Rating: 
Summary: Philip Dick a Bit Out of Joint
Review: "Time out of Joint" is definitely not one of Philip Dick's best novels. It's not awful or anything, especially the early parts of the book, but ultimately it just doesn't really hang together very well. Also, the book kind of fizzles and cops out at the end, which left me a bit disappointed and unsatisfied. Still, having said all that, there's some really good stuff in "Time Out of Joint," including the usual, fascinating PKD-esian themes: the nature of reality; personal identity; memory; sanity vs. "insanity;" paranoia (or are they REALLY out to get you?); authoritarianism; war; conformity vs. individuality. And on the positive side, Dick DOES show flashes of brilliance during the early parts of the book, especially in the bathroom lightbulb scene and of course the disappearing hot dog stand scene, but to my tastes, Dick reverts to cliches and predictable plot devices in the last part of the book. He also lets certain narrative threads and characters just sort of unravel or disappear. All this doesn't completely ruin "Time Out of Joint," but it does cause it to miss out on possible greatness and settle for just a "good" rating. Go ahead and take this one out of the library, but if you've never read Philip Dick before, I'd personally recommend that you start with "The Man in the High Castle," my personal favorite so far.
Rating: 
Summary: Paranoid in the Fifties
Review: Although technically a science-fiction book, Time Out of Joint (1959) reads more like a strange hybrid of science fiction and the mainstream realist novels Dick was also writing at the time. The major part of the story takes place in a small town, rendered with much more detailed texture of description and characterization than in any of Dick's sf novels to that date. Dick throws out many tantalizing clues throughout the first part of the book that this version of the fifties is not quite the one we know. But it is an excellent imitation, aided by the fact that all the residents of the town have been hypnotized to believe they are living in the sleepy Eisenhower-era of the 1950s. The main character, Ragle Gumm, starts to break out of his hypnosis and realizes there is a conspiracy to keep him in ignorance. In one of Dick's most famous scenes, a soft-drink stand disappears and in its place is found a slip of paper that says "soft-drink stand." The book is a powerful comment on the fragile nature of reality as well as a reminder that sometimes the paranoid is simply perceiving the situation accurately.
Rating:
Summary: Get Back to Me in Forty Years
Review: Appearing in 1959 when P.K. Dick was 31 this book is set in a nameless town and centers around the gyrations, mental and physical, of Ragle Gumm, a paranoiac but proficient loner who lives nonetheless with his sister Margot and brother-in-law Victor, a supermarket employee. Other characters of note are Bill Black and his stunning but jejune wife Junie. Gumm is famous in his world, set contemporaneously in 1959, for the improbable skill of solving a daily newspaper puzzle, "Where Will the Little Green Man be Next?" He listens in a tree house with his nephew Sammy over a crystal radio set and detects people improbably discussing him. Since he is paranoid one might thing they are aliens but they are not. One of the biggest contributors to Gumm's paranoia is his world's tendency to alter precipitously. A maelstrom of things not being what they seem starts innocuously when he goes to the bathroom and reaches up for a string to pull the light off--a string which does not, and never did, exist in said bathroom. Far more radical is the tendency of things to turn into words. This slide down the Saussurean abyss is most startling after Gumm, taking time out from flirting with his neighbor Bill's wife Junie (he goes so far as to kiss her and tell her he loves her in the middle of the day as they lounge in public by an outdoor swimming pool), treks up a hill to a hotdog stand. "The soft-drink stand fell into bits. Molecules. He saw the molecules, colorless, without qualities, that made it up. Then he saw through, into the space beyond it, he saw the hill behind, the trees and sky. He saw the soft-drink stand go out of existence, along with the counter man, the cash register, the big dispenser of orange drink, the taps for Coke and root beer, the ice=chests of bottles, the hot dog broiler, the jars of mustard, the shelves of cones, the row of heavy round metal lids under which were the different ice creams. In its place was a slip of paper. He reached out his hand and took hold of the slip of paper. On it was printing, block letters. SOFT-DRINK STAND." Ragle thinks he is being recognized and followed--and to an extent he is, because he is famous for his work on the puzzle. We realize we may be in a parallel universe when pictures of a girl (she had "heavy hair, well-groomed and quite long. She smiled in an amazingly sweet manner, a jejune but intimate smile that held him. Her face was as pretty as any hea had seen, and in addition she had a deep, full, sensual chin and neck, not the rather ordinary neck of most starlets but an adult, ripe neck, and excellent shoulders. No hint of boniness, nor of fleshiness. A mixture of races, he decided. German hair. Swiss or Norwegian shoulders") turn out to be Marilyn Monroe in England making a film with Sir Laurence Olivier. A series of coincidences spur Gumm to escape, despite the fact that Junie is ready to leave her husband for him, hijacking an eighteen wheeler. Without giving the ending away, let's just say that Dick's estate deserves royalties for The Truman Show, the Jim Carey show where reality turns out to be a huge staged production. In Time Out of Joint, leaving your home town takes you to the future-or what was the future, 1997-a time when Lunatics (moon settlers) are in civil war with Earth, where women wear boy's clothes and the height of young male fashion are tribal tattoos and "cones of hair, each with a sharp, colorful, spike stuck into it." In addition to everything else, Dick seems to have predicted punk (anti-)fashion, almost half a century before its appearance.
