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Loading... Clans of the Alphane moon (1964)by Philip K. Dick
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Dick is unique in the field of SF as far as I can tell. Nobody else I've read or even heard of would have thought up the premise for this book, which I'm not going to give away. Yes, it's about a CIA propagandist caught up in an interstellar web of conspiracy, largely through his own foolishness, but no, it's not really about that, at all. It's difficult to talk about the true theme without spoiling the effect, so I will save that for the bit hidden behind spoiler tags. THIS REVIEW HAS BEEN CURTAILED IN PROTEST AT GOODREADS' CENSORSHIP POLICY See the complete review here: http://arbieroo.booklikes.com/post/587689/clans-of-the-alphane-moon-philip-k-dic... I started this book knowing nothing only to realize I had just fallen into the deep end of nutsville. Literally. The inhabitants of Alphane Moon are full of crazies. Certified mental hospital escapees. Of course, that hasn't stopped them from building a skewy-functional society over 20 years full of overreactions but relatively peaceful cooperation among all the bickering. Move on to a few "normal" Earthlings, a bitter struggle between an idiot CIA man, his idiot psychologist wife, and an idiot popular comic and we get paranoid intrigue, suicidal depression, telepathic slime molds, buxom women, and an interplanetary war. I kept suspecting that this whole novel was a fever dream of a man in a psychotic break, but no, no cheap tricks here. :) It's a bona fide SF full of aliens and a message that no one is normal. :) In other words, it's PKD to the core. Most of PKD's old standard questions are externalized in this early novel, but they're all clearly the same questions he revolves around later in his more intellectual and introspective later novels. Insanity is a big one, of course, but drug use, the nature of creativity and the holy spirit and the fluidity of human nature and perception is all bigger than life. :) This is darkly funny and NUTS. If I had to compare it to anything, I'd rank it along the same line as the original Total Recall with Arnie. Full of cool crap, snappy dialogue, wild situations, and totally dysfunctional families. :) It's a fun roll. :) A struggled, yet eventful, reading. Overall, this Dick novel suffers from stopping and starting many times in the flow of the book. The first quarter is a little tedious until the real story comes into play. From there, it picks up until it drops off again-- then finally finishes in a swooping conclusion. Despite this not being the greatest novel of Dick's, it's use of schizophrenic mind readers and other science fiction devices is particularly interesting. This is Sci-Fi, and Philip K. Dick, pulling out another story fueled by his own personal life and then into the realms of the scenarios that he had played out in his mind. 3 stars: still worth reading. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to Publisher SeriesPKD composition order (1964) Is contained in
For years, the third moon in the Alphane system was used as a psychiatric hospital. But when war broke out between Earth and the Alphanes, the hospital was left unguarded and the inmates set up their own society, made up of competing factions based on their particular mental illnesses. When Earth sends a delegation to take back the colony, they find enclaves of depressives, schizophrenics, paranoiacs, and others uniting to repel what they see as a foreign invasion. Meanwhile, back on Earth, CIA agent Chuck Rittersdorf and his wife, Mary, go through a bitter divorce, and Chuck loses everything. But when he is assigned to clandestinely control an android accompanying Mary to the Alphane moon, he sees an opportunity to get revenge. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Moreover, everyone was smoking all the time, which makes me suspicious of why PKD died when he was about 57. I did like the character of the Ganymeden slime. ( )