Product Description

A few years from now the President of the USA will be an android and his entire government a fraud. Everyone in the country is maladjusted. Doesn't seem possible, does it? Welcome to the world of Dr. Superb, the sole remaining psychotherapist. Philip K. Dick tells a story of desperate love, lethal body odour and an attempted fascistic takeover of the USA and shows that there is always another layer of conspiracy beneath the one we see.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23781 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

About the Author
Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) was born in Chicago but lived in California for most of his life. He went to college at Berkeley for a year, ran a record store and had his own classical-music show on a local radio station. He published his first short story, 'Beyond Lies the Wub' in 1952. Among his many fine novels are The Man in the High Castle, Time Out of Joint, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.

Customer Reviews

A vivid scary vision
Philip Dick close to the peak of his visionary talent though this sometimes makes it difficult to follow exactly what is happening to the characters. But the description of a world where the stability of the society rests on the need to brainwash the population is vivid and chilling. And the geniality and weakness of Kongrosian, the great telepathic pianist is also very poetic. The book is full of Dick's invention, with the overlapping of time a striking feature, whilst his obsession with WW2 and the nazi also reappears with the bringing of Goering. Definitely a book to read for someone who already likes Dick.

Good book by a great author.
The Simulacra is a good novel that goes quite well with The Penultimate Truth. It has all the hallmarks of a PKD book; a middle-aged loser everyman as its main protagonist; rampant paranoia; and layers of truth that are gradually unfolded. I enjoyed this book because it depicts a totalitarian future threatened by neo-Nazis told through the eyes of each character. We never get bogged down with the politics too much but rather we see the implications such changes have upon the people.

This now completes the Masterworks’ current run of Philip K. Dick and am proud that I have read them all (11, I think). I will say that the blurb on many of these books is true: he was the most consistently brilliant SF writer about. He had his masterpieces but it’s his average books that elevate him to greatness and I can only think of Robert Silverberg as a rival of both quality and quantity.

Decent but disappointing for PKD
This one is firmly in the middle ground of PKD's wide repertoire. It's certainly not one of his few really awful SF novels. It's quite well written by his standards and there are some interesting characters and ideas. However it never really takes off, and the ending is a real anticlimax. Actually, it feels unfinished, as if he just lost interest and wrote the last couple of pages to read as a fake enigmatic ending. Maybe I've missed something but it's misleading to pick it as #57 in the SF Masterworks mainly cos it's far from a masterpiece. Nearly all of the other PKD books in this series are better.