Out of Gas: Good intro to peak oil science, but look elsewhere for solutions

Out of Gas
David Goodstein
W.W. Norton & Company, 2004

We can hope, if we are wise, to alter the laws of peoples. But we cannot change the laws of nature. The intent of this small book is to explain the relevant laws of nature. The idea is to sketch out, for those who are not specialists, both the opportunities and the limitations that nature has provided for us. Only if we understand both can we hope to proceed with wisdom. (p. 19)

To this end Dr. David Goodstein, professor of physics at Caltech, has written a very readable introduction to the imminent peak in oil production and subsequent "end of the age of oil." Alas the book's greatest strength, its relatively narrow focus on the science surrounding fuel and energy, is also its biggest weakness when it comes to proposing solutions. After all, the problem of peak oil has as much to do with "the laws of peoples," or at least their habits and expectations, as it does with the laws of nature and raw technoscientific know-how.

He begins by describing something which is now a standard phrase in our household, "peak oil." M. King Hubbert was a petroleum geologist who predicted that the rate of oil extraction for the lower-48 states would hit a maximum value in the early 1970s (i.e., it would peak) and that it would rapidly decline afterward. Although his ideas were roundly dismissed in the shiny-happy 1950s, he found a more receptive audience during the fuel-challenged '70s. His prediction was based on three basic methods: (1) noting that increasing rates of resource use equal increasing rates of resource depletion, (2) assuming that rates of oil production will follow a bell-shaped curve, and (3) recognizing that the curve in production paralleled the curve in discovery, which has already peaked.

Goodstein notes that not all geologists heed Hubbert's warning, discussing oil in terms of the ratio of reserves to production (the R/P ratio) and concluding that we have oil aplenty for at least 40 to 100 years. As well, there is little agreement about the total amount of oil reserves left in the earth, and so all calculations based upon this uncertain amount must also necessarily be uncertain. His response is to note that Hubbert's warning is not about running out of oil per se, but about reaching a critical point at which the demand for oil will outstrip production:

Given that worldwide demand will continue to increase, as it has for well over a century, Hubbert's followers expect the crisis to occur when the peak is reached, rather than when the last drop is pumped. In other words, we will be in trouble when we've used up half the oil that existed, not all of it.

He then gives a cursory overview of the other energy sources available to us at this point in time. There are the much-discussed heavy oils, tar sands, shale oils, etc. whose exploitation will be expensive, slow, energy-intensive, and even more environmentally disastrous than conventional oil has been, and those cons are relevant only if we grant that these substances will ever be feasible to produce in quantity to begin with. Natural gas is a possible substitute for the oil on which we depend, but that would require an enormous overhaul of our entire energy infrastructure for a substance whose production will peak in a few decades, based on current demand levels. In other words natural gas is not a long-term solution. Although we have centuries worth of coal in the ground, it is highly polluting, dangerous to mine, and contains only half the energy of an equivalent amount of oil; additionally, to extract the same amount of energy from coal that we currently get from oil, we'd need to mine ten times as much coal as we do today. (To those who think this is reasonable, all I can say is here's your lamp and your pick, start digging.) Barring some crazy advances in technology (oil-based technology, I should add) nuclear fusion is a nonstarter, and nuclear fission, with good reason, is politically unpopular. So what options are available to us? What are the limitations reality imposes on how we can respond to this looming crisis?

Before Goodstein answers these essential questions (and because he is, after all, a life-long teacher) he provides crash courses in several areas, beginning with basic terms used in the discussion around energy. Global warming and the greenhouse effect aren't all bad, he says, because if it weren't for those gases and their warming effects, the Earth would be a pretty cold ball of rock floating in space. On the other hand global warming understood as "human-induced catastrophic climate change" is a very bad thing. Nuclear energy isn't all bad either, especially since all the energy we use ultimately comes from nuclear reactions in the sun. He also notes that while around 100,000 men and boys died in English coal mines in the latter half of the 19th century, the total number of deaths attributable to Chernobyl is around 2,500. (It isn't the most compelling argument for nuclear power, but it certainly makes visible the normally unseen human cost of fossil fuels.) We cannot conserve energy, which conserves itself as a fundamental law of nature; rather, we can learn to conserve our fuel. As Goodstein himself notes on p. 48, to say that there can never be an energy crisis "doesn't mean we don't have a problem; it just means we haven't been describing the problem in the correct terms." Because many of the books critical of peak oil use terminological sleight of hand to mislead readers into thinking everything is A-OK, this information helps provide intellectual self-defense against these status quo apologists.

The bulk of the book is dedicated to chapters on the history of energy, which describes the various forms of energy (e.g., kinetic, potential, thermal, etc.), the history and characteristics of electricity (a form of energy that is central to contemporary life), and the absolute importance of the idea of entropy, in which a fraction of energy used to do any kind of work will instead become disorganized heat energy. He describes a very vivid demonstration that he uses in his introductory physics lecture courses to underscore the implications of entropy: suspended from a long cord directly in front of his face is a 16-lb. bowling ball. After he releases it, he explains to his class that his confidence in the laws of thermodynamics, and particularly in the inevitability of entropy, allows him to stand in place as the returning bowling ball hurtles toward him. Of course, as should be obvious to anyone whose watched a pendulum, each swing is a little shorter than the last as the energy of the swing is dissipated due to the resistance of the air (i.e., friction, i.e., heat, i.e., entropy). This material was all absolutely fascinating, particularly when explained by such an obviously gifted science teacher, but I still find myself scratching my head about how it all connects to the theme of the book, which is the end of the age of oil.

Finally, Goodstein looks at some of our options for fueling the future in his chapter called "Technological Fixes." We could place a giant umbrella in space between ourselves and the sun, which he describes as a foolish idea. Limiting the damage done by our consumption of fossil fuels and the resultant production of greenhouse gas through carbon sequestration is feasible, although it has a variety of serious drawbacks, including the sad fact that there is little economic incentive to do so. (Sad how maintaining human life on Earth does not count as an economic incentive.) Goodstein feels that we might need to reconsider nuclear fission as a primary fuel source, in spite of all the dangers and difficulties with which it is fraught. Yet, even if the world were forced to use nuclear fission in this fashion, it is estimated that there is only enough uranium fuel (U-235) to last five to twenty-five years. And even if we could find more nuclear fuel, the world would have to build one Gigawatt nuclear plant every day for 30 years to supply the amount of energy we currently consume in fossil fuels. The only other option, he argues, is solar power--whether as photoelectricity, solar heat power, or indirectly as wind-generated electricity--and in order to harvest the most solar power, we'd need to do so with solar collectors in geosynchronous orbit, another sizable task. His conclusion, though, does not seem to follow from these premises, which would seem to suggest that we don't have a replacement for the fossil fuels to which we are addicted. Instead he falls back on faith in the "future technological fix" to keep from succumbing to the hopelessness of our present situation:

As this brief survey suggest, there is no single magic bullet that will solve all our energy problems.There is no existing technology capable of replacing the oil we will soon be without, nor is there any on the horizon that we can depend on to replace the remaining fossil fuels when they are exhausted. And if we permit them to become exhausted before replacing them, we may place the climate of our planet in grave danger. The best hopes for our civilization lies in technologies that have not yet arisen--possibly based on scientific discoveries that have not yet been made. Most likely, progress will lie in incremental advances on many simultaneous fronts, based on principles we already understand: controlled nuclear fusion, safe breeder reactors, better materials for manipulating electricity, more efficient fuel cells, better means of generating hydrogen, and so on.

While I don't disagree with his assertion that we need to fund research into these various research programs, I'm hesitant to suggest that we can avert disaster through mere supply-side solutions. In other words, we are going to have to learn to be a lot less individualistic and more communal in orientation, exchange single driver vehicles for mass transit, eat less meat, have fewer children, and in general learn to replace our consumer culture with one that values relationships instead of retail.

Earlier in the book, Goodstein provides a best and worst case scenario based on Hubbert's prediction, and I feel this is an appropriate place to end my review of his book. In his best case scenario, we collectively wake up to the dilemma, develop a methane-based economy to bridge the gap to future fuels, and then use a combination of nuclear and solar power while we build an alternative energy infrastructure. In his worse case scenario, which really is worse case, we don't heed the warning, run out of oil, and end up burning lots of coal for energy, increasing the green house gases in the atmosphere, crossing a tipping point, and basically making the Earth unlivable.

