Martian Time-slip

The Mars in Martian Time-Slip doesn't require spacesuits. The air is thick enough for helicopters, water, while scarce, flows through ditches. You can have a radio conversation with someone on Earth without a noticeable delay. This is not real Mars. Like Ray Bradbury's Mars, this is the California desert with red dust -- or probably more accurately, the Australian outback, with aborigines. This is not a real future. This is the 1960's, with that era's attitudes towards social roles, foreigners, autism, and schizophrenia, that are almost as foreign now as the Red Planet. As is typical for Dick, he is both participant to and observer of these attitudes. The concerns of the novel are inter- and intra-personal more than SFnal. This novel show more has one of Dick's richer cast of characters, including a more sympathetic portrayal of women than was typical for the time period. Dick's trademark warping of reality is held in abeyance for about half the book, but eventually arrives, including one disorienting set of chapters worthy of Chiang's The Story of Your Life. Highly recommended. show less

Time Waits for no Woman
Not having read any works by Philip K. Dick for many a year, I really didn’t know what to expect. Had my tastes changed? Were the charges of Dick’s sexism and racism justified? Would a book set in the “future” of 1996 even make any sense?

It so happened that Dickwas able to hold my interest, and though the plot was all over the place and full of holes, there’s something about this writer’s story-telling that kept me reading.

Martian Time-Slip is set on a Mars that hasn’t been terraformed. There’s oxygen, water (though limited), and humans live normal lives. They are grouped into “colonies” that reflect the geopolitical Earth of the 1960s, overly stereotyped.

So much so that for a while I thought I show more was reading a Johnathan Swift-like satire. There is the New Israel colony full of wealthy Jews, the corrupt trade union colony where member union fees are spent by the union bosses on their own earthly pleasures. And then there are the indigenous people, the Bleekmen, lazy noble savages, pushed back into the inhospitable FDR mountain range that has no obvious value. The UN has bureaucratic control over movement between the colonies and the FDR wilderness, as well as transport to and from earth.

I had an audio version from the Talking Books library. It was recorded in 1986. Hopefully the use of the N-word has been edited out. I found it disturbing. It was used in a matter-of-fact way, by the writer in his description of the Bleekmen, and not by any character in the story, so there was no excuse and its use was either due to racism or ignorance.

The story centers around the idea that schizophrenics are able to move through time. This is not realised by the Earth immigrants, but the indigenous Bleekmen seem to be aware; unaware until the villain of the piece goes back in time and decides to buy land in the FDR mountains, knowing that the price will rise as the government will open it up for industrial development.

No need to say any more. It was readable enough not to throw away. The stereotyping is even-handed and apart from the use of the N-word there’s no overt racism. There are the usual prejudices common in the sixties. No excuse but it is what it is.

The moral of this story is that Dick-heads have been around for a while and there’s no likelihood that they will vanish with time. show less

"Death upsets everyone, makes them do peculiar things; it sets a radiating process of action and emotion going that works its way out, farther and farther, to embrace more people and things."
- Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip

Dickheads of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your minds! Go ahead, read Martian Time-Slip and push yourself to the limit - you are on Mars in the near future among colonies under the umbrella of the United Nations, colonies formed by citizens from such countries as Russia, Israel and the United States.

This framework is all the author needs to explore an entire range of very human topics, from the impact of technology on education to the consequences of limited water supply. Since the story is too show more vintage PKD over-the-top crazy and convoluted for any simple overview or synopsis, allow me instead to highlight a number of the many colorful characters and themes:

Jack Bohlen – An electronics machine repairman living with his wife and son out in the Martian desert, living very much like thousands of middle class suburban families back on earth. All the way to Mars for this? But the real action for Jack is on the inside – he has to deal with his past schizophrenia. While on a job at his son’s public school he has a flashback of a hallucination when he was in an interview with a personnel manager in California: he could see through the man’s skin to his skeleton where the bones were all connected by copper wire and all his internal organs were plastic and stainless steel. And this only for starters. Jack’s visions and hallucinations become more disturbing - his schizophrenia resurfaces and threatens to destroy his Martian life.



