's oft repeated exploration of human consciousness often takes us into the weird and crazy. Here the theme is explored but with a quiet subtlety as Ragle Gumm awakens to his own reality. And once awake he faces an old decision.

This novella takes us into a surealist noir-like detective story where unexplained strangeness is the order of the day.

A famous architect builds a house that runs on an artificial intelligence. In this way the house continues as the repository of all his major work after his death. Think of HAL in 2001 A Space Odyssey, but less murdery. The house remains locked except for one person the AI will allow in as an archivist, but only for seven days each year.

One day the house calls the local police station to say there is a dead body inside. How did that guy get inside? Who killed him and how? How will the police investigate when they can't get inside to examine the scene?

The story is part locked room mystery, part gothic horror, part police procedural, part sardonic poke at one of the detectives who keeps wondering if he's in some noir detective story at last.

Overall it's a rather brittle story, as if reality is being bent almost to snapping point. Martine doesn't give anything away and the reader is left to work out their own take-away from it all. Nothing is really explained, the tension builds and falls away in unexpected moments, and the ending doesn't resolve the questions that the book presents.

This is one of PKD's most coherent novels. Two characters vie for the role as main protagonist. There is Jack, an electrical repair man and there is Manfred, a boy locked up in an institution for being 'anomolous'. For that we can read non neurotypical. Dick refers to autism on some occasions but the boy is not seen as that by those around him. And for a book written in the early 60s we should not expect a modern understanding.

Jack is called to a repair and gets involved with a powerful local union boss, Arnie, who is impressed with his work. Running parallel is the discovery that Jack's neighbours have a son, the boy in the institution whose father has just died. Jack's family gets involved with Manfred and through that Arnie makes a claim on the boy as he believes people with such brain function can see the future. Arnie recruits Jack to build a facility/machine that will allow them to communicate with Manfred so Arnie can interrogate the future.

Through a web of family relationships and power games, Dick explores the themes of isolation, shared hardship, mental illness and psychosis, and the human need to have mastery over our environment and community.

As the story develops we find that Manfred can communicate almost telepathically with the indigenous martian people. In a last ditch attempt to gain control over a situation that has escaped him, Arnie and Manfred set off on a pilgrimage inspired by the indigenous culture. Once again, Arnie can't quite keep control of things as we approach the climax of the story.

And then at the closing pages PKD hits us with a brick between the eyes. "I bet you didn't see that coming," he says as the book come to a close.

An easy reading romp of a novel that swaps between being a tribute to Raymond Chandler's noir detectives and mildly dystopian science fiction. It was a single sitting rainy Saturday read for me that was undemanding as long as I kept track of the weird stuff.

Metcalf is a gritty and cynical private 'inquisitor', the change in his job title represents the dystopic culture of the time. He's employed by a client, the client turns up dead and another man asks him to investigate it as he's in the firing line to be charged with the murder. The 'Inquisitor Office' gets in the way of his investigation and the novel proceeds as a game of cat and mouse as the facts of the case slowly get revealed. Along the way his 'karma' card keeps being docked by the Office to scare him off. Zero karma points could see him taken out of the society.

There are the normal noir detective tropes of cynical banter, women to be ogled, people being followed into dark places, bars with cigarette butts in pools of beer on the floor, all the expected stuff. There are also 'evolved' animals, modified animals that mimic humans, walking upright, wearing clothes, talking, carrying guns. And everybody is snorting drugs variously named as Forgettol, Avoidol, Acceptol, to smooth out their experience of living.

The book won the Locus Award for best first novel in 1995 so it came with a pedigree. However, the thirty years since has pushed the misogyny into the 'no go' zone. And even for a 1995 novel to hark back fifty years was pushing it. The weirdness of the characters held my attention and I was less interested in the 'who dunit' aspect as I was in the play between the human and animal power tripping. OK, as an Australian I wanted to know more about that kangaroo on the cover.

