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Loading... Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970)by Philip K. Dick
None.  RandyStafford | Aug 9, 2012 |  no reviews | add a review Is contained in
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0375719342, Paperback)For all the strange worlds borne of his vast and vivid imagination, Philip K. Dick was largely concerned with humanity’s most achingly familiar heartaches and struggles. In Our Friends From Frolix 8, he clashes private dreams against public battles in a fast-paced and provocative tale that ultimately addresses our salvation both as individuals and a whole.Nick Appleton is a menial laborer whose life is a series of endless frustrations. Willis Gram is the despotic oligarch of a planet ruled by big-brained elites. When they both fall in love with Charlotte Boyer, a feisty black marketer of revolutionary propaganda, Nick seems destined for doom. But everything takes a decidedly unpredictable turn when the revolution’s leader, Thors Provoni, returns from ten years of intergalactic hiding with a ninety-ton protoplasmic slime that is bent on creating a new world order. Winner of both the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards for best novel, widely regarded as the premiere science fiction writer of his day, and the object of cult-like adoration from his legions of fans, Philip K. Dick has come to be seen in a literary light that defies classification in much the same way as Borges and Calvino. With breathtaking insight, he utilizes vividly unfamiliar worlds to evoke the hauntingly and hilariously familiar in our society and ourselves. (retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:34:52 -0500) Whilst a repressive Earth police state does its utmost to keep the people down, some very powerful aliens from Frolix 8 answer mankind's call for help in this fast-paced novel from one of the most inventive science-fiction writers of our time. |
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I seemed to recall reading interviews with Dick stating this book represented a time of extreme creative fatigue in Dick's life and that he regarded this book as totally lacking merit. It's largely true this book reads as if Dick is trying to just fill up white space with something, as if it's an attempt to meet alimony payments. This book makes Dick seem very tired at the time.
The book's plot holds together better than Dick's other bad book, The Simulcra but is much more boring. There are occassional flashes of Dick's traditional humor, wit, and power in the poignancy of the novel's end, the short, whimsical discussion of cats, and the oh-so-Dickian character of Charlotte Boyer, a neurotic, insightful, passionate, damaged girl of the kind that often shows up in Dick's work and, it seems, he was attracted to in life. But Boyer is not as well-realized a version of the "Dark-Haired Girld" as say Pris Frauenzimmer of We Can Build You. (It is interesting to note that Dick, here, postulates an early life of abuse as an explanation for girls like Boyer. They can't form relationships, are neurotic, and have a core of emptiness while desperately wanting love.)
Gone are reality shifts and perceptual questions. Dick gives us a pale tale of political intrigue in which he half-heartedly poses moral questions of revolution and revenge. He doesn't even use the tension of the question of Frolixian motives to good effect. (