Rating: 
Summary: Good story, flimsy premise
Review: Anyone who has seen the Red Dwarf episode "Backwards" will know the basic premise of Counter-Clock World. Based on Dick's short story "Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday", Counter-Clock World has time running backwards, curiously only on Earth, due to the naturally occuring 'Hobart Phase' (in the short story the Hobart Phase was artificially created).
Logic would dictate that everything would have to run backwards but in Counter-Clock World people have a forward-pointing 'arrow of time' while the world they are living in has a reverse arrow of time. Dick selctively has his characters doing certain things in backwards (such as 'imbibing' Sogum and later on uneating a plate of food) and other things forwards like driving a car or carrying on a conversation.
Even though the environment of Counter-Clock World is a bit hard to buy it nonetheless a good story and is as worth reading as any of his other novels.
Rating:
Summary: Packs more paradoxes to the page than the brain can handle
Review: Dick attempts the impossible task of making time seem to flow backwards as the reader moves forward through the book. An eerie and unforgettable premise has the dead being "born" in their graves, crying out to be exhumed so they can begin their reverse trek through life. In other scenes food is excreted onto plates and then boxed and returned to the shelf, while bodily wastes are ingested through a "sogum pipe," a process alluded to several times but mercifully never depicted. Eventually the book reaches an action-packed climax (shouldn't it have occurred at the beginning?), in which bullets are sucked back into firearms and so forth, but by that time the paradoxes have come so fast and furious that the reader's brain has imploded. As in so many of his novels, Dick throws too many balls in the air to keep the juggling act going, and as scientifically plausible fiction, it's a mess, but only a genius would have attempted an idea as weird as this one, and taken it as far Dick does.
Rating:
Summary: foody premis, great writing for Dick fans.
Review: Do you love PKD? Have you read a lot of his books?
If you answered yes then you'll love this. If not I would try one of his more approachable titles first (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, or one of his short-story collections). I would not recommend this to a first time Dick reader; if you don't know what you're getting yourself into you probably will not like it.
With that said, I love PKD, and have read quite a few of his works. I, having been aclimated to his style, found it very enjoyable. The only concerns I have are that some of the ideas, with reguards to the backwards flow of time, are somewhat garbled. A good example is how cigeretts are smoked by inhaling the fumes and blowing into the filter- yet the people still manage to communicate while inhaling. Try it yourself, see it's not so easy. I know it's nit-picky, I can't help it.
All in all a great book for anyone who already enjoys PKD.
Rating: 
Summary: Something of a "clunker" (2.5 stars)
Review: I'm reviewing this book, because I've just read it; also, I'm a bit appalled at the number of high reviews of Dick's work in general. Dick is definitely one of the all-time great SF writers (and he's arguably one of the few geniuses to have worked in the field). Approx 6-10 of his books are classics; however, Dick also wrote a lot of just plain awful books (esp. in the 1950s); and due to his growing popularity, some of these books are actually being brought back into print (e.g., the Man Who Japed, World Jones Made). Luckily Counter-Clock world (1966) isn't one of them; however, this is one of Dick's lesser works. It's a short, mildy amusing read, but the ideas in it are frankly underdeveloped and unconvincing. Race relations also are thankfully much better than depicted in this rather quaint and obsolete "clunker" of a book. Save your money and get this from the library; or better yet, read something better (and similar) like Ubik.
Rating: 
Summary: Underrated PKD
Review: It's kinda a cliche to be labeling one of Dick's books as, "underrated." This one has gotten a few "average" reviews which I don't think are deserved. This is my fourth Dick book and first time I've commented on Amazon about him, I feel I've read enough PKD to make an accurate comment.
This book gets a lot of average reviews because of the world depicted. Time is traveling backwards, people are born from the grave and end their lives in the womb, cigarette butts are lit from ashtrays and are finished when they're "new" again. The world, in anyone's stretch of the mind, isn't believable, in fact it's a bit silly. But that doesn't matter, it's VERY entertaining. Dick slowly reveals more and more about this world throughout the book, always leaving you with more and more questions. A real page-turner.
For those of you who are new to PKD, I think Counter-Clock World is a great introduction. Unlike some of his other books, this one starts off very exciting. And for the newbies, it's much easier to follow than the other books I've read of his ("Ubik", "Flow My Tears...", and "A Scanner Darkly") - Unfortunately, it doesn't have that huge weird ending like in his other books, but that doesn't matter. The end is very climatic and has millions of twists and turns all throughout the entire book. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Sheer audacious bravery in the face of commercial pressure.
