Rating: 
Summary: A mystery that veers into mysticism
Review: A Maze of Death is a strange mixture of science fiction, mystery, and theology. Fourteen people are assigned to colonize an uninhabited planet, Delmak-O. One by one, they meet mysterious deaths. It is unclear whether the malevolent agent is a military conspiracy, evil aliens, or each other. The solution to this puzzle is, however, in the end less important than the mystery of Delmak-O itself. This world gives indications of being a false reality; some of its life forms are organic, others are mechanical contraptions of unknown origin. Its central mystery is a monolithic Building that each member of the group sees in a different light. The lettering above the entrance changes according to the psychology of the viewer. The Building is the ultimate symbol, an irreducible core reality that cannot be entered and whose nature can only be inferred. Dick invented a completely original theology for this novel; it gives quite a fascinating dimension of meaning to the plot, but that religious system ultimately proves as unreal as any of the experiences of any of the characters. This is an essential novel for anyone interested in the "higher Dick" novels such as VALIS.
Rating: 
Summary: I love this book
Review: At first, it seems like such a normal old school type of Sci-Fi book that there might come a time about 1/3 of the way thru, when you may be tempted to put it down because you think the style/setting/script is sort of dated. WOW...am I glad I didn't succumb to any of that nonsense... I placed my faith in PKD, knowing full well that I would eventually be thrown for a loop. Er...several loops. Eventually, I got my wish. When this one starts to build, it just takes off.
All in all, this book is so loveable because it succeeds in capturing that late 1950's - 1960's classic Sci-Fi style... but, still completely packs the reality-altering PKD whallop that we all come to expect from his works. I'm sure that this book completely blew minds when it came out.
Rating:
Summary: a excellent taste of P. K. Dick
Review: First off, Dick is the unsung hero of postmodern literature. If there is a sense of failure in any of his works it can only be attributed to his effort to take on too much of reality, to put complete portraits of men and women in an environment fully realized and even more complex than that in which we live presently. Call him Icarus or Ishmael, for his task is greater than the breadth of any of his novels is capable, which is to say that nothing seems to end satisfactorily, that Dick is more than ready to leave loose ends and frayed edges, not because of oversight or inability, but because he rejects conventionality. Simply put, if the universe were really in order, why would one be compelled to write? Like other novels, A Maze of Death ends ambiguously, but in a much different manner...
A Maze of Death is sheer mastery, and yet to characerize this mastery is at once to applaud its unconventionality and to give away the plot. This I cannot do, but I will say this: nothing ends so sweetly as this work. Unlike other works, this one is the epitome of postmodernism--it will wrap you in its folds, stretching your imagination and forcing you to carry out endless deductions, and then it will give you nothing to walk away with. It is a purely reflexive experience: this book connects to nothing in the world and is yet a world unto itself, a maze that can only be appreciated by getting through it.
Rating: 
Summary: Murderworld, or: A Parable of Polyencephalitic Fusion
Review: Fourteen colonists (an amiable linguist, a head-in-the-clouds theologian, a repugnant psychoanalyst, an elderly sociologist, a worldweary marine-biologist, a plucky naturalist, a level-headed M.D., a hard-nosed technician, a trollish thermoplastics-engineer, a conspiratorial economist, a prophetic soil-sample expert, a nymphoid secretary, a shrewish housewife (there's one in every PKD novel, to the perpetual dismay of the author's numerous real-life spouses), and an elderly janitor) are jettisoned to the synthetic murderworld of Delmak-O to try and survive the usual Dickian tailspin of multi-level reality dysfunction.In the process, Dick manages to present an interesting case for radical psychiatric practice, the use and abuse of polyencephalitic role-playing games (i.e. mindmeld virtual environments) to assuage social guilt, the possibility of cartharsis through simulated acts of murder. The book's moral, naturally enough, seems to imply that aggression will only lead to more aggression, as violence becomes ordinary and acts of homicide as emotionally involving as the stomping of vermin. The cabin-fever hysteria of interstellar travel leads to an obsession with technologized escapism, with an undertow of murderous resentment at their consensual loss of compass (here in the labyrinth the minotaur is God and Ariadne's ball of twine just another paranoid entanglement). Throughout the novel, Dick vacillates between the failed group-dynamic of the colonists (they are unable to function as a team, though occasionally they make do as a crazed rabble), the perils of solipsistic and affect-less introversion, and the horror of being trapped in an enclosed complex with the same people for a subjectively *cosmic* length of time. [Personally, I've always read this as a veiled indictment of the '60s hippie commune, and a prolepsis to the Manson family murders.(?)] Most disturbingly, Delmak-O is a religion-mad world where theology actually *works*, an insane amalgam of Judaeo-Christian, Mohammedan, Zoroastrian, Tibetan, and Technocratic polytheism, a soul-crushing "distillate of man's total experience with God - a tremendous logical system, a comforting web deduced by the computer from the postulates given it - in particular the postulate that God existed"(182). Dick's message to those nostalgic for a pre-Copernican world where God's existence is an established scientific certainty admonishes us all to be careful what we wish for. Behold a monstrously *theologized* galaxy where the New Testament has been displaced by a book entitled *How I Rose from the Dead in My Spare Time and So Can You*. (In the author's forward, Dick confesses that some of the religious scenes correspond "in exact detail" to one of his LSD trips.) Of course, *A Maze of Death* is as badly written as any of Dick's novels (a stilted and reflexive prose-style, characters as hollow and 2-dimensional as anything in the hard-boiled tradition), but where 1968 gave us the chilling pulp masterwork *Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?*, here he can only rework old material, i.e. Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Paradigm Shift. And yet John Clute insists that *Maze* is one Dick's four central novels, along with *Androids*, *High Castle*, and *Three Stigmata*. However puzzling this judgement seems, we can all appreciate Dick's audacity in writing such an absolutely pessimistic and proto-Mansonesque book for a major publishing house (*Maze* was originally released by Doubleday in 1970, following closely upon the Tate-LaBianca slayings in Los Angeles). Dick's novel stands with Malzberg and Ballard in that audacious SF counter-tradition which deigns to invalidate any romantic notions we may have about interstellar colonization and the imperialistic mastery of alien star-systems. It further lampoons the New Age vacuity of texts such as *The Celestine Prophecy* and its precursors, arguing that theological wish-fulfillments are only good for creating more terror and more confusion which ultimately overshadow the vapid evasions of a simplistic pop-religion. In the end, though, despite all its speculative verve and hot flourishes, *A Maze of Death* has a face only a Dickhead could love.
