Adventure classics -- Bless the Bleekmen and children

The writer is on vacation. The following post is a reprint.

Martian Time-Slip

by Philip K. Dick

***

Philip Kindred Dick’s novels of ideas are only science fiction in the same sense as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.  Neither Dick’s stories of  his late twentieth-century near future nor Gulliver’s travels to Lilliput could have happened.  But that wasn’t the point for either author. 

As biographer Lawrence Sutin reports in Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, the writer’s long-time editor, Don Wollenheim of Ace Books, turned down one of his finest novels,  Martian Time-Slip, because the time frame of the 1960’s manuscript -- with a story set in the 1990’s -- offended his editorial sensibility.  “If he’d thrown it ahead a hundred years,” Wollenheim said later, “I would have liked it.“

However, the setting perfectly suited Dick’s satirical story of Earth’s political problems transferred to the red planet.  It also slotted presciently into the civil rights issue, with Bleekmen -- Dick’s version of aboriginal Martians -- standing in for Earth’s people of color.  And could any countercultural novelist of the 1960’s ignore the  looming drug culture?  Certainly not one with Dick’s obsessive interest in the nature of reality.

Hollywood discovered Dick shortly before his death.   And kept on discovering, movie after movie.  After this summer’s release of a Total Recall remake, based on another Dick novel, I’d love to see what filmmakers could do with Martian Time-Slip, with its multiple versions of reality.

Jack Bohlen, an “ex-schizophrenic,” keeps the Martian colony going by repairing everything from toasters to robots.  (It’s less expensive to repair than to import new gadgets.)  Jack thinks he’s got it bad enough when his father comes to visit and do some insider-trading in real estate, his wife develops a wandering eye, and he’s pulled into local union politics bearing a strong resemblance to the wrangling Dick detested at his Berkley, California, apartment complex.

But when Jack connects with the orphaned “anomalous“ (and apparently autistic) child Manfred Steiner and a wandering group of Martian aborigines called Bleekmen, his life truly comes apart, as Manfred triggers a series of parallel visions of events. 

Which visions are real, which aren’t?  Which kill and which save?  Don’t try to figure it out.  Just ride the magic carpet all the way to the surprising but inevitable final vision of Manfred and the Bleekmen.

As a writer, Dick had hoped to escape from the limited audience of the science fiction genre.  But with the failure of Martian Time-Slip and other novels to break into mainstream fiction, he put those dreams behind him.  In return, fans rewarded him with one of science fiction’s greatest honors, the Hugo Award.

In early 1974, he had a series of religious visions that would haunt him until his death in 1982, at age 53.  In addition to his prolific output of fiction (44 published novels, more than a hundred short stories), Dick wrote exhaustively in trying to explain his visions.  The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick has edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem from the more than 8,000 pages of Dick’s notes is available from Amazon.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics begins an August of adventures at sea, with James Calvert's Surface at the Pole.)

Adventure classics – Remember when, or was it then?

"We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”

by Philip K. Dick

***

“The science fiction writers of this world are resolutely different – from mankind and from each other – except that Philip K. Dick is more different,” editors Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison wrote in their anthology Nebula Award Stories Two. Except that, in a twist Dick would have enjoyed, the story they were introducing, his 1966 “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” was never nominated for a Nebula, the highest honor bestowed by SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc.

It wasn’t even a runner-up for best short story of its year. Like editor Roger Zelazny, who the next year shoehorned J. G. Ballard’s “The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D” into his Nebula Award anthology despite its shunning by the SFWA, sometimes editors gotta do what editors gotta do,even if it requires implanting eerily realistic memories of what ought to have been.

Like those of Dick’s Walter Mittyish, Earth-bound protagonist Douglas Quail, who has become obsessed with a dream of visiting Mars. And not just visiting the newly-colonized planet, but of visiting it as an agent of the solar system’s interplanetary police force, Interplan.

That will never happen, of course. He can’t even afford the cost of trip to Mars, let alone qualify as an interplanetary agent. But he can afford the next best thing – to buy an implanted memory of such an adventure. And he knows just the place to get that done.

The technicians at Rekal (pronounced “recall” the receptionist corrects Quail) are happy to implant such memories. “The actual memory, will all its vagueness, omissions and ellipses, not to say distortions – that’s second-best,” the Rekal salesman assures Quail.

