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kilroyPrint date: 1962 (20s: 1, 60s: 2, 70s: 1, 80s: 3, 90s: 3, 00s: 3)
Page count: 259 (4636 total)
Dick isn't famous because he writes good characters or good stories. The populations of his books are neurotic and confused, and the arcs of his stories aren't always clear. What he is justly famous for is his vision. He takes simple ideas and extrapolates, then extrapolates again: creating believable worlds from strange premises.
Case in point, this book. Start with the idea that the Axis won World War Two twenty years ago. Normally this would make me run screaming from a novel already, but I didn't realize that was what was going on until forty pages in-- by which point I'd already gotten acclimated to the world. Now take that premise and expand. Hitler went rubber-room crazy from syphilis and was replaced, causing continuous inter-faction warfare within the party; Nazis are doing space exploration, but basically as a propaganda exercise to distract the population from other issues; the extermination of Jews continues, to the point where they can be deported from other countries back to the German territories to be killed; everyone knows about the camps; Africa has been destroyed and the remaining Africans are legal slaves once more.
Expand again. Japan controls the western coast of America; the I Ching is now popularized with the American population; whites are essentially second-class citizens against the Asian gentry; business is now conducted according to "place"; pede-cabs are everywhere; the Japanese don't approve of the Germans' continued barbarism but can't really do anything about it.
These are the sorts of details you osmose from the book. It's all told from the ground, from the perspective of people who don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. There is no top-down explanation. You understand that some of the conquered Americans truly admire the Japanese and their way of doing things. You feel their sorrow at the essential death of American culture. You wonder with them whether or not there will be another war, possibly a nuclear war. Things are different. Things are the same. The book is worth reading just to be there, to stand in that world for a while and think about what exactly it reflects from your own.
I'm not going to keep it, since I don't think the narrative was strong enough for me to read it again. But I have to give a nod to Mr. Dick with regards to one particular thread of the novel. Inside the world which is for us an alternate history, there is a popular novel--illegal in the German territories--describing a world in which the Axis had lost. It speculates about the details of what that world would look like, matching our history in some ways but logically diverging in others. Characters read the book and try to understand it, to feel the ramifications of the ideas and perceive what might have been.
All of the characters in this book are us.
Verdict: Absolutely worth reading once, will recycle. (6.5/17 keepers, recalibrated)
Completed: 13 (6 female authors, 7 male authors)
Rejected: 4 (4 male authors, 0 female authors)
Next book due: 5/5
Page count: 259 (4636 total)
Dick isn't famous because he writes good characters or good stories. The populations of his books are neurotic and confused, and the arcs of his stories aren't always clear. What he is justly famous for is his vision. He takes simple ideas and extrapolates, then extrapolates again: creating believable worlds from strange premises.
Case in point, this book. Start with the idea that the Axis won World War Two twenty years ago. Normally this would make me run screaming from a novel already, but I didn't realize that was what was going on until forty pages in-- by which point I'd already gotten acclimated to the world. Now take that premise and expand. Hitler went rubber-room crazy from syphilis and was replaced, causing continuous inter-faction warfare within the party; Nazis are doing space exploration, but basically as a propaganda exercise to distract the population from other issues; the extermination of Jews continues, to the point where they can be deported from other countries back to the German territories to be killed; everyone knows about the camps; Africa has been destroyed and the remaining Africans are legal slaves once more.
Expand again. Japan controls the western coast of America; the I Ching is now popularized with the American population; whites are essentially second-class citizens against the Asian gentry; business is now conducted according to "place"; pede-cabs are everywhere; the Japanese don't approve of the Germans' continued barbarism but can't really do anything about it.
These are the sorts of details you osmose from the book. It's all told from the ground, from the perspective of people who don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. There is no top-down explanation. You understand that some of the conquered Americans truly admire the Japanese and their way of doing things. You feel their sorrow at the essential death of American culture. You wonder with them whether or not there will be another war, possibly a nuclear war. Things are different. Things are the same. The book is worth reading just to be there, to stand in that world for a while and think about what exactly it reflects from your own.
I'm not going to keep it, since I don't think the narrative was strong enough for me to read it again. But I have to give a nod to Mr. Dick with regards to one particular thread of the novel. Inside the world which is for us an alternate history, there is a popular novel--illegal in the German territories--describing a world in which the Axis had lost. It speculates about the details of what that world would look like, matching our history in some ways but logically diverging in others. Characters read the book and try to understand it, to feel the ramifications of the ideas and perceive what might have been.
All of the characters in this book are us.
Verdict: Absolutely worth reading once, will recycle. (6.5/17 keepers, recalibrated)
Completed: 13 (6 female authors, 7 male authors)
Rejected: 4 (4 male authors, 0 female authors)
Next book due: 5/5