As things came to a head between Metcalf and the Office the story took an unexpected u-turn and the whole endeavour seemed lost. The final chapters take us into a new world and Metcalf has to adapt with instant reflexes to bring the investigation to a close. This final part of the story elevated it up a notch and gave a sense of satisfaction to my day of reading.

PS. The novel took inspiration from a quote by a Chandler character, "... the subject was as easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket."

Deadbeat Chuck is being divorced by his more successful marriage counselor wife. He's a programmer for simulacrum robots for the CIA but it seems he's better at writing lifelike code for robots than he is at living his own life. Chuck sees two possibilities, suicide or murder his ex wife.

His wife decides to go off to one of the moons in the Alphane star system to work with the communities that have formed since the psychiatric hospital closed down. The patients have gathered into villages according to their shared psychoses and suddenly Earth has decided they need 'help' - ie. We'd like to take their moon.

Chuck wangles his way into taking charge of the CIA robot that will accompany his wife on the mission, planning for the robot to kill her. Trouble is, a new second job he's been offered writing comedy scripts for a TV personality wants him to write a script where a man programs a robot to murder his wife. This is beginning to sound very suspicious to Chuck.

This novel is a comedic look at the human personality when it splits into its many components. The various moon dwellers, Chuck's current mental state, his wife's incipient violence, a couple of other female characters, the CIA management, there's an intelligent telepathic slime mold alien life form, are all metaphors for the aspects of the inner life that PKD has been setting out in his books from the beginning. As a self-referential look at the ridiculousness of human life, this is PKD saying, "If your life is anything like mine, welcome to the crazy club."

A tale of increasing unpleasantness. I picked this up as I loved Noon's Vurt. Had I read this first I would probably have not read Vurt at all.

This starts out as a bit of a mystery story with a weird underlying theme of people being either a writer of their own life or a character in somebody else's writing. It seems to be developing into a metaphor for the Thought Police of 1984. However, half way through it turns towards being body horror and after that a strange and ancient magic works its way into the foundation of whatever has been happening. It ends with a bunch of people out in a field with all the magic stuff rising off them as if they are in medieval England on 'witching day' or something.

The prose is thick with over-described thought processes that left me wondering when I was going to feel some emotional attachment to any of the characters. In the 'show, don't tell' arena, this had many losing moments. It was as if Noon was forcing his narrative to drag me along, knowing it wasn't succeeding very often.

The detective, Nyquist, is a pretty normal noir investigator. He's dogged in his determination to follow his nose no matter the cost, and his nose never seems to get it wrong. There's a woman, there's the police, although in this setting they are The Narrative Police making sure people are writing their story properly (i.e. spying on everyone), and there are lots of dark corridors in tall buildings. If Nyquist's gonzo side had been let loose we might have had a taste of Dark City or Gilliam's Brazil.

The theme of 'everything depends on the words' that underlies the story tries to take it into an hallucinogenic direction that it just doesn't want to go.

A comedic romp as a time traveler from the not so distant future bumbles his way through the English aristocracy of the late 1880s.

Ned Henry is a time traveler whose job is to go back in time to search for collectible items from jumble sales for his boss Lady Schrapnell. This time he's sent back to find a hideous piece of ironware called The Bishop's Bird Stump that went missing from Coventry Cathedral in the bombing. Along the way he manages to divert the course of history of one of Lady Schrapnell's ancestors and frantically tries to fix his error before it derails the whole of the twentieth century history.

There's Ned and his secret accomplice, accompanied by a rich and lovesick university student, an Oxford don obsessed with history and fish, a wealthy landowner in a stately home, a bunch of aristocratic young women intent on marrying, lots of household servants, train timetables, parish fetes, jumble sales, a once drowned cat, and a dog.

It's a bit Monty Python / Hitchhiker's Guide as Ned bounces from one mistake to another, but as the story progresses we get the impression that there is something vitally important underlying his assignment. And slowly the discussions between the Oxford don and the landowner on the importance of minor events in history's major battles start to take on a new significance.