Rating: 
Summary: Not Your Grandfather's Martians
Review: Remember those swashbuckling Mars adventures by Edgar Rice Burroughs? Remember those terrifying, unconquerable Martians from War of the Worlds? We are not talking about those Martians here. The Martians and the humans in this novel are quite ordinary, often weak, and occasionally nuts. You want space opera, go watch Star Wars again.On this Mars, our hero is a traveling repairman with a schizophrenic past. Our villain is the president of the plumber's union. Our damsel in distress is the villain's mistress, but she falls in love with the schizophrenic anyway. The prize everyone is after is an autistic adolescent so terrified of physical contact that he can't see one person touch another without seeing them both decay on the spot. And the character who triumphs at the end does so not because he's got a bigger gun, but just because he has compassion for a group of weak, dying Martian natives who can't possibly do him any good. Never mind your typical SF novel, this isn't your typical novel of any sort, or your typical anything. That's PKD for you - he takes you on a seemingly normal science fiction trip and immediately turns everything inside out. That's part of what makes him brilliant. The other part is that he understands all his characters, which is to say all human types, including the greedy and self-serving ones. (This empathy for all types of people is all the more remarkable when you consider that his previous book, The Man in the High Castle, won a major award and he still couldn't get a hardcover book contract.) The schizophrenic, the union leader, the autistic kid, the mistress - all they want is to be loved, like you and me. Unfortunately, some of them (and some of us) learn that fact too late. Of course, if one is living in a world where your choices are overpopulation and madness or emigration to Mars and endless struggle - a world in which mental illness is as frequent as the common cold, in which psychiatrists earn a living by replacing their patients at social functions instead of treating them - in a world like that, it's all too easy to overlook love and compassion. That any of these characters manage to find, feel and express love is little short of a miracle. You read Martian Time-Slip and, after you're finished saying "What a weird story," you feel better about being human. Martian Time-Slip is without question one of PKD's best works. It has an entertaining and exciting story, it's full of intriguing ideas handled well, there's a nice balance of humor and intensity, and I promise you've never met characters like these before unless you've been reading PKD for a while. Which isn't a bad idea, by the way. He's a good tonic for the modern man and woman, beset from all sides by forces they don't understand but somehow able to stand up and take care of their friends at the same time, like these characters do. Benshlomo says, The greatest triumphs are the small ones.
Rating:
Summary: Hold on to your hat
Review: So maybe Dick's vision of the future was wrong, and his grasp of Martian geography was weak. Well, Shakespeare gave a seacoast to Bohemia and Italian names to Danes, and it didn't hurt his reputation! This is one of PKD's best novels, from the decade when he cranked out one mindbending book after another. His best traits are all here: the intensely human characters; the grounding of the fantastic plot in practical, real-world concerns; the questioning of our everyday concepts of time and space; the deft use of multiple perspectives and shifting time-schemes; and the abundant humor. PKD disliked being stranded in the pulpy ghetto of "sci-fi," but I think it worked to the reader's gain. Although his work has something in common with the American techno-paranoid school (Pynchon, Vonnegut, DeLillo), its honesty and lack of deliberate cleverness render it superior in my view. His unnerving excursions into the human psyche bring to mind Georg Buechner's comment, "Man is an abyss, and I get dizzy when I look therein!"
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Summary: PKD showing what it is like inside the mind of a Paranoid
Review: The real treat for the true fans of Philip K. Dick. speculation about his mental stability have thrived even to this day. This book gives us insight and view into the mind of a man bordering on schizophrenia. This is the turning book. I have read early Dick novels, and I have read late Dick novels. Being a fan of his writing, I noticed immediately that this was the book that showed us how his finall novels would carry us down dark paths of paranoia and confusion. The true conspiracy theorist, Dick will alwasy be the best writer of mental SF.
Rating:
Summary: A truly disturbing and rewarding book to read.
