Philip K. Dick (1928–1982)

Not to be confused with the PKD book Vulcan's Hammer, 'Richard-Bessiere' is a pseudonym used by two Fleuve Noir editors; François Richard and Henri Bessièr. No one can agree, 50 years later, who wrote what, but it wasn't Philip Dick.

At the start of the book our narrator is in possession of a map to a planet which contains a fabulous treasure trove of jewels. He's about to gather together a crew to go look for it when Redbeard, a killer space pirate from his past ("the most feared and show more wanted man in the galaxy") turns up having found our narrator's watch next to the body of the last known possessor of the map. At blaster point our hero pulls out an ace card and tells the pirate that he's destroyed the map... but memorised it. You need me alive! Redbeard, I'm useless to you dead!
So off they go. Stopping only to blow up a galactic patrol ship that gets in their way, they navigate the secret hyperspacial path to the hidden planet, Fortuna. The crew are a repulsive, venal lot, a drunken doctor, a hermaphrodite from Saturn (who keeps the narrator awake at night by having noisy sex with itself), a Venusian who has to eat every 20 minutes and so on.

When they get there they find the planet Fortuna is surrounded by unusually high concentrations of "living proteins" which the author/s claim in footnote is a real thing, citing the, then recent, discovery of ammonia and formaldehyde in space https://www.nature.com/articles/222009a0.pdf - neither of which are proteins - anyway....

And after finding they can't eat the local fauna - the one animal they do try to eat has some kind of chlorophyll for blood, they set off in the direction of 'thataway' because, though the narrator has a map to how to get to the planet, he has no idea where on the planet the treasure is. Luckily the Venusian crew member has the uncanny ability to just point in the direction that any nearby pile of expensive rocks happens to be. So off they go following his sixth sense.

And the book gets very boring and repetitive for a long time. "We were attacked by some giant horrible worms that tried to eat us, so we ran into a cave where some horrible giant insects tried to eat us, so we ran out of the cave again and the worms had gone away but the rocks were suddenly explosive! and then a tree tried to eat us but we ran away and...." for chapter after chapter. During the course of their running away they are constantly beset by creatures with bizarre life cycles. Trees that bear animals as fruit, rocks which hatch out into insects. Caves where time suddenly runs at a different rate - they spend two hours inside while twenty days pass outside. Giant human arms grow out of the ground and try to flatten them with their fists - and get one of the crew. Splat! The whole ecosystem of the planet is one weird hyper-mishmash of mineral, animal and plant. The Venusian dies when something he ate turns him into a tree but luckily he drew a map. Why he drew a map is not explained but the book would have just stopped if he hadn't. More of them die. A fire breathing dragon sets fire to a desert as they are trying to cross a river. Our hero and Laura, the only woman in the crew and Redbeard's girlfriend, get separated from the others. As you would expect - they fall in love.

Eventually they meet up with the remaining members of the crew. Along the way they pass strange columns of light surrounded by circling flying fish. Creatures run into the light and die and dissolve and become proteins which fountain into the air and spread out over the planet starting the life cycle all over again. Some of the molecules achieve escape velocity and get into space to form the panspermial clouds they'd observed around the planet on their approach. (Wait! is 'panspermial' a real word? hang on... Googly... Googly... it is! Cool!) Anyway after observing this weird wonder they find the treasure. Huge piles of jewels just lying about in a valley. A strangely silent valley. The slightest noise makes violent echoes which threaten to bring down the surrounding cliffs and bury the treasure forever. Redbeard steps on a lose rock and makes a sound so loud that the echoes amplify so much they become so loud they become solid (sic)... and bring down the surrounding cliffs... and bury the treasure forever....

The last four characters get back to the ship - "Aha!" cries Redbeard, "I have the jewels! I no long need you, narrator person!" and pulls the trigger on his blaster. But nothing happens! How can this be? (Spoiler: Laura has taken the batteries out.) Our hero fires his weapon and blasts the villain - and the treasure - to atoms.

The doctor fries himself to death trying to repair the ship and the narrator and Laura start to feel feel heavy.