Review: PKD faced the old problem of commercialism vs. integrity. I consider this book to be a testament to Dick's integrity. Exploring often mentioned, but never developed, ideas.
For example, the Wizard Merlin supposedly lived backwards in time. Yet this idea has only been presented, not developed in the stories I have read. Several religions suggest a rapture or ressurection of the dead, without filling us in on the details.
Dick must have really felt the avenue of backwards time was worth exploring or he never would have finished it. It was brave for Dick to see these ideas through to their conclusion. While facing the realities of rent and editors, etc.
This book is not as morbid as earlier reviews might suggest. The characters are sincere and even light-hearted at times.
I found this to be one of Dick's easier and smoother reads.
I break it down this way. If you go to a movie and willingly submit to a fantasy experience, read this book. If you go to movies to test your analytical and deductive skills don't bother.
If you suspect that time is really just one big cosmic "Wow!" that has already ensued, I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Sheer audacious bravery in the face of commercial pressure.
Review: PKD faced the old problem of commercialism vs. integrity. I consider this book to be a testament to Dick's integrity. Exploring often mentioned, but never developed, ideas.
For example, the Wizard Merlin supposedly lived backwards in time. Yet this idea has only been presented, not developed in the stories I have read. Several religions suggest a rapture or ressurection of the dead, without filling us in on the details.
Dick must have really felt the avenue of backwards time was worth exploring or he never would have finished it. It was brave for Dick to see these ideas through to their conclusion. While facing the realities of rent and editors, etc.
This book is not as morbid as earlier reviews might suggest. The characters are sincere and even light-hearted at times.
I found this to be one of Dick's easier and smoother reads.
I break it down this way. If you go to a movie and willingly submit to a fantasy experience, read this book. If you go to movies to test your analytical and deductive skills don't bother.
If you suspect that time is really just one big cosmic "Wow!" that has already ensued, I highly recommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: A counter-clock comment
Review: Started of with too many characters and too many conversations, this book almost forced me to give it up straight away. But perseverance to read until the middle will be rewarded. The concept itself is interesting. A world when times move backwards. When the deads are 'revived' from the grave, being sold as a property to anyone who would bid the highest.
And when the one who's coming back to life is a religious figure, interesting things can happen. There are two kinds of sci-fi books: one that is written by a scientist and one written by a non-scientist. This book is the latter. Sci-fi Books written by scientist contains the actual correct science or science of what would be possible in the future. While non-scientist writers tends to use science as basis and props for futuristic situation, emphasizing more on (perhaps) psychological and philosophical issues. This book puts forward some interesting religion and philosophical issues such as how a person who live in the period where times move backwards reacts to the mind that move forwards. However, a reader with a scientific background might be put off by the some of the logic and science in this book, that are rather inconsistent and incorrect at times. Take the example of this: [A person in a coffin in a grave just woke up]
" 'Get air down to me!' he tried to yell, but since there is no longer air he could not breathe; he was suffocating. `Hurry!' he called, but his call became soundless in the absence of air; he lay compressed, crushed, by an enormous vacuum; the pressure grew until, silently, his ribs broke. He felt that, too, his bones one by one snapping." Overall it's an enjoyable book if you somehow can disregard the incorrectness of the science behind it.
Rating:
Summary: A Strange Book
Review: This is not one of Dick's best books, and I kind of found myself getting annoyed a lot of the time at the way time "moved backwards" in the story. It just never quite made proper sense. However, I still enjoyed the whole book, mostly because I love PKD's writing style and imagination. If you are new to his books, I would not start out with this one. (Rated at 5 because he's my favorite author and way better than any other sc-fi out there)...
Rating:
Summary: A darker shade of Dick
Review: This novel, first published in 1967, has a more serious and darker tone than most of Dick's earlier works. It is an ambitious novel, underread and underrated in the Dick canon, in which the author attempts to integrate religious and metaphysical thought from a wide variety of writers across history. The premise is that time has started to run backwards due to something called the Hobart Phase. Dead people come back to life in their graves; living people grow continually younger until they reenter their mothers' wombs. Food is regurgitated into its original form, and while eating is considered obscene, waste ("sogum") is "imbibed" through tubes in public. People say "goodbye" when they greet each other and "hello" when they part. Critics have derided Dick's use of time reversal as completely illogical and inconsistent. That doesn't seem to matter really. The novel's serious concerns, about the frailty of life and love in the face of monolithic external forces, lift it above its own contrivances.
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