Arnie Kott –Blustering, self-absorbed business leader; it's as if PKD had a flash of insight into the future and anticipated a well known current-day president with the initials DT from the constant gush of harsh words issuing from his big mouth down to his fat white toes. Dickheads and Dickhead wannabes should most definitely put Martian Time-Slip at the top of their list for this reason alone. As anybody with a shred of aesthetic sense will undoubtedly realize, having someone like Arnie on Mars quickly turns the red planet into a red hell realm. And what ultimately happens to Arnie? PKD couldn’t hold back.

Doreen Anderton – Girlfriend of Arnie who comes to love Jack, a stunningly beautiful redhead who also is the novel’s most intelligent, perceptive, sensitive earthling on Mars. Doreen is particularly attuned to the dynamics of schizophrenia since she had a brother back on earth who suffered from the disorder and subsequently committed suicide. At one point, Doreen draws on her past observations of her schizophrenic brother to warn Jack of his possible psychic collapse unless he takes the necessary steps to stop work on his current project. A lovely young lady with wisdom and compassion - a fabulous combination. Thanks, Phil.

Bleakmen – The tribespeople living as hunter-gatherers on Mars for thousands of years prior to the arrival of anyone from earth. Their lands are stolen, their mystic beliefs ridiculed and their dignity denied. Some are taken on as slavelike cheap labor in homes, others to work deep underground in mines. Enough to send a few shivers up an anthropologist’s spine. However, the more we read, the more we come to appreciate the power and special insights of these Bleakmen.

Manfred Steiner - A ten-year-old autistic boy living at Camp Ben-Gurion along with other "anomalous children." Manfred neither speaks nor interacts with others; rather, he lives in his own world of highly accelerated time which enables him to see the future, an ability that makes him a valuable commodity for an enterprising land speculator like Arnie Kott. But how to communicate with Manfred? The more central Manfred becomes to the story, the more the plot warps in dark, eerie and even sinister ways.



Teaching Machines – Kids are taught at public school not by real teachers but teaching machines, lifelike copies, mental capacity included, of the likes of Aristotle, Lincoln, Edison and Twain. There’s even one of “Kindly Dad.” Jack resents these machines forcing sheeplike conformity on the children and tells “Kindly Dad” as much. One of the more hilarious sections; I reread several times.

Camp Ben-Gurion - A special school for "anomalous children," that is, children judged to have physical or mental or antisocial defects. All these defectives on Mars are a major drawback to marketing efforts to get more people to move to the red planet. One of the proposed solutions – kill off the defectives. Remind you of Nazi Germany? It should.

Time Chamber – A psychotherapist at Camp B-G by the name of Dr. Glaub explains a new Swiss theory about autistic children like Manfred, how such children experience time speeded up and how a chamber is being constructed to slow sights and sounds down for them. Remember this is science fiction and PKD squeezes the possibility of such a chamber for all its worth.

More Schizophrenic Visions – Distortions twist space and time, occasionally replaying time, and we glimpse schizophrenia from the inside with terrifying images of things like huge meat-eating birds in a decaying, rotting, death-filled world. Curiously, such apparitions and phantasms touch on the mystic rituals of the Bleakmen.

Highly recommended. After all, you have nothing to lose but your mind.


“I'm not much but I'm all I have.”
― Philip K. Dick, Martian Time-Slip show less

Published in 1964 Martian Time Slip is one of the many Philip K Dick novels in the masterwork series and I find Dick at the top of his game with this one.
It is set on the planet Mars, which has been colonised for some years, however despite the advertising life is tough. Water is strictly rationed, colonists cannot be self sufficient and so rely on expensive imports from earth. The earlier enthusiasm for a new life on a new planet is faltering despite issues of overcrowding on earth. Jack Bohlen is a repair man flying around the desolate planet patching up faltering machinery. Arnie Knott has become a powerful man in the colony and lures Jack to work for him. Jack has suffered from schizophrenia in the past and contact with a neighbours show more ten year old son who is currently totally uncomunicative is drawing Jack back to another bout of illness. Mars has an indigenous population (Bleekmen) something like the aborigines in Australia and the colonists confine them to the desert, however they have a latent power and can communicate with those children whose mental illness is severe in nature. There is a rumour that important mineral deposits have been discovered in the desert and speculators from earth are arriving to buy up the land. Arnie Knott believes that he can make use of the Bleekmen and the schizophrenics to beat the speculators to the land grab.

