Rating: 
Summary: PKD is the Bomb
Review: I took a while to finish this book, because the ideas and nonlinear narrative had me on my mental heels all the way through. The more I thought about this story, the less I really wanted to read, but the more I had to read. An utterly disturbing book on all sorts of mental dysfunction, and blends psychology into metaphysics. Possibly the best novel (other 10's so far have been linked stories) I've ever read. Certainly the most challenging: recommended in small doses.
Rating:
Summary: My Brain on a Platter
Review: I'll be honest, the psychotic breakdown of Arnie Kott, which comes quite late in the book has been better represented in Dick's other books (such as A Scanner Darkly) but this book is carried by the power of the characters and social narrative. Dick doesn't write about nice people, he writes about people who have neurosis, quirks, failings, freaky episodes and just general annoying traits.Here, all the characters are tied in together though many strands of the story making it a complex, rich (I can't believe I'm going to use this cliche, but) tapestry of life in something akin to a frontier lifestyle, where life is hard, the men are away and the wives stay home and, well, I'll leave that for you to read about. He also looks at possible social and polical situations, like the co-op appartments that provide everything from schools to shops (why would you ever leave?) and the economic power they provide, and political power they wield. To the idea of the UN controlling the water supply, the thing that keep everyone alive. There are ghettos from different countries, like the Israel Settlement and areas that are free (or too far) from the law. It is a good book, but I don't think it is his best from the pure internal madness point of view. But as a social commentary, it is excellent.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome!
Review: I've read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" and"The Man in the High Castle", and I only had high hopes forthis book. I can't say enough about this book! I recommend it to allmy friends, even the ones who don't read (they'll come around oneday...it's my goal!). It's a shame that some of the reviewers[don't] understand the concept of time, and how the present has beeninfluenced by such people as Dick. They think that Dick should haveexplained how people could breathe in the Martian atmosphere, yet theyfail to realize that this book was written before the american spaceage. It was written in 1964!... There was still a lot to learnabout other worlds then, and for Dick to write a book like this,that's like William Gibson writing a book about jacking in to theinternet before there WAS an internet (that people actuallyused). Before his time! Oh yeah, FYI, William Gibson wrote"Necromancer", which is the basis of the Matrix (written in'84, before computers in general were very popular publicly, keep thatin mind!). This book is awesome! I'm reminded of Vonnegut's"Slaughterhouse-Five" in the respect of time, with all theschizophrenic patches of action strewn about. Philip K. Dick justmakes you think....this is one of those books where once you'refinished, you'll have a moment of silence. You can't beat that. Ihope you choose to read this book. If you don't like this book, giveit however many stars you like. But try to keep in mind when Dickwrote this! Not too shabby -- before we had even landed on the moon,Dick is writing about colonizing mars, detailing a society. Read it!
Rating:
Summary: great book by great Philip K. Dick
Review: I've read a couple of Dick's novels and really enjoyed them all, except "VALIS" which I found a little bit superficial and banal. Im a big fan of "Three stigmata of Palmer Eldrich" which is his best book in my opinion.
"Martian Time-Slip" is a typical Phil Dick book - boring in the beginning, confusing in the middle, but excellent and interesting in the end. It is also his most optimistic and life-affirming book as well.
The essence of this book is the story of little autistic kid, who is deeply troubled by his savant abilities which allow him to see future and past. Driven into the state of sheer terror by visions of his own old age and death in the gloomy abandoned complexes of Martian colonists, boy is finding happiness by withdrawing into his past as a fetus in his mother's womb. Boy's ability to bend time is affecting people around him, and some of them foolishly try to use it to achieve their selfish goals. Finally, boy achieves redemption from his visions by coming into the contact with Bleekman - a backward and primitive, but deeply human and strange Martian nomadic race.
Rating: 
Summary: uh
Review: In the beginning there was the book and the book told a story. The story turned out to make the mose infinite and iniminable sense imagineable to everybody who read it. Every story thereafter strove towards the ideal of the infinite and iniminable story but none succeeded. Nevertheless, many of these stories surive to this day for had they not they would have failed to. Philip Dick was disinterested in this idea.
Rating:
Summary: uh
Review: In the beginning there was the book and the book told a story. The story turned out to make the mose infinite and iniminable sense imagineable to everybody who read it. Every story thereafter strove towards the ideal of the infinite and iniminable story but none succeeded. Nevertheless, many of these stories surive to this day for had they not they would have failed to. Philip Dick was disinterested in this idea.
Rating:
Summary: Twenty-first century schizoid boy
Review: In this major novel, first published in 1964, Dick effectively utilizes multifocal viewpoints to comment on the nature of the schizophrenic experience and its implications for our evaluation of "normal" experience. The precognitive schizophrenic boy, Manfred Steiner, into whose mind the narrative sometimes strays, sees the world as entropic, in continual decline, as the horrifying spirit of the Gubbler pervades everything, reducing all communication to meaningless "gubble" and all life to dust and rot. Schizophrenia is seen here as a horror in which the dark shadowy fears and inner demons are let loose into the day world of ordinary consciousness. Manfred innocently projects his deranged vision so powerfully on others that they begin to see things the way he does, causing one main character's time-sense to become non-chronological. It seems to have the power of a pervasive, infectious disease in this novel, replicating itself throughout the fabric of society. It is interesting to read this in contrast with another sixties book about the schizophrenic experience, R. D. Laing's The Politics of Experience (1967. Dick hardly soft-pedals the horrific aspects of the disorder, but like Laing also plays with the possibility that the psychotic may sometimes glimpse reality more fully than "normal" people can.
Rating: 
Summary: Ho-Hum
Review: Like I said, ho-hum. A plodding story about some folks living on a Mars that is very much like, say, the Australian outback. The spacey twist revolves around a character who can see through time and influence it, and the efforts of another to use that power for his own selfish interests. Mildly diverting, but I can't understand how it would motivate another reviewer to run out and buy everything by the author. But then, I've read several other of Dick's novels and I can't say that any of them has lived up to the hype. He's definitely got an interesting outlook, but his writing is just average and frequently incoherent (at least to me). Good luck.
Rating: 
Summary: Crazy
Review: Martian Time-Slip at its core is about humans' perception of reality and time, which makes for a very interesting read even though the subject is wrapped in a crazy story. The book gives you insight into each character's own perception and how that affects their every interaction with society. With the story set in a world where mental illness is extremely common the characters' perceptions are drastically different. What I thought was particular interesting was the fact that only males seemed have these mental problems, while the females were left to anchor the males.
Rating:
Summary: the perfect introduction to PKD
Review: Martian Time-Slip is the book that made me an avid PKD fan. This book alone made me buy over 40 more of his books. It is so terrifyingly brilliant that it simply blows my mind on rereading. The setting is very good, very real. The characters are some of PKD's best (Arnie Kott as the antagonist but still likable, Silvia Bohlen the stoic, Manfred Steiner the schizophrenic.) And the plot is tremendous without being overtly action-based. The series of chapters where the same event (the meeting of Kott, Bohlen and Doreen) is told from different points of view is the single greatest influence on my attitude towards life. The sheer distemporality and the way in which PKD shows how different people see things changed my life. I don't think Time-Slip is quite as good as the very best PKD, but it is close enough not to matter.
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