Rating:
Summary: Pretty good book
Review: I couldn't put the book down once I started reading it, but when I finished, I was sorely disappointed. I wish he hadn't made it so traditional. It seemed like more of a way to end some wacky TV sit-com.
Oh well.
Rating:
Summary: The first PKD I really liked
Review: I drew on to PKD from his reputation. After reading a few of his works with bemused admiration, this was the first of his books I really enjoyed. SPOILERS A Maze of Death is genuinely readable; most PKD is a little shoddily put together, but this one is perfect. It is a wonderful allegory of loss of faith in God. These people create a world with a virtual reality machine. A world where God exists. The trouble is, when they get out, they can't face reality any more... This is indicative of Dick's own religious confusion at the time - this was prior to his "revelation" of 1974. I can sympathise with him.
Rating:
Summary: pretty good
Review: I have read many of Dick's short story compilations, and am new to his novels,preferring the shorter, more interesting short stories. This is my first.
I chose this book only because it was the cheapest one on selection. It was good, but I certainly know (and hope) the Dick could have produced better works, and will continue to read into him regardless.
The story is one of twelve entirely different individuals all summoned for unknown reasons to a elusively mysterious, hyper-kinetic world.
I should mention that in the forward to the book he mentions he this is a book that arose from a speculative concept he created in hopes of engineering a religion based on utmost logic. And true to his word, this is mentioned in the book, but don't defer to it as the underlying theme, or else you'll end up confused.
If you are new to Dick, this probably isn't his best book, but a good book nonetheless.
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Summary: The Kafkaesque Trial-motif in a science fiction novel
Review: In Maze of Death, Philip K. Dick has taken the Kafkaesque Trial-motif and placed it into a science fiction context. His characters find themselves in alien environments and must piece together meaning and their own identity, and like philosophers or theologians they are detectives that have little to work on yet much riding on the success of their investigation. So they use reasoning, logic, postulations - yet the phantom that they are trying to outsmart may be a lot closer to home than they expect.
In reading Maze I acquired a new awareness of how frantic and maybe self-delusional people's lives are, including my own - we are, like the characters in Dick's novel, mice in a maze. We are impatient for our end to come in the form of entropy yet too cowardly to vent ourselves into space. Instead we become very skilled in the creation of our own delusions - magicians of our own mind.
Philip K. Dick takes the despicable ending of `And it was all a dream' and makes it not only tolerable, but cool. This may be because he world that the characters wake up into are as fantastic, if not more so, than the world that they `dream'. Consider, for instance, that if the world that Neo woke up into in _The Matrix_ was very much like our own, there might not be a film.
Rating:
Summary: a truely dark and morbid story...
Review: maze of death is by far one of the most darkest of stories i've every read, a tale about the desperation of man clouding up the truth of his unavoidable fate in order to reestablish hope and meaning in his life to continue on, and reading this story you are confronted with the morbidly tragic life style that is the result, simulated in this story as a maze of frustration, anger, and paranoia that the main charactors in this story most go through, with no hopes of deliverance from this maze once they have reached the end, but instead being confronted with the revelation of that truth that they are so desperately but subconsciously trying to avoid....
Rating:
Summary: Excellent page turner, but a book of despair
Review: Maze presents the common PKD theme of one ersatz reality, the one in which we believe we live, giving way to another. Invariably this is traumatic, such as in Ubik. In this case, however, all hope is lost as to a solution. Dick's metaphor of the doomed spaceship (being Earth) is gloomy indeed, and it is no surprise that this book was written at a time in Phil's life where he had no hope. The only hope is the mystical removal of Morley at the end, but this could be interpreted as an escape into death. This is not a happy novel. Nevertheless, as others have said, Maze is possibly the fastest PKD read you will encounter. I have read this book but once, and I was astounded at the time. I rate this extremely highly as a work of fiction, although I suspect that further reading will confirm what others have said - that is that the soul is not there, Dick no longer believes in what he is writing.
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