Review: This book was a hard read for me. Many of the characters mimicked real thoughts and feelings and emotions, that I kept putting it down and only reading it when I was in a good mood. It is sad and depressing, but fantastic in it's scope and thoughts. I can't believe more of his books aren't nomitated for awards. This man is fantastic, he has such a way of looking into the souls of people and it's like every character in his books has a soul and a life. This was the first K. Dick novel I ever read. Before this, I'd read many of his short stories, all of which were excellent, but this showed me that his novels were better than his short stories could ever capture. To say I was overwhelmed by this would be an understatement.
Rating:
Summary: Martian Time Slip: The Forbidden Future
Review: This is a near-masterpiece about schizophrenia and society in the US in the 1950s, although it takes place on a sparsely populated Mars run by the UN, a desert world traversed by helicopters and inhabited most successfuly by indigenous blacks and the Arabs and the Jews of New Israel. Jack Bohlen, like the younger P.K.Dick, is a repairman of audio devices such as the anachronistically reel-to-reel tape-based encoding machine used by his eventual boss, the irrepressible but irresponsible Arnie Kott, the leader--the Supereme Goodmember--of the Water Worker's Union on Mars. Kott is a big fish in a small pond, and his beautiful red-headed girlfriend is easily as interested in Jack, who is married, with a normal child, as she is in her big spender boss. There are at least two main problems: 1) they live on Mars, an essentially lonely red desert of frontier survival, despite its indigenous population of Aborigine-like "Bleekmen" and 2) schizophrenia is beginning to transmit laterally, like a contagion rather than a genetic disease. This second problem is compounded by the potential usefulness of the afflicted, especially a boy named Manfred Steiner, whose father commits suicide early on, leaving Jack's wife, the phenobarbital-popping Silvia, to care for the healthy children. Hard-drinking cut throat businessman Kott, who likes to waste water in steam baths on a planet where scotch is cheaper than beer because it contains less water, realizes that the mentally ill on this small planet have real clairvoyant powers. Without going into too much plot detail, there is much of interest here. It has been said that the greatest windfall of the space program is that it allowed us to look back and really see ourselves for the first time. Dick's Mars here is a transported microcosm, with Bleekman as the indigenous people whose valuable civilizations have been temporarily trampled, their human reservoirs of knowledge insulted and enslaved. The sexism, suburban isolation, and prescribed drug use of the fifties has also landed undamaged on the red planet. The faith in American psychiatry is subtly spoofed as for example when the red planet's most highly regarded therapist (therapists on Mars stand in for agoraphobics, accomplishing their worldly affairs), the essentially petty Milton Glaub, diagnoses Kott as someone with an "oral, sucking problem." More to the point, schizophrenia itself, of which P.K.D. is thought to have had a (pharmaceutically enhanced) touch, is wonderfully described, both "internally" via the points of view of Jack and Manfred (and later, Arnie, the last one you would expect to be afflicted) and "externally" with reference to Swiss theorists who analyze it as essentially a disturbance in the time sense. In this connection there is much talk of "gub" and "gubbish"-stand-in words for the schizophrenic's sense of dissolution, of a lack of meaning and the eventual entropic deconstruction of all presently held valuable. The gub words, which emanate at one point even from the mechanical teaching robots (e.g., Mark Twain) at the local public school, alert us that clairvoyant Steiner's schizophrenia is potentiating Bohlen's latent affliction. When Bohlen's father comes to the UN planet to put a down payment on land that will be used for emigrants, Arnie Kott is angry and scooped because he can see that his mafia-like control is coming to an end. Yet Jack's realtor father is also upset because the Steiner boy can look still further to see the demise of the housing complex that will contain the emigrants and enrich the land developers. Indeed, the Steiner boy, along with we ourselves, can eventually project into a future that "jubs" us all. Here jub joins with "kipple" in Dick's special lexicon of entropy-related words: jub is a mental version, in a way, of kipple, Dick's term for household clutter, gum wrappers and old newspapers and the like. "Ich liebe die Unwissenheit um die Zukunft" wrote Nietzsche: "I love not knowing the future." Dick's schizophrenic seers here are afflicted by the weight of knowing too much, one of the great themes of human introspection-even in the Bible where it is a weight which makes the first couple plummet to Earth after Eve eats the forbidden apple. This is not "hard science fiction"--the origins of the Bleekmen and the breathability of the atmosphere are never addressed--but it is emotionally rivetting.
Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece of speculative fiction
Review: This novel blew my mind. PKD explores time, madness and human nature in this novel so thouroghly that it affects the reader deeply, sucking him or her into the bleak world. The conclusion PKD reaches at the end of this novel rings utterly true, and everyone should experience it. PKD was easily one of the most brillant writers fiction has ever seen.
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Summary: Gubble Trouble
Review: Warning: Although this the action of this book is set on Mars, it could just as easily have taken place in one of the desert communities around Los Angeles. The real action takes place inside the minds of the characters. If you're looking for all the external trappings of interplanetary Sci-Fi, you will be deeply disappointed. Approach it with an open mind, and you will be richly rewarded. What happens when one of the most powerful men on the planet Mars finds that real-estate speculators are intent on gobbling up the remote and seemingly worthless Franklin D Roosevelt mountains? Naturally he wants to find out why. A casual conversation with a psychologist followed by a chance encounter with a master repairman leads to one of those Dickian leaps: Since (1) autistic children do not respond to others because they are living in the future, (2) just build a machine to slow down time and (3) maybe even use it to go back in time and retroactively post a claim on the land before the speculators do. Well, the mechanism works, in a way. The speculators were proposing to build giant apartment blocks to help relieve overcrowding on polluted Earth. The autistic boy, Manfred Steiner, sees much further, however, to the time the apartment block would become a warehouse for the sick and dying, a "tomb world," of which he himself is a denizen. Manfred's visions have a way of bending the reality of those around him; he persistently retreats to a vision of reality as "gubble" -- entropy seen as large wormlike constructs that underlie reality, leading to pure "gubbish." MARTIAN TIME-SLIP is one of my favorite Philip K Dicks. (The problem is that I like all 15 or so I've read more or less equally.) Reading Philip K Dick tends to bend your sense of reality much as Manfred Steiner does. And one can't help looking over one's shoulder for a few hours after reading him. I see Dick as not so much a science fiction writer as a creator of disturbing and eerily plausible futures.
Rating: 
Summary: Unbalancing
Review: Where to begin. The story tells of mental instability, perception of time, and life on a colony on the planet Mars. Dick's writing takes you inside the characters perceptions of events, and whenever he reaches the unstable "hero" of the story, you can't help but feel the same disturbances. It is like being given a small peak into psychosis, then being pulled back out before falling too far.
Rating:
Summary: SF NOVELS OPUS THIRTEEN
Review: With UBIK, MARTIAN TIME-SLIP is in my opinion an achievement in Philip K. Dick's career. Simulacra, schizophreny and autism, time breaches, Dick's favorite themes, become mingled in this nightmarish novel you are going either to reject violently either to be hypnotized by. Because, in 1964, Philip K. Dick, books after books, was creating new standards for modern science-fiction. Philip K. Dick has always read a lot, classic as well as modern literature. He rapidly felt that he had to adapt the classical structure of his first novels to a more deconstructed one in order to be able to treat his main themes like virtual realities or time gaps with the virtuosity we know. Some would say that most of the disturbing descriptions found in MARTIAN TIME-SLIP are the result of both a sick mind and the abuse of illegal substances. Maybe, maybe not. What is sure is that Philip K. Dick has written some of the most innovative pages of the literature of the sixties. The description of the mental universe of Manfred Steiner, the schizophrenic boy, will leave you psychologically exhausted and with the urge to buy the whole literary production of this under-appreciated Master of american science-fiction. A book for your library.
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