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Loading... Counter-Clock World (1953)by Philip K. Dick
None. A strange world even in Dick's standards. A world where everything happens backwards. Well, not everything.... there are some pitfalls in the logic (everybody walks, thinks forward...) but the idea is great. The dead DO resurrect. And if one of the newly living is a great religious leader, prepare mayhem in Dick's style... ( )See What I Have Been Reading, May 2010 at From Word to Word An intriguing book and one which I wanted to read for a long time before I got my hands on a copy. I enjoyed it quite a lot. Unfortunately, for some reason I decided to sell my copy back to the second-hand bookshop I got it from, but it's a book I would like to have in my permanent library. Felt a bit confused. Felt like Dick built a world to write a story about, then set a different story in that world. A rather strange one, this. Time running backwards is a theme infrequently tackled; in Brian Aldiss' 'Cryptozoic', it's always been running backwards and our evolutionary advantage as hominids arose when we developed the ability to perceive time the wrong way round and foresee the future (i.e. run time in the direction we are familiar with). But in Dick's novel, causality seems reversed but people's experience of it isn't. So the police have resurrection squads to dig up the dead when they spring back to life and find themselves entombed; and the business of eating and digestion has become neatly hedged around with words like 'ingest' and 'disgorge' to describe what it is that people find themselves doing. The problem is, if time ran backwards, we wouldn't notice, being locked into that timeframe ourselves; and to make it noticeable involves making exceptions so that the story can be told. Perhaps this is why very few writers have tried it. Dick's attempt shows up some of the pitfalls of this plot device. no reviews | add a review Is contained in
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