Eye in the Sky is one of Dick's earliest science fiction novels but remains one of my favourites. It illustrates already some of Dick's recurring themes, such as deep distrust of authority and the problem of distinguishing between illusion and reality. It was first published in 1957, so Dick wrote it during the McCarthy era of Cold War paranoia.

The book opens with a report of an accident at the Bevatron in 1959, which injured seven visitors and their guide, but Dick quickly gives a bit a back story for some introduction to the characters. Jack Hamilton is an electronics engineer who worked for a company which does missile research for the government. He has just been told that his wife, Marsha, is a security risk. According to her FBI file, based in part on information supplied by Hamilton's supposed friend McFeyffe, a security guard for the company, she has shown interest in organisations thought to be sympathetic to Communism and supported causes also supported by Communists. Among many other errors, she objected to Charlie Chaplin being barred, she contributed $48.55 to the Society for the Advancement of Colored People, she has claimed to be in favour of peace, "she still turns up when some Commie group organizes to protest a lynching in the South". (I find it surprising that apparently all that the FBI claims is true: is that realistic?) His choice was, get rid of his wife or lose his job.

Hamilton and Marsha had planned to visit the Bevatron that afternoon and they stick with that. McFeyffe decides to go too and gives them a lift. They join a group under the charge of a young negro guide: he has an advanced degree from MIT, but it's not easy for a negro to get a better position here than tourist guide. There's a bit of conversation among the group which gives some hints of the kind of people some of them are — this is relevant later. There's the elderly gentleman who is more impressed by God's hurricanes than scientific marvels, the vaguely well-meaning middle-aged woman, the precise, fussy young woman. Then the accident happens: a beam of highly energetic particles escapes from the Bevatron and slices through the supports of their observation platform and they fall through the radiation and equipment to the concrete floor below. "Conscious of the grotesque brokenness of his body, he lay in an inert heap, trying aimlessly, reflexively, to get up. And realizing at the same time, that there would be no getting up for any of them. Not for a while."

Nonetheless, Hamilton wakes up that same afternoon in a hospital bed and is not much hurt after all. His wife is even less hurt and is in the room waiting for him. They go home, but begin to suspect that something is seriously wrong, and his experiences the next day when he applies for a job with an electronics company run by a friend of his father's amply confirm his suspicions. In fact, the victims of the accident are trapped in the delusional world of the religious member of the group, the elderly gentleman Arthur Silvester, and the development of this world and their adventures in it take up more than half of the book. After some time in this world, the people begin to take on the characteristics of stereotypical members of the groups Silvester sees them as belonging too. Their escape from this world comes when Silvester is knocked unconscious during a fight between the others and some vengeful angels.

Relief at escape from illusion is short lived: they are now subject to the beliefs of the prudish middle-aged woman. Luckily she will abolish from her world anything she finds distasteful when it is pointed out to her. Since the processes of life are rather messy, she can be manoeuvred into rendering life impossible, thus killing herself and everybody else, which gets them out of that world, but into a yet worse one of paranoid fantasy, which is however also self destructive. The next illusory world is someone's communist vision of capitalist America, complete with bloated plutocrats and heroic labour leaders. The pain and struggle of the dissolution of this final fantasy merge into the pain of real life and the efforts to rescue and treat the accident victims.

After their real recovery, most of the accident victims, wiser, we hope, for their experiences, pool their talents and resources to set up a factory to make high-end sound reproduction equipment: the final, hopeful words are, "What are we waiting for? Let's get to work!"

On one level, Dick is crudely warning us of the dangers posed by extreme irrational political or religious ideologies — warnings which are as relevant today as they were during the Cold War. That covers, however, just the framing story and two of the fantasy worlds. More generally, he is urging us to consider whether our beliefs and fears are well grounded, because they too may endanger our welfare and happiness even while external influences do not.

The first PKD I ever read, and I couldn't put it down, but I was a student then so when I decided to re-read it recently I wasn't expecting much.

It actually holds up very well. The basic premise - of a group of visitors to the Bevatron being caught in its beam after the collapse of a viewing platform, then "waking up" only to find themselves trapped in the subconscious wish-fulfilment-world of a still-unconscious member of the group - is still original and makes an exciting story. And PKD makes as many political points in this as he was to make later, in novels like A Scanner Darkly.

I was a bit startled on my re-read to discover that my student self must have thought that Dick had missed a "neat ending" to this book, and had scribbled a pencil epilogue to it. Enough time has passed (that self is not me) to risk adding it here, even if I expose myself to endless mockery and accusations of arrogance!

Actual ending:

Heading eagerly toward the corrugated-iron shed, Bill Laws yelled, "What are we waiting for? Let's get to work!"

Pathetic student addition:

Hamilton hung back a moment, watching the large form of Edith Pritchet retreat to her car. A warm and contented feeling began to surge up from some hidden source within him. A smile slowly widened across his still painful jaw.

Yes, he thought, this is the kind of world I would create for myself... ( )

One of Philip K. Dick’s Best Books – A Brilliant Look at The McCarthy Era in the 1950s

In the 1950s, America was troubled with an identity crisis…the struggles between paranoia and socialism and communism and the fear of the different or seemingly un-American were gripping the nation. From the Beavers’ sterile vision of America to the youth yearning to throw off the yoke of societies norms through figures like Elvis Presley to McCarthy, we were defending our society from every angle – both the overly conservative who wanted us all to act and behave the “right” way and those who embraced the false hope of socialism or communism and the belief that we can make an “equal” society and everything in between.

During a tour of the new Bevatron facility, eight people from different walks of life are bathed in the Bevatron beam when something goes terribly wrong with the Bevatron experiment. After the accident, these eight people think that they have escaped any effects of the accident until they realize that they are trapped in a time hole and dropped into an alternate reality – kind of a quantum virtual reality – where one of the eight are secretly creating the rules and manipulating the laws of physics through their dreams. And these dreams are definitely specific about how they think the world should be and how people should live in it.

From here, this book also becomes a whodunit of sorts as some the eight begin to understand what is going on; they must learn who their new companions are and what they believe if they are to determine who is controlling their reality so they can stop the madness before things get out of control. But they also figure out that the only way to stop the person is to kill them…something that isn’t too easy to do when that person controls the nature of reality.

Oh yeah…and killing this person is just the beginning of their journey back to reality.

In one of his most lucid novels, Philip K. Dick’s Eye in the Sky takes a critical look at the America where one group or another thinks they have all the answers and know exactly how everyone else should live. If ever someone wanted to truly understand the importance of keeping society out of the bedroom and the like, this would be the book to start with. And, for anyone just wanted to get started in reading Philip K. Dick, Eye in the Sky is one of the five to start with. ( )

http://home.comcast.net/~tonydal/wise... ( )

Awesome story of separate realities cropping up sequentailly from the survivers of an askewd foundational astronomical equipment. Dick explores the implication of different worldviews that have become actually the one reality.