This was a so-so work of PKD; nothing to write home about. I think I was a bit put-off at the way he made fun of the people on the Alphane moon with their different kinds of mental illness. Then, there was the sexist way he treated his women characters: the big-busted mistress of Bunny; the slim-waisted, small-breasted Dr Rittersdorph, and the plump Annette. Step up, women authors, let's show them we can give as good as we get, i.e...Chuck Rittersdorph, the small-penised, big-testicled husband of Dr Rittersdorph, Had fantasies of killing his wife, while Bunny Hentman, the big-bottomed, pencil-penised TV comedian, talked Mary Rittersdorph into having sex with him. Ha!

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. ( )

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. ( )

Genial, es obligatorio leerlo mas de una ves ( )