So they sit down and turn into rocks.

FIN

Seriously awful. I suspect fashionable, 1968 type, recreational pharmaceuticals were involved. show less

In an alternate version of San Fransisco, change is in the air, and Americans (both Jews and non-Jews), Japanese, and Germans weigh decisions about their futures. In their world, the Axis powers won World War II, and both individual society and international relations operate in a vacuum of trust. Japan controls the U.S. West Coast and the Americans who still live there have adopted Japanese customs. Japanese and Americans alike consult the I Ching as an oracle to make decisions and foretell show more the immediate future. Everyone is morbidly curious about a book the Germans have banned, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, an alternate history of World War II in which Germany and Japan were defeated.

The theme of free will vs determinism resonated most with me. The characters, with a couple of brief exceptions, have a fatalistic view of the world and of their individual lives within the larger whole. By consulting the I Ching for even the most inconsequential of decisions, they cede their free will and personal responsibility for the consequences of their choices. If you take determinism to its logical conclusion, this book would be completely implausible because it would be impossible for history to have turned out any differently than it has. show less

Wow. I read through this novella twice, and after the second time I was all set to start at the beginning all over again. I think it's marvelous. The more I read the book, the more nuance I found.

Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter who 'retires' androids who have escaped the human colony on Mars and travelled to Earth, an earth rendered a wasteland by a terminal world war. The radioactive dust that has contaminated all has not yet affected him biologically, but others who are so contaminated are show more considered unfit for migration, or much of anything else. Rick and his wife and others are sustained by self-selected electrical mood manipulation and an religion that acknowledges the hopelessness of life but provides a massive and supportive circuit of empathy. Androids, however, are missing the ability to empathize, even with each other, and this lack allows detection.

At first I was amused by the mix of futuristic predictions and seeming anachronisms - yes to self-programmed mood machines but also coin-operated wired telephones. But that unevenness in imagination is after all unimportant. More to the point, what is the value of a 'natural' person? How well-engineered does an android have to be before it's indistinguishable from a natural person? Will it someday be possible to engineer an android with all the emotional accoutrements of a human - what then?

Could there be a religion that would support a population witnessing the slow ending of the world? What would it be?

Who has the right to survive after world-wide self-destruction? What would we value in such a devastated world?

And of course, the analagous questions are about our own times: What constitutes a valuable person (especially in 1968, when this was published, and now, alas - do black lives matter)? What is the value of the living world? To what purpose are the various religions we honor, and how real are they, and how real do they have to be to be of value? How pure can our actions be, or are we as imperfect as the androids?

Written in the 60s, there are more than discreet echoes of questions of race, the impact of slavery, ecological danger, religion as opiate, opiate as opiate, denial versus reality, love and despair.

The story is so intense and visual it cries out for a movie treatment, which of course is the film 'Blade Runner' - with many changes. Read the book. show less

This is one of those books that has had a whole lot said about it, so I'm not going to go too deep right now. Maybe I'll have more thoughts later. Suffice to say, I bloody loved it.

In the far flung future of 1992 capitalism has reached the point where you have to pay your front door door to be able to get in or out and corporate espionage teams are made up by all groups with various psychic and anti-psychic powers. When a mission on the moon blows up in his face Joe Chip is hurled into the show more past and and must try to work out what the hell is going on as time decays around him.

Essentially, this is a murder mystery with a phenomenal sci-fi framing device using denaturing time and instability of objects that echo the confusion and degrading sanity of the protagonist and reader. This doesn't do it justice though. It also has some fun and pithy adverts.

There's commentary on capitalism, consumerism, death, letting go, and more, which is hardly surprising for a Philip K. Dick novel, but there is something truly fascinating about how he goes about all of this, even when compared to his vast and bizarre library. I can see why this was his favourite.

This book is incredible. I literally said, "what the fuck?!" moments before it ended and then, "motherfucker!!!" much louder when it finished. I'm not saying I haven't ended a few books that way before, but it is rate that they are accompanied by positive feelings towards said book. show less