No matter what else happens, this is the century in which we must learn to live without fossil fuels. Either we will be wise enough to do so before we have to, or we will be forced to do so when the stuff starts to run out. One way to accomplish that would be to return to life as it was lived in the eighteenth century, before we started to use much fossil fuel. That would require, among many other things, eliminating roughly 95 percent of the world's population. The other possibility is to devise a way of running a complex civilization approximating the one we have no which does not use fossil fuel. (pp. 37-8)

Thus Goodstein sets the stage for our near future. I don't agree with him that these two are the only possibilities, although they do seem to be good endpoints for a continuum of options. According to Jim Kunstler's The Long Emergency, our dreams of running a civilization that approximates our own, particularly our love of automobiles and the infrastructure that supports an automobile culture, are pipe dreams, and nothing more. On the other end of the continuum, while it might not be possible or even desirable to return to an 18th century existence, we can all certainly work on the demand side of the energy equation and learn to live much more simply and in a way that minimizes our energy consumption---using public transportation, eating less meat, walking through the park instead of the mall, etc.

In short, this is a great book for explaining the scientific basis for peak oil and the coming fuel/food/transportation crisis. With a lot of voices being well paid to write off "peakists" as whackos, this sort of book is invaluable for providing a solid, reasonable, scientific response. Unfortunately, the technoscientific fixes he provides aren't that compelling, as even he seems to suspect. All in all a good place to start, but not to finish, your peak oil reading.

Dr. Futurity: Medical profession saves humanity, surfs temporal paradoxes

Dr. Futurity
Philip K. Dick
1960


Jim Parsons, MD, 2012, born in 1980 wakes up in a world of foreign spires, colors, and nighttime skies. He has abruptly and involuntarily traveled through time to 2405 after some sort of radiant beam knocked his car off the guide beam and into the far future. There (or it is then) he saves a gravely injured woman's life, thereby discovering that doctors and the entire medical profession are viewed as criminal. In this future society the population has reached a steady state with zero-population growth and no natural births; new embryo formation is triggered only when someone dies.

Dick hints at an earlier nuclear war (the H-War) and a subsequent Age of Darkness. He also presents a future in which post-Columbian global white power has been supplanted by an interplanetary tribal culture and society. Future humans comprise one general ethnic type, a mix of African-American and Native American, and whites have been wiped out or racially integrated. The future's eugenicist culture views death as nature's way of improving the species and so poverty, disease, and other forms of "weakness" have been allowed to die off. In this future death is revered as the source of new, ever stronger life.

And so the head of the future government, Chancellor Al Stenog, exiles Dr. Parson to Mars.

His spaceship is intercepted en route (reminiscent of Purcell's kidnapping in The Man Who Japed). Parsons comes to a parched red plain devoid of water and life (except for a single fly!) and so he assumes he is on Mars. In a rather chilling scene, he discovers an extremely weather ed marker with his name on it and instructions on how to operate the time travel controls on the spaceship. Only when he sees the surface of the moon does he realize that this isn't Mars but the Earth and that he has traveled far, far into the future. (Shades of The Time Machine.)

The marker directs Parsons back to his future and to a tribal lodge whose inhabitants wrongly believed that it was one of their beacons which brought the surgeon. These tribal people, who obviously disagree with the dominant culture's views on death, request that Parsons perform surgery on their wounded leader Corith, who has been fatally injured by an arrow wound. Parsons, being a dedicated physician (and also attracted to Corith's exotic daughter), revives Corith after extracting the arrow, only to have it later rematerialize mysteriously in Corith's corpse.

Lifting her head, she gazed at him; her eyes seemed to have shrunk so that the pupils gleamed like tiny, burning points, no longer located in space but somehow hovering before him, blinding him almost. "Someone is working against us," she said. "They have it, too. Control of time. Thwarting us, enjoying it..." She laughed. "Yes, enjoying it. Mocking us." Abruptly, with a swing of her robes, she turned away from Parsons and disappeared past the ring of attendants. (p. 94)

To solve mystery of this second arrow, Parsons and Corith's relatives travel back to Corith's previous assignment. The year is 1579, the place is the Golden Gate, Northern California. Corith has come back in time to kill Sir Francis Drake in order to change history and protect the Americas from European colonization.

"My son Corith is responsible for the idea. Many years ago, when he was a young man like yourself. He was very brilliant. And so ambitious. He wanted to make everything right, erase the Terrible Five Hundred Years..."

Parsons recognized the term. The period of white supremacy. He found himself nodding....

"So my son went back. The the first New England. Not the famous one, but the other one. The real one. In California. Nobody remembers...but Corith read all the records, the old books." Again she chuckled. "He wanted to start there, in Nova Albion. But he didn't get very far." ...

That was their great plan. To change the past by going back centuries, before the time of the white empires. To find Drake encamped in California, helpless while his ship was being repaired. To kill him, the first Englishman to claim part of the New World for England....

One after another, he thought. Drake would have been the first, and then--Cortez? Pizarro? And so on, down the line. As they landed with their helmeted troops, they would be wiped out--the conquerors, the plunderers, and the pirates. Prepared to find a passive, helpless population, they would instead come face-to-face with the calculating, advanced descendants of that population. Grim and ready. Waiting. (pp. 101-2)

Parsons sees Corith's assassination attempt and realizes that Drake is in fact Chancellor Al Stenog who is in turn planning to ambush Corith. Parsons warns Corith, who hasn't met him yet and so doesn't know him, and who thinks he's bad guy (after all, he is white) who has come to attack him. Corith leaps at Parsons, they fight, and the doctor Parsons accidentally stabs Corith in heart with arrow one number.

Although they recognize the accidental and ironic nature of the time traveler's death, their sense of tribal justice still demands a punishment for the killing. Parsons is taken through time and stranded in 1597, after whites had departed for Europe, and is rescued after brief while (for him at least) by Corith's hottie daughter Loris, who is pregnant with Parson's child.

Parsons realizes that he must be responsible for the second arrow as well and conjectures that he will kill Corith the second time in order to protect himself from the reviving Corith, but being a doctor he cannot bring himself to harm his "patient." As he is prepares to flee, two young people appear from future and kill Corith with second arrow to heart. Parsons realizes that they the children are the children he had/will have with Loris, traveling back to 2405 from an even more distant future.

After they take him forward to meet Loris again, he decides to return to 2012. back to the same day from which he was swept, to his doting wife. The novel closes with him constructing the stone marker that will eventually save his life on that desolate future Earth.

It is an expansion of his earlier short story "Time Pawn", which first saw publication in the summer 1954 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. Thus far in my "PKD Project," this has been the most fun novel to read, in terms of the pacing, the plotting, and the deft usage of tangled timelines and temporal paradoxes. I'd never even heard of this novel before I'd begun my project, and now I would recommend it highly to anyone.

Time Out of Joint: Some don't accept the reality of the world with which they are presented

Time Out of Joint
Philip K. Dick
1959

Ragle Gumm lives with his sister Margo and brother-in-law Vic, doing little apart from flirting with his neighbor's wife and obsessively playing and winning a nationally syndicated puzzle called Where Will the Little Green Man be Next? Although he appears to be little more than a couch potato, Ragle's puzzle-solving manages to bring more money into the household than does his brother-in-law's honest work at the local grocery store. Little does he know that, in true PKD fashion, his simple life is not at all what it seems.

This revelation takes place gradually. Vic has a moment of deja vu when he reaches for the light cord in his bathroom only to remember that the bathroom lights have a wall switch and not a pull cord. Then in the midst of a bout of self-loathing, Ragle watches stunned as a soft drink stand dissolves into emptiness, leaving behind a slip of paper reading "Soft Drink Stand." (This reminded me of the Roddy Piper vehicle They Live, in which everyday objects are revealed to be alien artifacts imprinted with subliminal messages---like this fistful of dollars.)

Gumm keeps a small metal box in the pocket of his coat in the hall closet, and in this small box the strange slip of paper keeps company with its five predecessors. Thus far Gumm has seen a door, a factory building, a highway, a drinking fountain, and a bowl of flowers disappear in the same way as did the soft-drink stand. "The time is out of joint," he muses, quoting Hamlet as his world begins to fall apart around him. He then discovers that his nephew has also found several similar slips of paper in "the Ruins," a collection of abandoned lots, and on his subsequent journey there Gumm uncovers an odd phone book that references unfamiliar telephone exchanges. In the Ruins Gumm also finds a magazine featuring someone named Marilyn Monroe who is apparently quite famous although no one that Gumm knows has ever heard of her.

Of course, at this point Gumm thinks he is losing his mind. His neighbor Bill Black, who knows more about these goings-on than he reveals, suspects something different. He fears that Gumm is becoming sane.

