Larry Maddock

I read the original novella version published in Fantastic magazine (1964 v13n12) which can be found online for free here. PKD's works are members of my "Bad Pizza" categorical set; that is, even bad pizza or bad beer or bad PKD (and I leave a few members of the set unnamed, but I digress) are better than 99% of the remaining choices in food, drink, or sci-fi, respectively.

This is a minor work, but like all PKD material it addresses major themes and it addresses them well. The story begins like this:

Rachmael ben Applebaum (RbA), owner of a space transport business which is now obsolete due to a recent teleportation invention, is pursued by creditors and decides to take his last and greatest asset - the space liner The Omphalos - on an 18-year one-way rescue mission to the Whale’s Mouth colony in the Fomalhaut system. RbA convinces Matson Glazer-Holiday, principal owner of a private police agency called LIES Inc., to help him escape the clutches of his primary creditor Trails of Hoffman Limited (THL) which owns the telpor technology that put RbA out of business and intends to seize or destroy The Omphalos at first opportunity. RbA, based on fake audio he detected in alleged transmissions directed back to Terra from the Whale's Mouth colony, disbelieves THL’s claim that a) the telpor process only works in one direction, only sending people from Terra to the colony with no way of sending them back home, and that b) the 40 million colonists who have already emigrated to Whale's Mouth are happy there. He suspects Terrans are being deceived by ... (wait for it)(wait for it) ... fake news about the colonists, and he fears the colonists who have teleported there may be dead or enslaved with no way out.

This set up is the best part of the story and, along with PKD's distinct empathetic tone and humor, is enough to carry us through the more pedestrian space opera that follows.… (more)

Transport yourself back to the late fifties or early sixties. It's a time when there were few avenues readily available for pornography and paperbacks on the newsstand rack screamed out with racy titles. Sin Street graced those news racks and is concerned with prostitutes and call girls. But, it is not explicit. It's depictions are really rather tame by today's standards.

The stories portray a world out of Madmen or the early innocence of Darren in Bewitched. Feminists today might scream about this book and how it makes it sound as if women were always eager to try the world's oldest profession and there are no drugs and no pimps and no desperation. Yes, it's a world out of Playboy fantasies.

Here, we have stories of businessmen trying to make a first date with a call girl, college students convincing college girls to host special parties, and a dose of science fiction with androids and ray guns and an early version of viagra. The stories are often light and humorous and easy to read.
It's a fine entree into dime store pulp without really being smutty.… (more)

I didn't like this as much as the first - too much political intrigue type stuff that is always, for me, distractingly confusing and uninteresting. But now I'm hooked and so will probably read all four.

There is an interesting little speech planted in the text: The average man's total contribution (to the continuance of the species) takes him ten seconds, two or three times in his life. Then it's up to someone else to do the *important* part of the job. That's what hurts.... So... he declares the entire female population inferior.... By abstracting the *concept* of motherhood (to Goddess worship), he can pay proper respect to the miracle and still keep the actual mothers under his heel.""… (more)