Saturday, April 21, 2007

post-Parzival pre-Don Quixote reads



Oprah's book club just got a little more badass. This....this is the best thing I've read in years. There was no way for me to prepare for the brutality of this particular post-apocalypse. Just completely harrowing. For someone who loves Haneke's "Time of the Wolf", where an unnamed plague has forced everyone to flee cities and fend for themselves in the wild, and someone who wished that the third half of Polanski's "The Pianist" had lasted 3 hours (where the protagonist wanders amid ruins looking for something to eat and a place to sit down), The Road is the crowing achievement of a genre, and a crystallization of everything I want from a novel. Genius. Blacker than moonlight on a moonless night.



I thought I was finished with Philip K Dick, but it was either this or Maze of Death at the used bookstore and I had some store credit to abuse. Good thing, too. You read the wrong PKD novel, you feel as if they're all the same and you've got it covered. Martian Time-Slip taught me that its still worth it to find all the gems among such a massive output. Most of his novels do an incredible job of replicating the feeling of an acid or mushroom trip. This one applies those techinques towards anxiety, something that Philip K Dick was afflicted with (I should say, in his case, extreme paranoia and likely symptoms of OCD). So I'd say more people can relate to this one, or at least bypass the denotations of a psychodelic sci-fi novel. Martian Time-Slip crept up on me and slapped me in the face like the best of them (Dr. Bloodmoney, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, etc).

Plot Summary:
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.

copied and pasted chumps.