This is indeed the case, as Gumm (and the reader) discovers after he and his brother-in-law manage to escape their small town via a stolen truck on the highway. It is not 1959, as Gumm, his family and (all but one) neighbors accept unquestioningly:

Anyhow, he thought, we've been out and we've seen that it is 1998, not 1959, and a war is in progress, and the kids now talk and dress like West African natives and the girls wear men's clothing and shave their heads. And money as we know it has dropped out somewhere along the line. Along with diesel trucks. But, he thought with sudden pessimism, we didn't learn what it's all about. Why they set up the old town, the old cars and streets, kidded us for years... (p. 217)

Then he figures it out. The war is being fought between the Earth--now under the control of the "One Happy World" government--and lunar colonists known as "loonies" or "lunatics."

A civil war.
I know what I do, now. I know what the contest is, and what I am. I'm the savior of this planet. When I solve a puzzle I solve the time and place the next missile will strike. I file one entry after another. And these people, whatever they call themselves, hustle an anti-missile unit to that square on the graph. To that place and at that time. And so everyone stays alive... (p. 222)

One more question remains to be answered, and one more surprise awaits Gumm. Why was the elaborate deception necessary to keep Gumm "playing the game" and saving the people of the Earth from lunar missiles? Because Gumm had actually planned to turn traitor and leave the Earth behind in order to migrate to the lunar colonies---after he got his first taste of zero gravity, he saw through the anti-space migration chauvinism. Luckily for all involved, his final defection to the "lunatics" is not accompanied by the extinction of the human race courtesy of the loonies space arsenal. In fact, the only thing preventing a cessation to all hostilities had been Gumm's continual playing of the game. His liberation into sanity is also the liberation of humanity.

This was Dick's sixth published novel, and the third that I have re-read for my "PKD project." As with Cosmic Puppets, I originally read much of this book whilst riding the BART trains between SF and the East Bay. I distinctly remember reading this book on a concrete bench outside the Dublin-Pleasanton station, biding time until my wife and mother-in-law arrived from Modesto to pick me up. I think that was Christmas vacation back in 2005 or so. My memories of the book are that it was so-so, and that the wild ending really came out of nowhere; on second reading, the novel holds together better than I remember, but the ending still doesn't seem to gel completely. What is initially a philosophical exploration of a man's awakening from the dream of his daily life turns into a classic SF genre story about war between the planets and a paean to space migration. It's definitely well worth a read, as are all of PKD's novels, though its premise won't be that much of a shock to folks familiar with The Truman Show (a film that is not based on this novel, from what I can tell and contrary to some online rumors).

The Cosmic Puppets: Cosmic game in Virginia town

The Cosmic Puppets
Philip K. Dick
1957

It begins in all innocence with some children molding clay into various shapes and a little boy named Peter watching them.

Ted and Peg Barton are traveling through Virginia on vacation. Ted wants to visit his home town of Millgate, which he hasn't seen in 18 years; they get there and he realizes that it isn't the same town in which he grew up. I'm not referring to the normal strangeness that comes over once familiar sites with the passage of time, either. In typical Dick fashion, an alien strangeness descends into an otherwise normal world and the world of appearances is revealed to be not quite what it seems.

Barton's face was waxen. 'I've never seen this town before,' he muttered huskily, almost inaudibly. 'It's completely different.' He turned to his wife, bewildered and scared. 'This isn't the Millgate I remember. This isn't the town I grew up in!' (p. 10)

The streets have different names. The landmarks are all gone, having been replaced with completely different houses, storefronts, etc. The house in which he grew up is gone and the street name is different. It is as if his entire past has been erased. The biggest shock comes when Barton visits the office of the local newspaper and reads about his own death at the age of 9:

The second child [to die of scarlet fever] was Ted Barton. He hadn't moved out of Millgate on 9 October 1935. He had died of scarlet fever. But it wasn't possible! He was alive. Sitting here in his Packard beside his grimy, perspiring wife. (p. 17)

Barton justly wonders who he is and where his store of memories have come from since Millgate is apparently not the town he remembered it to be. He begins to suspect that someone, or something, is behind this manipulation. As to who this someone may be, he has no idea.

We return to Peter Trilling, the little boy from the very beginning, and learn that he too is not what he seems. Somehow this small child has the power, like the juvenile Jesus in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, to bring clay to life. As soon as the reader is given this glimpse into something going on in Millgate, Ted Barton pulls up outside Peter's house; it turns out that his mother runs the town boarding house, where Ted plans to stay while he investigates the world turning upside down. Peter begins a conversation with Barton and inadvertently discloses his knowledge of the strangeness surrounding the town:

'How did you get through?' he demanded. 'Most people don't get through. There must be a reason.'

'Through?' Barton was puzzled. 'Through what?'

'Through the barrier.' Suddenly the boy withdrew; his eyes filmed over. Barton realizes the boy had let something slip, something he hadn't meant to tell. (p. 24)

Then Peter reveals an absolute humdinger. The town of Millgate, completely surrounded as it is by mountains is also encircled by two vast figures, each one of which overhangs and controls half of the bowl-like valley. Later in the novel Peter hands Barton "what looked like a cheap, nickel-plated magnifying glass" and instructs him to look to the haze overhanging the mountains; the scene resolves itself and Barton is able to see one of the two cosmic figures:

He had figured it out wrong. He had expected him to be part of the scene. He was the scene. He was the whole far side of the world, the edge of the valley, the mountains, the sky, everything. The whole distant rim of the universe swept up in a massive column, a cosmic tower of being, which gained shape and substance as he focused the filter-lens.

It was a man alright. His feet were planted on the floor of the valley; the valley became his feet at the farthest edge. His legs were the mountains--or the mountains were his legs; Barton couldn't tell which. Two columns, spread apart, wide and solid. Firmly planted and balanced. His body was the mass of blue-gray haze, or what he had thought was haze. Where the mountains joined the sky, the immense torso of the man came into being.

He had his arms out over the valley. Poised above it, above the distant half. His hands were held above it in an opaque curtain, which Barton had mistaken for a layer of dust and haze. The massive figure was bent slightly forward. As if leaning intently over his part, his half of the valley. He was gazing down; his face was obscured. He didn't move. He was utterly motionless.

Motionless, but he was alive. Not a stone image; a frozen statue. He was alive, but he was outside of time. There was no change, no motion for him. He was eternal. The averted head was the most striking part of him. It seemed to glow, a clearly radiant orb, pulsing with light and brilliance.

His head was the sun.

Likewise, Peter and Ted are sitting in the shadow of the other cosmic figure:

The figure rose around him. He couldn't exactly see it; he could sense it vaguely and no more. It flowed up on all sides of him. From the rocks, the fields, the tumbled heaps of shrubs and vines. This one, also, formed itself from the valley and mountains, the sky and haze. But it didn't glow. He couldn't see its head, its final dimensions. A cold chill moved through him. He had a distinct, sharp intuition. This one didn't culminate in the bright orb of the sun. This one culminated in something else.

In darkness?

Although Ted is loath to admit it (and who can blame him?), he has stumbled upon the secret of his missing hometown. Soon after he left it, this sleepy little Virginia mountain town became ground zero for the eternal struggle, first described by the Persian prophet Zoroaster, between Ohrmazd and Ahriman, the cosmic forces of order and chaos, of creation and decay. So of course, he tries to get the hell out of Dodge, only to discover that the road out of town has been rendered impassable, blocked by a jack-knifed logging truck.

He returns to town and meets up with the only other person left in Millgate who can see these looming figures and who remembers what life was like before they arrived--the town drunk, William Christopher. He reveals to Barton that soon after Barton's family left town, the Change came upon Millgate literally overnight. All of his fellow residents disappeared (they actually became these strangely luminous beings called Wanderers who nightly flit from one home to the next) and were replaced by a town full of strangers. No wonder Christopher, who was sober before the Change, has become the town drunk; it is his only means of staying sane.

Finally, after Barton and Christopher discover that they can literally "remember" the original town back into existence, and then ally with the Wanderers to do just that, all hell breaks lose. The little boy Peter is revealed to be none other than Ahriman himself, while Ohrmazd is the town doctor, Dr. Meade, who imposed forgetfulness on himself as one of the conditions of his contest with Ahriman. Once the charade has been exposed, the two forces expand their conflict out into the universe at large and the town of Millgate returns to normal. When we see Barton for the last time, he is leaving Millgate for a new life, his wife Peg having left him somewhere along the way.

