The Penultimate Truth (1964)

Philip K. Dick is one of my favorite authors. And yet, so often, after reading one of his books, I'm really not sure where I've been and where I wound up. This novel has some of that about it, but, like so much of Dick's work, is full of ideas that cause you to pause in wonder. And the final extinguishment of the plot is nowhere near as important as the road traveled to get there.

It is after the war, and most people are being kept underground for their own protection. Well, not really. Actually, the world didn't get destroyed and a lot of people are living a very nice life above ground. Even those who find out the truth lead lives that, while not that great, are better than the ones they had. As so often happens with Dick, nothing is as it seems (even the benevolent overlord is a robot).

Two ensuing struggles result. The first as a below ground dweller learns the truth and struggles to get back to let everyone know (and to revive an individual who was an integral part of the society.) The second is the battle between those who are slowly taking over radiated lands to build their own private palaces. Of course they intertwine. And, of course, because this is a Dick novel, the results are not what we expect.

One of the more interesting constructs in the novel is the way a faked documentary works as an important turning point in the progress of the plot. On one level, we learn how this faked documentary – a piece of film that is almost sacrosanct to most people – helped drive people's belief about the war. On another level, the flaws within it are so obvious that one group of protagonists use the flaws to help drive the plot of the novel even deeper.

Two things really drive Dick's fiction – ideas and paranoia. This has both in the appropriate measure. And, as such, it stands well against much of his other work ( )

27) The Penultimate Truth - P K Dick (9/10) The 5th Dick book I've read this year, & the best one so far. Out of the 33 novels by him I've read this is in the top 5. It's based on a story of his I read, where humanity lives in bomb shelters underground whilst nuclear war goes on above - but this is a lot more complex. It involves political intrigue, simulacra and mysticism. ( )

My first PKD Book, and it was a good one. In some ways, dated, in other ways, very relevant in today's digital world where most information is dispensed through digital means.

In this book we find the president of an ANT Farm (Those tubes that people crammed into at the beginning of WW3)being pushed to fing an artificial pancreas for their mechanic. The story also follows Joseph Adams, a public relations Yance-Man whose job it is to write Speeches for President Yancy. This is all fine and good, except World War III ended 10 years before, and nobody told the people in the ANT farms.

At the front, it seems the story is quite simple. We have a man with an ethical issue. It seems straight out a small man, Big Government sort of story. But, its much more than that, with a nod at environmentalism, the will of the masses, and the role of media in how the world is perceived. ( )

Written at the height of the Cold War, not long after the Cuban missile crisis, The Penultimate Truth is, in part, a reflection of general anxieties (in the West, at least) about the likelihood of nuclear war and whether human life would survive the devastating aftermath. The majority of the world's population live underground, in fear of the continuing armageddon they are told is still raging above-ground and of the threat of radiation for anyone who emerges on the Earth's surface. A Big Brother figure, Talbot Yancy, exhorts the multitudes to build more specialist robots to continue the fight above ground, though these are in truth designed to end up furnishing the requirements of an oligarchy which maintains the myth of a continuing war.

Many of Philip K Dick's thematic obsessions emerge in this novel (itself an enlargement of short stories written several years previously). These themes include the notion that authenticity may be an illusion, that what we perceive of as true is merely a simulacrum hiding something other. The key figure in the novel is a surviving Native American called Lantano. As with many of Dick's choices of character names the etymology and, thus, meaning is significant. The Ancient Greek lanthano means "to escape notice, to lie hidden", and in the novel Lantano's real identity and abilities indeed lie hidden for some time. In addition, the soft malleable metal lanthanum, which also derives from the same Greek root, not also provides chemical compounds which act as catalysts (exactly Dave Lantano's function) but also changes its structure according to temperature, and this change in appearance and properties is also matched by the mechanism that Dick describes which efficiently assassinates another key character. Nothing is as it at first seems.

The same applies to Talbot Yancy. This seems to be a compound of the name of British writer Talbot Mundy, an early 20th century writer whose stories combined mystical ideas with adventure yarns and reportedly influenced a generation of sf writers, and the surname Yancy, supposedly from an Amerindian word meaning Englishman which gave rise to the name Yankee. These several layers of allusion add even more to the mix from which the reader has to extract the quintessential meanings of The Penultimate Truth.

Typically, this Dick novel is difficult to engage with at first--he delights in puns and specially-created neologisms, literary references, a cast of assorted flawed characters and deliberate disorientations. The sci-fi machines that he envisaged in 1964 for his near-future scenarios (a key date in the story is 1982, ironically the year of Dick's death) are implausible in the extreme (robots with AI, time-travel machines, personal flying machines that operate with no obvious fuel-limitations) but are merely hooks on which to hang his philosophical musings. If resolution is often far from sure by the end of his novels, the fact that our preconceptions have been challenged is reward enough; if characterisation is often minimal and unconvincing it matters more that individuals function as Everyman figures in a morality play and make the reader contemplate real moral dilemmas. The penultimate truth? That's for the reader to ponder; this reader is still pondering it.

http://calmgrove.wordpress.com/2012/06/17/truth/ ( )

This book takes place in the near future, where World War III is taking place; at least, that's what the millions of "Ant Tank" residents believe. They are living underground in giant tanks, eating stored food and tirelessly building robot warriors to help in the war effort. The president of one of these ant tanks find out the truth. Phillip K. Dick expertly challenges the reader's perceptions and beliefs.