The time slip in the title of the book refers to the idea that the schizophrenics live outside of time and may have the power, when harnessed with the Bleekmen to slip backwards in time. Philip K Dick slowly reveals this narrative as he concentrates on setting out the lives of a few of the inhabitants. I enjoyed his portrayal of most of the characters especially Arnie Knott and Jack Bohlen, however it was his experiments with the narrative drive that was most eye catching. He repeats certain scenes from different points of view as though there has been a slippage of time not quite flashbacks but interruptions in the linear narrative. They are not intrusive and easy enough to follow when the reader understands what is happening. Three major themes emerge; the ravages of time on people and buildings, the colonists failure to understand or adapt to their environment and the treatment of people with severe mental illnesses.

The world building of the earlier chapters is effective enough and the characters that populate the book are believable. There is the mystery of the Bleekmen and the machinations of Arnie Knott leading to the narrative climax, this was more than enough to keep me reading as well as some interesting comments on education, loneliness and the sex lives of people living in harsh conditions. 4 stars. show less

One of the many, many things I love about Philip K. Dick is how he can make fantastic science fictional scenarios into studies of utter human banality (and yes, despair) but still make me want to live in them. Martian Time-Slip, for instance, also feels like it could, and likely would, be marketed nowadays under a title like Real Housewives of Mars. Except they're mid 20th century type housewives, so they actually, you know, fix lunch for their children and whatnot.* So maybe it's really more like Mad Men on Mars.

At any rate, these housewives and their husbands live in United Nations-controlled human colonies clustered around the canal systems of a Mars that is not too terraformed (I'm still not sure if an atmosphere has been induced, show more or if neighborhoods are domed or what, but they're not walking around in pressure suits anyway), but is habitable enough to where everybody has a vegetable garden and even attempts a flower bed here and there, with varying success. No lawns, though. That would be a suicidal waste of water, a lawn would. Just like it is somewhere else, although so far our climate has been forgiving enough to tolerate a certain amount of waste. Sort of. For now.

But water isn't really the issue in Martian Time-Slip. It's preciousness is perhaps a symptom of the larger issue, namely that it's really, really tough to live on Mars -- especially if you insist on trying to replicate the suburban California lifestyle of the mid-twentieth century. It allows certain types of people to seize and wield an almost despotic power, and that type of person is the repairman. Hence all-powerful on this world is the Water Workers' Union and its leader, one Arnie Kott, who lives like the ruler of an ancient Wittfogelian hydraulic empire, or at least like the Dean of the Air Conditioner Repair School on Community. When life utterly depends on gadgets, you utterly depend on the guy who can keep the gadgets working. Or the water flowing. Kott is, kind of, both.

But this is not enough. When is it ever? For Kott's path has crossed with Jack Bohlen's, and Jack is the nexus of a whole lot of intrigue, for all that he's kind of a nebbish himself. Jack's father, see, is at the spearhead of the next big wave of land speculation on Mars, and stands to make a killing if his inside information is correct. And Jack himself is a talented repairman and also, importantly, a recovering schizophrenic, and Kott has become convinced that exploiting certain fanciful traits of schizophrenics is the key to his next move: outmaneuvering speculators like Jack's father.

But it's not Jack himself with the talent required; Jack is just to be the builder of the machine that can connect an autistic child, Manfred Steiner, with Kott, and let Kott see what he believes Manfred sees. For in this novel, everyone is pretty sure that the autistic are the way they are because they experience time profoundly differently from the rest of us. To the autistic, in this novel, the rest of us are sped up like a life-long time-lapse film. And, as we learn from Manfred's point of view interludes, to him the rest of us are sped up towards decrepitude, decay, gubbish, like in all of those little films Oliver and Oswald are making in Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts/


Thus Manfred sees into the Tomb World familiar from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and other Phildickiana, which, interestingly, one of the minor characters immediately recognizes. We're all living in it; we've just deluded ourselves that we look and feel alive and whole and undecayed. But deep inside us are the bacteria that will rot us from the inside out once our bodies can no longer fight off that action.