Reading through this novel again, I was reminded of the places where I had read the story the first time. Images of the interior of BART trains and of my first apartment in the Richmond Annex came rushing into my mind unbidden; I'm guessing that I first read this book around a decade ago, soon after I had moved to California. At the time, the novel felt a little flat, but this time I really appreciated the nuances of the story. I also recognized this novel's relationship to Dick's later works dealing with various themes like maya and gnosis; these ideas obviously informed his writing long before his strange experiences of 2-3-74 brought them from his imagination into his waking life.

The Giza Power Plant: Perplexing puzzle of the pyramid power plant

The Giza Power Plant
Christopher Dunn
Bear & Co., 1998


I was reading something online about the Earth's "hum" when I came across this fascinating article by engineer and "pyramidiot" Robert Bauval . In it he explains that the Great Pyramid was constructed in such a way that it might have translated this frequency into something suitable for human listening; in other words, the pyramid may have been designed to "sing," making it the world's first multimedia monolith. I was so amazed at this revelation that I fired the e-mail off to my good friend, Rev. José M. Tirado, who shares my fascination for both ancient wonders and contrarians. Within minutes his reply indicated that I needed to read a book called The Giza Power Plant.

Although certain that the local library would not have a copy of this oddball book, I was taken aback when the online catalog pointed me right to it and indicated that it was available to request and check out locally. I placed my request, and once the book arrived at the library, I figured out why they were able to get a copy. It turns out that author Christopher Dunn lives in Danville, which is about 45 miles from here, and so the public library owned a copy. My attitude toward coincidences is that they all are meaningful, and so the proximity of the author cemented my desire to read this book.

Dunn begins with a pretty interesting question, one rooted in his decades of experience in manufacturing: why is the Great Pyramid of Cheops so precise in its construction? He explains at some length that the precision found in the measurements of the pyramid, including the surveying and alignment of the base, with variances of less than a hundredth of an inch over a length of hundreds of feet, is beyond the level of precision expected of contemporary construction. As an aerospace machinist with over 30 years of practical experience, Dunn cannot simply brush aside this question; he makes it clear that for the folks like him, those responsible for translating the ideas of engineers into physical artifacts, the standard theory about the purposes and construction of the Great Pyramid just don't hold water.

He also asserts that there is abundant evidence of the use of machine tools at Giza and he shows quite a few images that seem to support his contention. Thin parallel grooves in shaped stone look like the marks left by a power drill. Intersecting curved surfaces in stone bowls indicate the use of lathe-like machine tools, and not easily blunted copper implements and scouring compounds. Dunn marshals some pretty intriguing evidence in his chapter on the use of machine tools in ancient Egypt and discusses the positive responses he's gotten from machinists, engineers, and others involved in hands-on manufacturing. This chapter was probably the most compelling in the book, because it does seem to me, a total layman, that he's on to something.

However, while his ideas on machine tooling in ancient Egypt are pretty intriguing, I found his overall hypothesis--that the Great Pyramid was a vast machine intended to produce power through resonance with Earth's "hum"--a lot less convincing, though no less fascinating. In brief, he asserts that the pyramid was a power plant that converted the Earth's hum into a source of clean, renewable energy. He doesn't just make this up out of whole cloth either; on the contrary, he provides a lot of circumstantial evidence that does seem to indicate the inadequacy of the current explanation of the pyramid as a tomb. The granite-lined "King's Chamber" with its overlying vaults and entry-way is seen as a sort of "sound box" whose abundant quartz crystals resonate and amplify the humming earth below. The "Queen's Chamber" was a reaction chamber providing a source of hydrogen as a medium for the accumulated energy; Dunn notes the presence of various salt encrustations and a foul smell in this chamber that would be consistent with the presence of acid-base reactions. He even explains the mysterious shafts running up through the pyramid at an angle (a design feature inexplicable to modern manufacturers, since constructing the shafts on the horizontal would have been much, much easier); one shaft acted as wave guide to collect microwaves from space, focused them through granite lens that has been mistaken for a sarcophagus, and sent them out the other shaft as high-powered output.

It's a fascinating idea but it is not without its problems. Where are machine tools used in the construction, for example? I've seen museum cases filled top to bottom with Bronze Age implements but not one ancient Egyptian Black and Decker power drill. Where is evidence of the power usage (apart from the hypothetical power tools)? How was the power transmitted? (On one page, Dunn shows a bizarre "eye of Horus"-like satellite reflecting the beamed power back down to Earth, but thankfully doesn't really try to explain that.) Why did the human race completely lose its memory of this level of advancement?

This was a very interesting book which was incredibly well written (particularly since its writer is from Danville; in his defense, he is English by birth) and very fun to read. Dunn is an articulate voice for the seldom heard perspectives of those "on the ground" in the worlds of machining and manufacturing, and he raises some valuable and not easily dismissed questions about our knowledge of the ancient past.

Blackberries in the Dream House: Living, loving poetically

Blackberries in the Dream House
Diane Frank
1st World Library, 2003


One of the contributors to my ever-growing "to read" list (ok... pile; ok, ok... piles) is author/astrologer/rock star/pronoiac Rob Brezsny. Every Wednesday, he sends out an e-mail with horoscopes, inspirational quotes, selections from his books, and recommended readings ("Other Pronoia Resources"). In early March, I received the latest weekly Free Will Astrology e-mail (the webpage version is here) in which he recommended this novel. The entire recommendation took the form of this question: "What would happen to us if we were to undertake the discipline of turning our life entirely and self-consciously, into a poem?"

Blackberries in the Dream House is the Pulitzer-nominated tale of Yukiko, a geisha in 19th century Kyoto, whose life is breathed into being in exquisite, epigram-like chapters whose poetry is tangible. Although this work is Frank's debut novel, its author has been a practicing poet for some time and her loving attention to language is evident in each page, paragraph, sentence, and word. This is not a novel that I would have picked up off the shelf and read on my own; in fact, I'm not even sure where in a library or bookstore this would be shelved. Accordingly I am so grateful that it was recommended in the e-mail, that I ordered it through the library, and that I actually checked it out when it arrived. (By the time I picked it up at the library, I had begun my PKD project, and so I didn't even remember having placed the order for the book. In fact, the cover image is so unlike that of any book I'd "normally" read that at first I thought the book held for me by mistake.)

I am no poet, and so any ham-fisted attempts on my part to encapsulate the novel in terms of the characters and plot will, almost by definition, fail miserably in conveying the beauty and power of this book---I'm reminded of Thelonius Monk's comment on how writing about music is like dancing about architecture. So it is with a sheet metal worker's son trying to capture hallelujah poetry in ho-hum prose.

In brief, this is a love story and a tale of spiritual transformation, although that says very little in our world of debased "love" and commodified "spirituality." As mentioned above, Yukiko is a geisha trained in the arts of entertainment, culture, companionship, and physical love. She has her heart broken by her first real lover, Eitaro, when he leaves her to marry a woman his parents have chosen for him. After this, she becomes involved with Kenji, a young monk from the nearby Zen monastery, and it is Kenji who sets her on the path to self-discovery. After she begins to retreat within herself, she is sent to work and meditate with the local Buddhist nuns, where she discovers a profound sense of freedom and joy within the silence; she also realizes that the nunnery is not her home and the monastic vocation is not her calling, and so after healing her broken heart, she returns to her life as a geisha, where she is very in-demand due to her singular wildness and creativity. The tale twists to a close as she and Kenji consummate their love for one another in the midst of a seismic upheaval.

This was a delightful read and one that somehow filled my spirit with a sense of awe and playfulness, responses to the world that truly belong together but that so rarely co-habitate successfully. Thanks to Rob for the recommendation.

Eye in the Sky: Mind manifested

Eye in the Sky
Philip K. Dick
1957

In Dick's first three published novels he brings characters to life within alternate worlds of his imagining; in this, his fourth, he brings these worlds to life within his characters. This was also the first of his novels I have read in the course of my "PKD Project" that I would rate really highly in terms of how fun it was to read and how well it seemed to hang together. (The first three were all what I call "solid"--as opposed to "great" or even "good"--books. When I'm grading, saying your writing is "solid" is a tip-off that you're probably going to get a "B" on that particular essay.)

At 4:00 PM on October 2, 1959, a proton beam deflector at the Belmont Bevatron malfunctioned, releasing its charge---a six billion volt beam of energy---and incinerating an observation platform overlooking the giant device. The eight people who had been standing on the collapsed platform drop to the floor and into an alternate reality.

In a flashback, we are introduced to Mr. Jack Hamilton, the novel's primary protagonist and a senior research scientist working on the Belmont Bevatron. He is called into a meeting with Colonel T.E. Edwards, one of the top brass of the company, where he is given an ultimatum: leave his wife, who has been classified as a security risk due to her flirtations with left-liberal politics, or leave his position at the Bevatron. Wisely, he chooses the latter course of action. After breaking the news to his wife, the two of them make their way to the Bevatron for its inaugural test; there they encounter a motley group of visitors whose number includes an elderly soldier, a middle-aged mother and her son, a severe woman in a rough-woven suit, and their "Negro" guide. The last member of the group is Charley McFeyffe, the company cop responsible for turning Mrs. Hamilton in as a Communist and who is, inexplicably, a friend of the Hamiltons. Of course, these eight are those caught in the path of the errant particle beam, which is when the fun starts...

Hamilton awakens to find himself in an alternate universe, one that he shares with the other seven "participants" in this accidental experiment. At first, though, no one knows that they are in an alternate reality. He and his wife suspect that something is amiss based on vague intuitions, but they discount these by ascribing them to shock resulting from the accident. Strange little details begin to appear---Jack swears and is then stung by a bee, a shower of locusts descends from nowhere to plague Hamilton, prayer is revealed to be immediately efficacious---and it dawns on the Hamiltons that something is indeed not right with the world in which they have found themselves. Everyone around them is devoutly religious and almost single-mindedly focused on the Second Báb, "the One True Gate to blessed salvation," and the laws of physics operate on a medieval, geocentric basis.

The values that made up [Hamilton's] world, the moral veritites that had underlined his existence as long as he could remember, had passed away; in their place was a crude, tribal vengeange against the outsider, an archaic system that had come from--where? (p. 66)

As it turns out, the world has arisen from the mind of the old soldier, who was the first to awaken after the incident with the Bevatron. Somehow the accident has caused his solipsistic fantasies to become reality for himself and the other seven on the collapsed platform.

"All eight of us dropped into the proton beam of the Bevatron. During the interval there was only one consciousness, one frame of reference, for the eight of us. Silvester [the old soldier] never lost consciousness... Physically, we are stretched out on the floor of the Bevatron. But mentally, we're here. The free energy of the beam turned Silvester's personal world into a public universe. We're subject to the logic of a religious crank, an old man who picked up a screwball cult in Chicago in the 'thirties. We're in his universe, where all his ignorant and pious superstitions function. We're in the man's head." (p. 105)

Having discovered their predicament, they go from the frying pan into the fire when Silvester is knocked unconscious. As the geocentric cosmos fades, it is replaced not by reality but by the next delusional inner landscape, this time belonging to the prudish Mrs. Pritchet. Sexual organs disappear, leaving everyone with the smooth, neuter bodies of Barbie and Ken dolls. Hamilton's laboratory has changed its focus from scientific research to bringing culture to the masses, one of Pritchet's Victorian obsessions. Luckily, Mrs. Pritchet's prudishness is easily manipulated, so much so that the rest of the party manages to talk her into "abolishing" every single aspect of reality :

The world's layer of atmosphere swept out of existence. His lungs totally empty, Hamilton descended into a crashing blur of death. As the universe ebbed away, he saw the inert form of Edith Pritchet roll over in a reflexive spasm: her consciousness and personality had fled. (p. 172)

Only to be replaced, of course, by the next consciousness in line, that of paranoid psychotic Joan Reiss. Because of her delusions of conspiracy and persecution, every aspect of her reality is out to get everybody. The house they are in becomes a living thing intent on devouring them all; Hamilton's cat is turned inside out while still alive, because Ms. Reiss doesn't like cats; and, because she sees the rest of her party as aliens intent on claiming her life, that's what several of them become, sealing her fate and ending her reign of delusion.

The world that arises to fill the void is characterized by a definite "Communist sensibility" in which a shoddy parody of American life, complete with slogans and cutout soldiers, unfolds. Of course, Hamilton is faced with a big question: is this his wife's world? Does this mean that she really is a Communist and a threat to national security?

I won't tell you how the book ends, but suffice it to say that the final resolution is not a let-down.

This has been the best PKD novel I have read thus far in my project. The pacing, plot, and characters are all relatively well developed without sacrificing any of the ideas the Dick fan comes to expect. In fact, this novel is so packed with ideas---involving religion, politics, consciousness, and reality itself---that it demands re-reading just to begin to get them sorted out.

And since the book was such a fun read, that doesn't sound like a bad idea.

The Man Who Japed: Humor as sedition

The Man Who Japed
Philip K. Dick
1956

I had never encountered the word "jape" before reading Dick's third published novel, although I did use it once in a game of Scrabble. (Most likely I'd subconsciously picked it up during the many times I've scanned the PKD section in bookstores.) Turns out that it is an archaic English verb that is defined thusly:

• v.intr., To joke or quip.
• v.tr., To make sport of.

The title is an appropriate one, since this is the first of Dick's novels to highlight his puckish sense of humor. In typical Dick fashion, levity is put to the service of weightier matters; the prankish plot brilliantly establishes that having a sense of humor can be downright seditious.

Allen Purcell, the man from the title, is "the forward-looking young president of the newest and most creative of the Research Agencies," a man whose career trajectory as a Moral Reclamation (Morec) propagandist belies his deep-seated antipathy to the entire endeavor. So strong is this antipathy that he gets drunk one night with some friends in the sterile wasteland of Hokkaido and on the way home japes a statue of Major Streiter, the beloved founder of Morec---by removing its head. After which he blacks out.

The novel begins the morning after this episode with Purcell "losing" his bedroom, as the automated furnishings in his one-room apartment rearrange themselves like clockwork. As Purcell goes about his day, the reader gets glimpses of this brave new post-apocalyptic world. The apartment overlooks the -- blessed -- Morec spire and the surrounding Park environs, complete with the 124-year-old statue of Streiter. We learn about the Morec phenomenon of the weekly block meetings, "the interminable interchange, the stuffy presence of his neighbors packed together in one room. And the whir of the juveniles as they surrendered their tapes to the Committee representatives" (p. 9). These "juveniles" (presumably named after the propensity of prudes to blame "the children" for their attempts at censorship) are "earwig-like sleuths," small camera-enabled robots whose regular invasions of privacy form the backbone of the humorless, puritanical snitch-culture that is Moral Reclamation. Another central tenet is the notion of "the domino method," in which it is assumed that all residents of a given block automatically believe the same thing:

The domino method operates on the assumption that people believe what their group believesm no more and no less. One unique individual would foul it up. One man who originated his own idea, instead of getting it from his block domino. (p. 20)

This new world was obviously not engineered with the best interests of the individual in mind; once again we find an everyman protagonist, not a larger than life hero, but a regular guy who is fed up with the repressive culture in which he finds himself.

As Purcell vaguely recalls his japing of the statue, he dreads being found out; however, instead of being discovered and pilloried he is invited to become the director of Telemedia, the central organ of Morec propaganda. Meanwhile, his block community has called him before the weekly meeting, which he loathes. We get to see this vile operation in action, as anonymous members of the community publicly interrogate and humiliate various block members for their infractions: sexual intercourse, rudeness, uttering morally objectionable words, etc.

In a whirlwind of events, Purcell is effectively kidnapped and taken to Other World, an offworld colony for those who can't cope with the world of Morec. There it is discovered that Purcell has some sort of defect on his brain scans---a sense of humor.

And a sense of humor doesn't fit in with Morec. Or with us. You're not a 'mutant'; you're just a balanced human being...The japery, everything you've done. You're just trying to re-establish a balance in an unbalanced world. And it's something you can't even admit to yourself. On the top you believe in Morec. Underneath there's that blob, that irreducible core, that grins and laughs and plays pranks....

Yes, your ethics are very high. But they're not the ethics of this society. The block meetings--you loath them. The faceless accusers. The juveniles--the busybody prying. This senseless struggle for leases. The anxiety. The tension and strain... And the overtones of guilt and suspicion. Everything becomes--tainted. The fear of contamination; fear of committing an indecent act. Sex is morbid; people hounded for natural acts. This whole structure is like a giant torture chamber, with everybody staring at one another, trying to find fault, trying to break one another down. Witchhunts and star chambers. Dread and censorship, Mr. Bluenose banning books. Children kept from hearing evil. Morec was invented by sick minds, and it creates more sick minds. (pp. 119-120)

Eventually his business rivals and a disgruntled ex-employee conspire to bring Purcell down. This they do by tailing him with juveniles and accusing him of extra-marital relations with the woman responsible for his kidnapping. After being caught "in the act" of giving this woman a peck on the cheek, Purcell weathers the ensuing shitstorm in the only way a living, thinking human being can---by not taking it too seriously. With his job as Director of Telemedia facing immediate cancellation, Purcell uses his last remaining bits of influence to create a huge media event revolving around the mysterious postwar policy of "active assimilation." This policy, invented completely out of whole cloth by Purcell and his creative team, insinuates that Major Streiter and his other Moral Reclaimers actually ate those with whom they disagreed as a means of obtaining nutrients while also maintaining population and social controls. Though the powers that be pull the plug on the faux panel discussion of "active assimilation" in the middle of the broadcast, the damage is done. As we leave Purcell, he is standing with his wife waiting for the coming Cohorts of Major Streiter, the brownshirt enforcers of Morec, and proudly announcing to all passersby that he is the man who japed the statue. All in all a well told, inspiring story about the radical nature of laughter.

I couldn't help but notice lots of frightening similarities between the world of Morec and the righteous nonsense Americans accept as a substitute for culture in the early 21st century. The leering need on behalf of the assembled people at block meetings to hear all the titillating details of every infraction is all too familiar in this age of "Humiliation Television." Ubiquitous spying technology in the form of "juveniles" echoes the current brouhaha over the President's illegal wiretapping of US citizens and the increasing omnipresence of security cameras throughout the UK. And of course, the entire Morec media environment, with its emphasis on hyperconformity, is far too similar to the televisual hive-mind I encounter at every water cooler; it's almost as if Dick saw what the cultural straitjacket of 1950s America would evolve into, given enough time. Luckily his message about resistance to this repression rings equally true; an entire body of social criticism owes its existence to stand-up comics like Lenny Bruce and his heirs.

Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke, right?

The World Jones Made: The problems with precognition

The World Jones Made
Philip K. Dick
1956


Our glimpse into the world Jones made begins in media res, as the reader enters the womblike Refuge, sees the little mutant people who live within, meets the novel's protagonist Cussick, and first hears about the titular Jones. Through a flashback, Cussick is introduced as a Fedgov agent; the world has apparently survived a cataclysmic nuclear holocaust and the surviving shards of various civilizations have come together under the aegis of a federal planetary government, with cultural relativism as its "non-ideology."

It is in this world, on April 4, 1995, that we meet Floyd Jones, a sad psychic working in a carnival with the gift of seeing how the world will be exactly one year ahead. After he makes his predictions to Cussick and they begin to come true, he is arrested and then released. Nothing comes of it for a few months until one day Cussick sees that Jones has become an ordained minister who is drawing large crowds, something that is immediately unsettling in the post-apocalyptic, post-ideological world of the late 20th century. Jones is a demagogue.

Dick gives us an eerie insight into the mind and life of Floyd Jones, who has been living every moment of his life twice, once in the "future" and then once again one year later in the "present." These moments include the very haunting images of Jones experiences in the womb and approaching the grave, having already experienced both thresholds.

For almost seventeen years his dual existence had been purposeless. It had been a burden, a great dead weight. Even the idea of utilizing it was lacking. He saw it as a cross, nothing more. Life was painful; his was twice painful. What good was it to know that the misery of next year was unavoidable? (p. 53)

This tortured existence is central to Dick's ambivalence about supposed "gifts" like precognition. As well, Jones' knack for seeing the future also presents a direct challenge to the probabilistic world of the Fedgov, because of its implications about free will and predestination, error and certitude:

For Jones, there was no guessing, no error, and no false knowledge. He knew; he had absolute certainty. (p. 57-8)

In typical PKD fashion (I don't know what it was with him, women, and betrayal) Cussick discovers that his new Danish wife, Nina, has secretly been involved with the Jones cult for several months, all while he himself has been a primary investigator of Jones and his people. Jones' people have begun to attack and burn the "drifters"--gigantic amoeboid alien creatures whose viscous (and apparently harmless) bodies have begun to drop occasionally into earth's atmosphere from space; his movement of Jones Boys agitated to end the tyrannical reign of relativism and its cadre of thought police (whose number, of course, included Cussick) and called for dedicated efforts toward making space migration a reality. After a universal referendum, Jones is appointed "Supreme Commander" to deal with the "crisis" of the alien blobs.

That was the chilling sight: the lines of tired people, worn out from a long hard day of work, willing to stand patiently in line. Not the enthusiastic faces of the dedicated followers, but the drab, ordinary citizens desiring to abolish their legal governments, wishing to end a government of law and to create in its place an authority of absolute will: the unqualified whim of an individual person. (104-5)

This is where the womblike Refuge and the miniature mutants enter the picture. Cussick learns that they are so helpless outside their sanctuary environment not through a defect but because they are perfectly built for Venus. The idea was that the project would go on for a while longer until the mutants were actually sent to Venus, but the "election" of Jones has forced Fedgov's hand and the mutants are sent to Venus. In a tender scene, the mutants first step out into the Venusian environment only to feel perfectly at home for the very first time.

Jones and his mobs continue to burn and destroy the drifters, until, too late it is discovered that they are gametes, one half of a reproductive structure that extends between planets. The parent creatures, "immensely complicated plant-like beings, so remote and advanced that we'll never have anything more than a dim picture of them" (p. 158), respond to this wanton destruction by quarantining the Earth and its immediate vicinity:

"They're going to seal us off. A ring will presently be set up around us. We'll have Earth, the Sol System, the stars we've already reached. And that's all. Beyond that--" Jones snapped his fingers. "The warships will simply disappear." (p. 159)

What had happened was that Jones in the future had died soon after all these events had transpired, and so his dual-vision was split between the present and absolute darkness. In other words, he had no idea what the human race had been up against, and so had bluffed. And lost.

He had no certain knowledge of what was to become of society because he would not be around to see it. Very shortly, he would die. He had been contemplating it for almost a year; it could be ignored temporarily, but always it returned, each time more terrible and imminent.

After death, his brain and body would erode. And that was the hideous part: not the sudden instant of torment that would come in the moment of execution. That, he could bear. But not the slow, gradual disintegration.

A spark of identity would linger in the brain for months. A dim flicker of consciousness would persist: that was his future memory; that as what the wave showed him. Darkness, the emptiness of death. And, hanging in the void, the still-living personality.

Deterioration would begin at the uppermost levels. First, the highest faculties, the most cognizant, the most alert processes, would fade. An hour after the death the personality would be animal. A week after, it would be stripped to a vegetable layer. The personality would devolve back the way it had come; as it has struggled up through the billions of years, so it would go back, step by step, from man to ape to early primate to lizard to frog to fish to crustacean to trilobite to protozoon. And after that: to mineral extinction, to merciful end. But it would take time.

(Philip Dick's speculation into the breakdown of consciousness here is just one of the sorts of gems that line his works.) Cussick comes to meet with Jones in response to this crisis, a gun battle ensues, and Jones steps into the fatal bullet like he knew it was coming. (Duh.)

So Jones dies, apparently along with humanity's dreams of conquering the known universe, yet he leaves behind him a new global legacy:

"He knew when to make his entrance and his exit. We thought we were going to be stuck with Jones for another six months...instead, we're stuck with Jones, the legend of Jones, forever."

He didn't need Jones' talent to see it. The new religion. The crucified god, slain for the glory of man. Certain to reappear, someday; a death not in vain.. Temples, myths, sacred texts. Relativism wasn't coming back in, not in this world. Not after this.

Cussick and Nina make their way to Venus, along with their new baby, to make a life with the Venusians until things back on the world Jones made return to a semblance of normality.

This was a fun read which raised quite a few interesting philosophical speculations and also provided some insight into the quasi-spiritual roots of demagoguery, a phenomenon discussed at some length elsewhere by Morris Berman.

Solar Lottery: PKD's first novel

Solar Lottery
Philip K. Dick
1955

I'd had a copy of Dick's sublime Divine Invasion on one of my "to read" piles for a while, so when I instead read Counter-Clock World by pulling it off the shelf literally at random, I thought to myself that maybe it was time for a systematic study of the work of Philip K. Dick. That's right. A project.

So I went online and printed out what looked like a pretty thorough bibliography. The first on the list, published in 1955, was Solar Lottery, the book here being discussed. I had a mass market copy which I had read in college; I knew I had done this because I remembered the image on the cover, not because I had any recall of the book itself, which I did not. Instead of reading the yellowing pages of the fifteen-year-old mass market, I passed it on via the Books to Prisoners project and finally visited the new Champaign Library. (It is gorgeous, by the way. From the outside the architecture is interesting enough, but it is the interior, with its intriguing use of materials, space, light and shadow, which is so striking.)

