This 1967 novel from Philip K Dick is a bit of a car crash, even for a science fiction novel. It starts off well enough with people coming alive again in their coffins and calling out for help. The Hobart Phrase has caused time to run backwards and so people are coming alive again and regressing to childhood and then back into the womb. An enterprising group led by Sebastian Hermes are touring the local graveyard looking for signs of life and when they hear something, they dig up the coffin give medical aid to the old-born before auctioning them off to family members. Once the opening phase of the novel moves to a story of the rebirth of a cultist religious leader of a negro sect then the story starts running into trouble.

It was originally a short story expanded to novel length and the gaps in the story telling are far too obvious. Time moving backwards only seems to affect certain aspects of the lives of those who have been reborn and so the author can be selective in what happens to them. In the case of the religious leader Anarch Peake; it is his experiences of being dead for fifteen years that makes him a prize amongst those being reborn. His welfare is the subject of a fight between, the catholic church, his cult followers and the Library which is embarked on a project of removing from the world all those inventions, books and works of the old-born as they move backwards through time. All that Sebastien Hermes is interested in is making a profit and holding his marriage together and he gets caught in the middle.

The action and the characters become so preposterous that I was not sure whether this was just an elaborate satire, an action story with too many plot holes, or an outline onto which Dick could come up with even more fantastic ideas. This didn't work for me on any level, I just got bored 2.5 stars ( )

Meh, I'm rounding down because even tho Bishop Pike is a big deal in this one as he was in the Transmigration of Timothy Archer (through a mirror darkly), the basic premise behind THIS book is pretty strong and should have been explored more fully.

I mean, look, PKD had a great thing going here now that newly dead peeps are coming back alive in their graves and clawing their way out, living full lives before they find a womb to crawl back into. This is a THING now. Long dead peeps are coming back, too, and now that time has done a little flip-flop in individuals, everyone still remembers when it worked the way we know now. :)

We've got some intrigue and rights issues going on here and a huge religious undertone that's focused more on the aftermath of religious movements rather than the content, and while that might have made a pretty good novel if not a particularly strong one, I found myself wishing that the main storyline had the limelight. Alas. ( )

An admirable effort. Philip K. Dick did a lot with his characters and plot in making it readable for the viewer. The plot is generally interesting and the characters follow through with it well, supplementing the chapter quotations which provide relevance towards the plot and themes of the book. This is typical Dick and it shows, through and through, of some of what he was capable of.

3 stars. ( )

It is a great big barrel of WTF. Entertaining to read, but the weird logic of the world will fall apart if you think about it too much while reading. ( )

This had good bits and bad bits and quite a few thought-provoking bits ... I agree with Mel's review that the book lacked a convincing strong female character, even with Ann Fisher the Librarian/seductress. The motivations for actions weren't very obvious to me, but perhaps that's because I am looking at the world in a "clockwise" direction! I was also confused about the smoking and eating backwards arrangements, because if the counter-clockwise happened at that micro level, why did people not talk and walk backwards too? Nevertheless, it is an interesting premise and I am inspired to hunt down other novels with the same idea at their core. Time's Arrow? Backwards? ( )