Martian Time-Slip - Softcover

Dick, Philip K.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345295609 ISBN 13: 9780345295606

Publisher: Del Rey, 1981

Synopsis

On the arid colony of Mars the only thing more precious than water may be a ten-year-old schizophrenic boy named Manfred Steiner. For although the UN has slated "anomalous" children for deportation and destruction, other people--especially Supreme Goodmember Arnie Kott of the Water Worker's union--suspect that Manfred's disorder  may be a window into the future. In Martian Time-Slip Philip K. Dick uses power politics and extraterrestrial real estate scams, adultery, and murder to penetrate the mysteries of being and time.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this title

Review:

One of the stand-out novels in Philip K. Dick's career of wildly reality-bending SF, Martian Time- Slip (1964) convinces by placing its insanities in a quiet, even domestic context. Here colonised Mars has a flavour of grubby, struggling 1950s suburbia, where money (not to mention water) is in short supply, jobs are insecure, the humour's mostly black, and small tragedies like one minor character's suicide cause far-ranging ripples. The good old human comedy of lies, power-play, real-estate deals and extramarital naughtiness continues as ever--all distorted by the real SF factor, an autistic child's dislocated sense of time. In one memorable scene he sketches the glorious new Martian housing project just being planned ... but as it will look a century later, a decayed slum. So powerful are this boy's visions of nightmare futures that they suck in other people and infect them with sick images of the "gubbish worm", an appalling symbol of entropy. Gubbish devours beauty and reduces language itself to meaningless gubble-gubble. The very human and occasionally even likeable villain Arnie Kott plans to exploit this time-twisting ability, whereupon things become very tangled indeed. Another worthy reissue in the Millennium SF Masterworks series, which has yet to pick a single dud. --David Langford

Book Description:

Published to celebrate the life and work of Philip K. Dick, the bestselling author of BLADE RUNNER and MINORITY REPORT, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death

About this edition

• Publisher: Del Rey
• Publication date: 1981
• ISBN 10: 0345295609
• ISBN 13: 9780345295606
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback