Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #105630 in Books
• Published on: 1996-12-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Synopsis
No man in their rightful mind would kill their wife miles from home. Chuck Rittersdorf has recruited some robot help, and now, in the madness and dysfunction of the Alphane moon, there seems no better place to carry out his cruel plans unless he too is part of a much larger conspiracy. Alpha Centauri, a star within the closest star system to earth, has several orbiting moons, among which is Alpha III M2. On this remote moon, a colony, originally set up to provide respite for the mentally ill is about to become the focus of a secret invasion plan. Among them is Chuck Rittersdorf, a 21st century CIA robot programmer, who has decided to kill his own wife via a remote control simulacrum. He enlists the aid of a telepathic Ganymedean slime mould called Lord Running Clam, an attractive female police officer and various others both witting and unwitting. But when Chuck finds himself in the midst of an interplanetary spy ring on the Alphane moon inhabited entirely by certified maniacs, his personal revenge plans begin to awry as the nature of reality itself is called into question in this brilliantly inventive tale of interstellar madness, murder and violence.

Customer Reviews

An early Dick paranoid and quirky gem
This was a surprising treat as my expectations where not high. `Clans of the Alphane Moon' is a very funny, pre-religious psychosis, Dick gem.

Those familiar with Dick's back catalogue will recognise many of the characters but they do feel fresh here with the author still working out some different eccentricities. It's unpredictable and funny and well worth a read.

A note on the topic as well, Dick was institutionalised on a number of occasions for bad mental health and became something of an expert on psychological conditions. It adds an air of believability to what is a fantastically surreal high concept for the story. It also shows that with a little extra thought a writer can get beyond the 'mental patient as visionary' cliché that is so often trotted out in even the best speculative fiction.

The pace is very fast and after a clunky start (the opening chapter being a bit painful, unusual for a Dick novel) it soon hurtles incessantly towards the end.

A good place to start if you haven't read Dick before.

The lunatics take over the asylum
On a moon of the Alpha system over three light years from Earth is a mental hospital full of inmates. Following a war between Earth and Alphane the moon is abandonned and the inmates set up their own society, with each clan gathering according to their (rather sterotyped) illnesses. So the paranoids are in one clan and the depressives in another, and so on. It's all extremely improbable, of course, but rather fun in Dick's madcap way. Unfortunately, the action keeps shifting to Earth, where Chuck Rittersdorf, a CIA robot programmer, is planning to kill his wife - one of the many typically shrewish female characters that populate Dick's fiction. This espionage plot rather goes round in circles, and it's only when the action goes back to the Alphane moon, where Chuck's wife is headed to 'help' the clans, does it get interesting again. Anyone coming to Dick's weird SF for the first time might wonder what all the fuss is about, but for fans it's an entertaining romp!

With psychology, we are all insane
`Clans of the Alphane Moon' is about an estranged Earth colony made up entirely of the mentally deranged, caught in the heart of an intergalactic cold war. This is a great platform for Dick to weave his twisted black humour and paranoid dialogue. A society where everyone groups together under their diagnosis, under the banner of a famous sufferer - Da Vinci the Maniac, Adolf the Paranoid, Gandhi the Hebephreniac, etc - can be seen as a microcosm of a human society ruled by Freudian self-analysis and California lifestyle-obsessed self-help. A prediction of a future ruled by an increasingly neurotic, hypocritical and therapy-addicted modern man.

The usual Dickian themes are here in force - paranoia of the CIA; vast, tangled conspiracies controlling every aspect of life; scepticism of Communism but a greater fear of American cold war tactics - but it is also a good example of one of Dick's rarely commented on themes, fear and scepticism of womankind. Philip K. Dick's world is populated by two highly negative archetypes of modern woman; the shallow and fickle nymphomaniac, who act as literary eye-candy and usually betray the hero; and the manipulative, domineering and sadistic emancipated woman, usually portrayed as a businesswoman, politician or Freudian psychologist (in this case, the latter). This makes Dick something of a twentieth century August Strindberg, and as with all of Dick's observations, we at first put them down to egocentric paranoia, and only later think about them seriously.

This book isn't on the same level as Dick's more famous novels, but nonetheless, the idea of a society ruled by lunatics is an original and witty premise, and that alone makes this book worth reading.