So here's the plot: It is the year 2203 and a man named Ted Bentley has just lost his job working in the Hill system, apparently a feudal corporatocracy. He moves to Batavia (which, strangely, had I not seen a documentary on Krakatoa just previous to beginning this book would not have heard of or known was the contemporary city of Jakarta) in order to take a personal oath of fealty to one Reese Verrick, the Quizmaster. Or at least, he was the Quizmaster before the start of the novel. When the reader first meets him, he has been replaced a a result of a twitch in "the bottle," and has been replaced by Leon Cartwright who is, scandalously, a "Prestonite." For one thing this means that he still wears outdated double-breasted suits and for another drives an "ancient '82 Cheverolet." He is also an "unk" or "unclassified," an outcaste from the ubiquitous Classification System that assigns human beings worth based on their intellectual (i.e., abstract and theoretical) strengths.

We learn that in the past economic production had outstripped consumption, and so quizzes and lotteries were designed whose express purpose was the unloading of all this surplus stuff. Eventually stuff was supplanted by the random assignation of of power and prestige, through the use of a complex game rooted in the quantum indeterminacy of an atom's decay. This complex game is what they refer to as "the bottle." Through the implementation of game theory or Minimax across the entire human culture, humanity lost faith in natural law, cause and effect, and reliance on pure probability became the norm. Other details of Dick's vision of s 2203 that stood out include women going bare-breated in public as a matter of course and Christianity's status as a sort of fringe remnant. Against this backdrop is set the messianic quest of one John Preston, an astronomer turned "unk," whose discovery of a legendary 10th planet called "Flame Disc" started the Prestonite movement, of which the new Quizmaster is a member.

A Challenge Convention is held, the purpose of which is to elect an assassin as a corrective for the excesses of "the bottle." Reese Verrick, the old Quizmaster, is not quite ready to give up power based on the whim of an atomic nucleus. Using the same science that brought the nutritious mutant alga called Protine to the masses, Verrick has had his perfect assassin genetically engineered. The game includes the rule that whomever assassinates the Quizmaster becomes the Quizmaster, unless the assassin is under a personal oath of fealty to another, as the assassin, Keith Pellig, is to Reese Verrick. This is why Verrick personally offers $1,000,000 in gold to the assassin responsible for the death of Cartwright. No need leaving everything up to chance, after all, even when the world is left entirely up to chance.

Here's where Bentley comes back into the story. He discovers (through a terrifying prank played on him by one of his associates) just what Pellig truly is--an empty shell through which a team of controllers operates. Bentley is one of these controllers, switching into and out of control of Pellig randomly to thwart any attempt at a coherent strategy on the part of the "teeps" (telepaths) who defend the Quizmaster.

"You see...Pellig is Heisenberg's random particle. The teeps can trace his path; directly to Cartwright. But not his velocity. Where Keith Pellig will be along that path at a given moment nobody knows." (p. 79)

This is used to interesting effect in the story. For example, we see Pellig, with one controller in charge, being quite nice to a young woman on a train, only to change instantly and without warning into a completely different person as a new controller clicks into place. We also see the effects of that click on Bentley:

"While he was reflecting, the mechanism switched. Silently, instantly, he was back at the Farben labs.

It was a shock. He closed his eyes and hung on tight to the circular metal band that enclosed his body, a combination support and focus." (p. 106)

We also see the effects that it has on the teeps assigned to protect the Quizmaster. Each teep monitoring Pellig is driven insane whenever a controller switch takes place during their watch. While their eyes tell them that Pellig is standing directly in front of them, their telepathic minds tell them that Pellig's consciousness has simply evaporated, and most simply crack under this sort of dissonant assault.

Pellig isn't your run of the mill genetically engineered multiple-consciousness-housing assassin, either. He also turns out to be an interplanetary rocket designed to pursue Cartright all the way to the moon. Bentley, who is operating Pellig at the time of his transformation to spaceship, discovers that the switch into and out of Pellig is not random but is instead under the direction of Moore the associate behind the aforementioned practical joke. You see Pellig isn't just your run of the mill genetically engineered multiple-consciousness-housing spaceship assassin, either--he is also a bomb designed to kill Cartwright at the same time that it switches Bentley into the operator slot, taking out two birds with one android.

Bentley breaks his oath of fealty when he discovers the plot to send him to his death unwittingly (something that can only be done with unk serfs) and runs to Cartwright for protection. The rest of the novel involves the legal proceedings between Verrick, Bentley, and Cartwright over the breaches in fealty; the final resolution of the question of who is to be Quizmaster; and the haunting final message of Preston to those seeking Flame Disc.

It was definitely a weird book. The story and subplots don't ever really gel, a quality I've noted in many of Dick's novels which stands in stark contrast to the precision and directness of many of his short stories. Right out of the gate, though, many of Dick's perennial themes can be seen--free will and determinism, simulation and simulacra, the ubiquity and centrality of advertising and spectacle, totalitarianism in all its guises, and the quest for transcendence. There is also, as someone pointed out on Amazon, the fact that the protagonist in this novel, unlike those in most of the novels of his contemporaries, are regular folks. They aren't the raygun toting Duck Dogers types or Starship Troopers but bureaucratic functionaries, middle managers, and down on their luck cultural creatives.

My chronological reading of all PKD's SF novels is off to a good start and will only be sidetracked by my classroom readings and all the other books in my "to read" piles, not to mention all the books on our shelves and at our local libraries. What could possibly happen to derail this project?

One down, 35 or so to go!

Robots, Androids, and Mechanical Oddities: Do androids dream of mechanical oddities?

Robots, Androids, and Mechanical Oddities: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick
Philip K. Dick, edited by Patricia S. Warrick and Martin H. Greenberg
Southern Illinois University Press, 1984

Warrick and Greenberg did a masterful job collecting these stories. They focus on Dick's ideas while also showing his gifts as a coherent short story writer (much more so than as a novelist). They also provide brief, yet illuminating, essays that situate each story in the context of PKD's personal life, literary output, mental state, the state of affairs in American politics, etc. This is a model anthology and a book my wife recommends I keep.

Here are my thumbnail synopses of most of the stories in this collection:

• "The Little Movement," 1952 --- Dick's first tale involving a robot presages Toy Story, albeit with a much darker tone. Toy soldiers are plotting something insidious against Adults by controlling Children; the soldiers understand them to be two entirely different species. Their machinations are thwarted by other toys, although whether for good or ill purposes is left unclear. Less like SF, more like a Twilight Zone teleplay.
  

• "The Defenders," 1953 --- A more hopeful predecessor to the novel Penultimate Truth, in which an 8-year war has been raging on the surface of the planet, carried on by robots while humanity toils in safety of the underground bunkers. A human contingent investigates the surface and discovers that the war has actually not been going on, and that the world is intead a verdant garden that the robots have been stewarding. The robots, it seems, have realized the illogical nature of war and are preserving the earth until humanity is mature enough to emerge to the surface.

• "The Preserving Machine," 1953 --- An inventor creates a machine to "preserve" music by somehow rendering it into the form of a living animal-like creature. One of the creatures is allowed to "evolve" through prolonged exposure to the world and it becomes feral. When it is translated back into music, the music is absolutely alien and strange. The inventor concludes that everything evolves. The story explore themes of evolution (particularly the idea of evolving ideas--prefiguring the notion of memes), chaos, and preservation as translation.
  

• "Second Variety," 1953 --- After being driven off-world to the Moon by the early attacks of the USSR, the US/UN government begins creating robots ("churning sphere[s] of blades and metal") to ambush and slaughter Soviet soldiers, which they do with chilling efficiency. The story begins when Major Joseph Hendricks is called to meet with some of the surviving Russians. Along the way, he meets a small, apparently traumatized boy named David who clutches his teddy bear while saying little. He discovers, thanks to the intervention of a handful of remaining Soviet soldiers, that "David" is a lethal robot, one of three varieties believed to exist. ("David" is a type III robot. The type I is designed to resemble a wounded soldier. No one has yet encountered a type II robot.) During the night, one of the Soviet soldiers kills the other, claiming that he believed him to be the second variety of robot. Major Hendricks, the surviving soldier (Klaus), and Tasso, a prostitute who had been with the Soviets when their fellows soldiers were wiped out by robots, decide to trek back to the US bunker, only to find it overrun with scores of "Davids" and "wounded soldiers." During the ensuing melee, Klaus is revealed to be a type II robot. A gravely injured Major Hendricks, hoping to escape to the Moon Base, leads Tasso to a hidden rocket, only to find that it is a one-person vehicle. Tasso convinces him to let her fly to the Moon Base, the secret location of which he reveals to her, in order to send back a rescue mission. It is only after she leaves that Hendricks considers that there might be more than three varieties of killer robot...
  

