Martian Time-Slip

Dick, Philip K.

ISBN 10: 0450029786 / ISBN 13: 9780450029783

Published by New English Library, London, 1976

SF Master Series. Introduction by Brian W. Aldiss. Near Fine in a Very Good jacket, unclipped (£3.95), laminated, lightly bumped at the edges and corners. Blue cloth with gilt lettering on the spine. Square and firmly bound, soiled at the top edge, clean internally. Seller Inventory # 13090

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.

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

Bibliographic Details

Title: Martian Time-Slip
Publisher: New English Library, London
Publication Date: 1976
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Near Fine
Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
Edition: First Edition Thus.