But Rekal’s technicians are stunned to realize that Quail actually has been to Mars as an Interplan spy where he committed a political assassination, only to have his memory of the true event (or was it?) previously erased. Now Rekal’s hypnotic drugs have unleashed a true memory of what was intended to be a false memory.

Not daring to explain this to Quail, the techs make no attempt to alter the existing memory. But he finds the recollection of his Martian adventure, now recalled consciously, just as hazy and vague as any real memory. Preparing to blast off a complaint to the Better Business Bureau, he finds a box of Martian souvenirs in his desk. What's going on? 

And why are there Interplan cops in his apartment, and a telepathic transmitter, and a still more deeply-buried memory, which seems to Quail to be one of his boyhood fantasies? How’s a reader, not to mention Quail, supposed to know what’s real and what isn’t?

If any of this sounds familiar, maybe you’re remembering the movie Total Recall, in either its 1990 or 2012 versions, both based loosely, but only loosely, on “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.”

Or maybe you’re inside the mind of Philip Kindred Dick on February 18, 1982, as he lies on the floor of his small apartment, unconscious from a stroke that will shortly kill him and perhaps thinking, as Anthony Peake writes in A Life of Philip K. Dick: The Man Who Remembered the Future, “My God, my life is exactly like the plot of any one of 10 of my novels or stories. Even down to fake memories and identity. I’m a protagonist from one of PKD’s books.”

(Next Friday, Adventure classics begins an August of adventures at sea with Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle.)

Adventure classics -- Bless the Bleekmen & children

Martian Time-Slip

by Philip K. Dick

#

Philip Kindred Dick’s novels of ideas are only science fiction in the same sense as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Neither Dick’s stories of his late twentieth-century near future nor Gulliver’s travels to Lilliput could have happened. But that wasn’t the point for either author.

As biographer Lawrence Sutin reports in Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, the writer’s long-time editor, Don Wollenheim of Ace Books, turned down one of his finest novels, Martian Time-Slip, because the time frame of the 1960’s manuscript -- with a story set in the 1990’s -- offended his editorial sensibility. “If he’d thrown it ahead a hundred years,” Wollenheim said later, “I would have liked it.“

However, the setting perfectly suited Dick’s satirical story of Earth’s political problems transferred to the red planet. It also slotted presciently into the civil rights issue, with Bleekmen -- Dick’s version of aboriginal Martians -- standing in for Earth’s people of color. And could any countercultural novelist of the 1960’s ignore the looming drug culture? Certainly not one with Dick’s obsessive interest in the nature of reality.

Hollywood discovered Dick shortly before his death. And kept on discovering, movie after movie. After this summer’s release of a Total Recall remake, based on another Dick novel, I’d love to see what filmmakers could do with Martian Time-Slip, with its multiple versions of reality.

Jack Bohlen, an “ex-schizophrenic,” keeps the Martian colony going by repairing everything from toasters to robots. (It’s less expensive to repair than to import new gadgets.) Jack thinks he’s got it bad enough when his father comes to visit and do some insider-trading in real estate, his wife develops a wandering eye, and he’s pulled into local union politics bearing a strong resemblance to the wrangling Dick detested at his Berkley, California, apartment complex.

But when Jack connects with the orphaned “anomalous“ (and apparently autistic) child Manfred Steiner and a wandering group of Martian aborigines called Bleekmen, his life truly comes apart, as Manfred triggers a series of parallel visions of events.

Which visions are real, which aren’t? Which kill and which save? Don’t try to figure it out. Just ride the magic carpet all the way to the surprising but inevitable final vision of Manfred and the Bleekmen.

As a writer, Dick had hoped to escape from the limited audience of the science fiction genre. But with the failure of Martian Time-Slip and other novels to break into mainstream fiction, he put those dreams behind him. In return, fans rewarded him with one of science fiction’s greatest honors, the Hugo Award.

In early 1974, he had a series of religious visions that would haunt him until his death in 1982, at age 53. In addition to his prolific output of fiction (44 published novels, more than a hundred short stories), Dick wrote exhaustively in trying to explain his visions. This year, the thirtieth anniversary of his death, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick has
finally been published, edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem from the more than 8,000 pages of Dick’s notes. Available from
www.amazon.com/.

(Next Wednesday -- As NASA rover Curiosity nears its destination on Mars, Adventure classics turns from the skies to a month of adventuring on earthly seas, beginning with Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki:  across the Pacific by raft.)