• "Imposter," 1953 --- It isn't bad enough that PKD imagined a world where an observer couldn't distinguish between a robot and a human; what's worse is this well imagined story in which the observer and the robot in question are one and the same. The protagonist expects a normal day at work only to discover that he is suspected of being an android replica of himself---a replica containing a U-bomb, intended to be used by the alien Outworlders in their war against the human race---and therefore destined for immediate termination.
  

• "Sales Pitch," 1954 --- A nightmare scenario of everyday life in the future. After an extraterrestrial commute at 60,000,000 mph during which individually tailored advertisements are beamed directly into commuters' brains, the protagonist finds himself held hostage in his own home by a giant robot selling itself and not taking "no" for an answer. This astute story left me in stitches and also in awe of Dick's insights into the ubiquity of commercial dross and the inability of the average Joe to escape it.
  

• "The Last of the Masters," 1954 --- In a post-nuclear war future, members of the Anarchist League wander the world and maintain a sort of anti-government in which no one is allowed to amass power over others. It turns out that one of the war robots, machines programmed to maintain military-industrial civilization at all costs, escaped destruction at the hands of the AL. A few AL members, in cahoots with the robot's own people, kill the robot and prevent a military invasion of the surrounding territories. But there's always tomorrow.
  

• "Service Call," 1955 --- What is a swibble? That's the question on the reader's mind throughout this delightful story about a repair person who comes to the wrong address.
  

• "Autofac," 1955 --- Life will find a way. Automated factories (the titular "autofacs") have virtually become life forms, cranking out weaponry for us in fighting one another as proxies in a long-lost war. Humanity has survived, but the autofacs insist on producing everything, as per their programming. In the process they completely monopolize all the planet's natural resources, preventing humanity from reasserting its prerogative to global primacy. People try to sabotage the autofacs, but the simple, elegant directives guiding these autofacs drive them to evolve.

• "To Serve the Master," 1956 --- This story, published in 1956 and never reprinted before appearing in this anthology, complements the earlier story "The Last of the Masters." Applequist (you have to love those PKD character names) is wandering through a ravine when he comes across the wrecked remains of a dying robot. It calls out to him. Over the next week, he visits with and helps to repair the robot, in return for which the he learns the history of the robot-human war; his efforts to obtain information about the war from his own locked-down human society avail nothing and so he believes everything the robot tells him. Much to his chagrin.
  

• "Electric Ant," 1969 --- Waking up after crashing his flying-car, Garson Poole discovers that he has lost not only his hand, but even more shockingly his very humanity. He is not a human being but is instead an "electric ant," an android whose subjective experience derives from a player piano-like roll of tape spooling through his thoracic cavity. In a fairly transparent reference to the culture of psychedelia prevalent at the time, Dick has Poole experiment with the tape and note the effects of these experiments on his perceptions of the world. Finally, Poole cuts the tape; the effects were catastrophic, and chillingly so. Dick himself had this to say about the story:

  "Again the theme: How much of what we call 'reality' is actually out there or rather within our own head? The ending of this story has always frightened me ... the image of the rushing wind, the sound of emptiness. As if the character hears the final fate of the world itself."

• "The Exit Door Leads In," 1979 --- Although I don't know it for sure, I suspect that this story came out of Dick's friendship with Paul Williams, author of the biography Only Apparently Real. That's because it was written--on the request of the editors, no less--for Rolling Stone College Papers, a short-lived spin-off publication of Rolling Stone, for whom Williams wrote on PKD. In this story, Bob Bibleman--again, what a name!--faces a dilemma: should he reveal classified information and in so doing save millions of lives, or follow the rules set by the authorities and return the information to them. He makes the "right" decision and returns the information, only to find that it has been a test that he has failed. He is expelled because he falls prey to conformity too easily and does what authority tells him rather than what he knows to be right. A pretty transparent parable about free will and moral agency in an authoritarian context.

Resurrection on the cheap

Counter-Clock World
Philip K. Dick
Vintage Books, 2002 (First published 1967)

"His most theologically probing" story is set in 1998. Time has been running backwards since the Earth entered the "Hobart Phase," an unexplained temporal inversion that only seems to affect the Earth (e.g., time on the moon flows forward normally). Because of this reversal of the direction of time, those who died before the world entered the Hobart Phase (a.k.a. the "old-born") are returning from the grave. One protagonist, Sebastian Hermes, runs a vitarium, one of the facilities where the newly resurrected are restored to life and sold to the highest bidder, as per W.U.S. law. A mild psychic, Hermes intuits that the resurrection of the Anarch Peak, a radical religious leader who died in the 70s, is imminent. This resurrection starts a chain of events in motion. Three forces vie for possession of the Anarch---the Library (a mysterious paramilitary organization whose purpose is maintaining public safety through "eradication of dangerous, disturbing written material"), the Udi religion (a psychedelic, consciousness-raising religion founded by Peak and now lead by Ray Roberts, whom we initially see as crazy and evil, but whom then turns out to be on Peak's side), and "Rome" (presumably the Catholic Church). The convoluted storyline ostensibly revolves around the resurrected Peak (and the potential danger of his revelations about postmortem existence) but rapidly goes off onto tangents about the protagonist's love for his ever-younger wife, her affair with Officer Tinbane (another protagonist), Hermes' affair with the daughter of the head of the library, and the true meaning of life after death (which all old-born experience, but only the Anarch is spiritually clear enough to recall with clarity). After the Library finally captures the Anarch, Hermes is "hired" by an alliance of Rome and the Uditi to rescue the Anarch; instead, Hermes uses the weapons his unlikely allies have given him to rescue his wife from the same enemies. Allusions to the race riots of the mid- to late-1960s and intimations of the Black Power movement appear throughout the novel. As the convoluted storyline comes to an end, the protagonist hears a slough of voices in the graveyard calling out to be reborn, and goes about his work digging them up. In typical Dick fashion, the sanest response to an increasingly crazy world seems to be to put one foot in front of the other.

Counter-Clock World is, like most PKD novels I've read, pure hallucinatory pulp. Another metaphor that came to mind while reading was that of a literary amphetamine. I couldn't help but suspect that the page-turning fervor with which I approached the book emulated the speed-driven fury with which he typed it. Maybe Dick took his time with this novel, but it certainly doesn't feel that way; instead, it's as if the ideas in this novel leaped fully formed like Athena from his brow directly to the page, inconsistencies and all.

People don't really read Dick for his plotting and character development, though. Instead, we read because we want to steep in the bottomless well of his intellect and imagination. This novel is filled to the brim with ideas that greater writers would have put to better effect, if only those better writers had been blessed with Dick's vision. Dick presents us with a new religion, Udi, which, like Timothy Leary's League of Spiritual Discovery, uses psychedelics to experience new forms of group consciousness. We have the aforementioned Hobart Phase, which finds its primary use as a narrative device. As with much of Dick's fiction, this novel presents us with an alternate vision of our contemporary world; in this case, the US has split into three different countries as a consequences of the secession of the Free Negro Municipality (FNM, the Udi nation lead by Ray Roberts). While the specifics aren't ever detailed, it seems that the Midwest (at least Kansas City) is part of the FNM, while California comprises part of the W.U.S. (Western US?). For those who like reading Dick for his wilder speculations on philosophical and religious, you won't be disappointed with this novel. He deals with resurrection and immortality, deception, hiddenness, apophatic theology, God as negation (the "pulsing black presence"), the emptiness before life and after death, and how we learn love best through its absence.

Finally, it must be noted that Dick's greatest genius was perhaps his attention to the mundane details of these fictive universes. In this world where time runs backward, people say "Goodbye" to begin a conversation and "Hello" to end it. Sexual intercourse is engaged in at the end of a pregnancy, so that the fetus' life-force can become a part of a man and a woman. Metabolic processes aren't described in detail, but enough oblique references are made that the reader can understand just how weird things have become: people "disgorge" food bite by bite and tend to do so in private, they imbibe sogum (which, while never explicitly described as such, is hinted to be a form of reverse defecation), and they use the words "mouth" instead of "ass" (e.g., to be a "horse's mouth") and "food" instead of "shit" (e.g., "foodhead," "foodlist," "food!" "feood"). In this crazy backwards word, men even put on whiskers in the morning in lieu of shaving!

Another flawed must-read by one of the greatest minds, if not writers, in science fiction.