Rating:
Summary: SF NOVELS OPUS SIX
Review: As a former reviewer has pointed it out, Philip K. Dick's TIME OUT OF JOINT has greatly inspired the authors of the screenplay of Peter Weir's THE TRUMAN SHOW. Ragle Gumm, the hero of TIME OUT OF JOINT, is questioning the reality he is living in, like in fact the majority of the characters created by Philip K. Dick during his literary career. Ragle Gumm's efforts to discover the "hidden" side of the world he has been thrown into is, in my opinion, the most interesting aspect of the novel. The science-fictional explanation of the reasons why Ragle Gumm has to play everyday is not very convincing and the analysis of the origin of the war between Lunatics and Terrians way too simple for an author such as PKD. However, TIME OUT OF JOINT provides the kind of pleasure the Philip K. Dick fan searches in vain in today sci-fi production. So don't hesitate to add this book to your collection if you are already familiar with the world of this writer.
Rating: 
Summary: This is "The Truman Show"
Review: Finally found this book again, after so many years. My god, when I was watching Jim Carrys "The Truman Show", I knew exactly where the storyline had originated. Only hope the PKD estate got some thanks. I mean, cmon, the guy is living in the distant future, but has the life and is made to believe that he is in somebodys idea of nostalgia heaven. Anyway, PKD is the man, and more and more people now know it. The difference between geek and hipster really is only 20 years, not a bad clip.
Rating:
Summary: A good example of Dick's early fiction
Review: I enjoyed _Time Out of Joint_. It is much simpler in structure and
concept than many of his later books, but you can see some of the
themes that came to dominate his later works here, too. The image
of a hot-dog stand dissolving into a slip of paper that says "hot
dog stand" has stuck in my mind over the years.
Rating:
Summary: Great book, but watch out for the summary on the back...
Review: I suppose I should begin this review by stating that I did genuinely enjoy reading this book. I felt it had highly readable prose and a gentle narrative style that eased you into some of the more bizarre happenings which occur later in the story. My one gripe, and I suppose this is just as much my fault as the publisher's, is the summary on the back of the book. Let me explain. Usually when I read a novel, I do my best to avoid reading the notes on the flap of a hardcover or on the back of a paperback. The reason is simple, I don't want the story to be spolied. Now with this particular novel, I am reading at work during my lunch break, revelling in the peculiarities that befall poor Ragle Gumm (the protagonist) when I realize that lunch is almost over and I have to stop reading. I place the book down on my desk face down and while glancing down simply to pick up a pen I inadvertently read two short sentences on the back of the book which ruined all of the suspense and mystery of the story. (They were the second and third sentences of the summary, which is the same as the summary here at Amazon.com, if you are interested.) I still enjoyed the book, although the last couple of chapters seemed very rushed to me. Yet, now whenever I think about "Time Out of Joint" all I can think of is the gradual dawning of understanding that might have been. The sublime joy of slowly, over time, figuring out what is going on... just as Ragle Gumm does. All spoiled by a poorly written summary on the back of the book. If you are the kind of person who hates when movie trailers give away the entire story of a film, avoid reading this summary before reading the book itself.
Rating:
Summary: I hope that the writers of "The Matrix" credited PKD
Review: IF you have seen the movie "The Matrix" then you've seen Time Out of Joint pushed forward to a timeframe of 1999/2200 rather than 1956/1996. Right down to the nagging sense of something out of joint in 'the real world'... the difference is in "The Matrix", humans are enslaved by machines. Dick hits on something more insidious: Humans voluntarily enslaved to a cause. No sooner do they submit to this, than they begin to fight it subconciously. This was my first PDK novel many years ago and had a profound effect. A must-read.
Rating:
Summary: Time Out of Joint - one of the best!
Review: In my opinion, Time Out of Joint and Radio Free Albemuth - two
different sides of the spectrum as far as time is concerned - are the best Philip K. Dick novels. Radio Free has a crisp and
unfortunately believable storyline, while Time Out of Joint is
delightfully free.
Rating:
Summary: REALITY OUT OF JOINT
Review: In this time tested fable Dick gives us a character who saw through the social conditioning that kept him insane. One of the gatekeepers to Ragal Gumm's psuedo-city, Bill Black, was terrified that the psychic hero, Gumm, would recover from his insanity. By turning Gumm into an early warning radar mechanism Black kept the world safe from the moon launched weapons. Returning Gumm to his humanity would end the Where-Will-the-Little Green-Man-Be-Next Contest and Earth's ability to defend against incoming moon based missiles. Dick's obsession with the two questions: What is real? and What is an authentic human? were both answered in this novel, TIME OUT OF JOINT. When Gumm stopped believing in the artificial city, constructed around him to keep him insane, he discovered his real world. When he broke out of his fantasy land and returned to his old self he became a authentic human. Dick tried to understand the dissolution of his own reality much like Gumm watched a solid structured hot dog stand dissolve into colorless molecules, leaving only a slip of paper reading SOFT-DRINK STAND. After watching this happen Gumm remarks, 'I think we're living in some other world than what we see.....' As Afterword writer Lou Stathis put it, PKD came 'to see all things as a unified energy field in which we are minuscule capsules entwined with tiny eddy-like pockets of wave-form energy manifesting itself in our personal realities.'(P. 263). When PKD's earthly reality dissolved in 1982 no doubt he went to that other world that he couldn't quite grasp while here. Is he now smiling at the attention and turmoil his 'little slips of paper' have produced in this pseudo world? As for this little slip of a novel--definitely a must-read.
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