I really, really hope that this is not the world that actual autistic spectrum sufferers experience, because it sounds like a never-ending horror. As explained by one of the Bleekmen, an aboriginal Martian race so closely related to humans it's been decided that the two races come from the same colonizing stock from millions of years ago:

"This boy experiences his own old age... decades from now in an old persons' home which is yet to be built...a place of decay which he loathes beyond expression. In this future place he passes empty, weary years, bedridden -- an object, not a person, kept alive through stupid legalities."

That's pretty much everyone's nightmare, isn't it? And Manfred lives it all day long, if the Bleekmen are to be believed.

How all of this comes together to blow up in the lives of Arnie Kott and Jack Bohlen is ponderous and depressing and terrifying and awe-inspiring and, as is usually the case with PKD, a complete joy to read. Martian Time-Slip as a novel title seems toward the beginning to refer to a account of man-hours worked on Mars, a slip of paper on which an employee records his time, which is pretty nifty for a little science fiction story right there, but then the other meaning of slip, as one does on a banana peel, comes into play and what SJ refers to as the "Dick Click" happens and it all turns into a marvel.

I spent a little chunk of time just now trying to imagine how someone might go about presenting this story on film, and all I could think of was we'd need Richard Linklater and his roto-scoping again, because we would need a visual ghost of Manfred's awful reality sort of steroscopically overlapping the rest of the visual and auditory presentation. And now, even though it would be ugly and frightening and soul-destroying and brain-punishing, I want to see that film very badly indeed. Although I just did, in my head while I read the book. So why do I feel this way?

Ah, PKD.

*Note, I have never actually watched an episode of any of those shows, so I'm just guessing that their stars don't really do any traditionally "housewifey" things based on the promos I occasionally see for them. If I'm wrong, well, mea culpa. I guess. I'm a misanthropic hater of the glass teat and I don't really care. show less

Martian Time-Slip delves into schizophrenia and autism and oppression of natives in the context of Earth people colonizing Mars. The corruption of a local union leader and corporations back on Earth affect the lives of settlers just trying to find a way to economically survive on Mars, and the native "Bleekmen" who resemble Australian aborigines. The settlers try to get by either through skills such as the ability to repair malfunctioning machines, or trafficking in black market luxury goods like decent coffee, whiskey and food.

It may be that Mars is somehow increasing the incidence of schizophrenia and autism. Honest and elite repairman Jack Bohlen is struggling with his own schizophrenic episodes while trying to make his family's show more lives as normal as possible. "Anomalous" autistic boy Manfred may be able to see the future and even travel in time, making him of great interest to powerful Arnie Kott. Jack hopes to help Manfred escape his dark visions, but is at risk of being pulled under by the swimmer he's trying to save.

I wouldn't recommend this one as a starter PKD, but it's another entertaining thought-provoker that confirms this author's brilliance and staying power. Four stars. show less

I go into a Philip K. Dick expecting to have my mind twisted. Accordingly, I was disappointed as I started this novel. It read like a well-crafted, standard science fiction story set on Mars. Was it too early in his career? Was he still cutting his teeth and writing straight science fiction? Well, 1964 was slightly early in his career, but it was after The Cosmic Puppets. But I set this all aside and continued reading because it was good reading, if a little formulaic. Various characters were established (the housewife on Mars, the mechanic, the autistic child, the union boss) and their stories began intertwining nicely.

Then an interesting thing happened. I didn’t get back to the book for about week. No other reading, I just didn’t show more get any reading done for a week. I picked up where I left off, and had to check if I had the same book. I happened to pause just as Dick was about to spin the story on its head. It was Dick at his best, making me begin to wonder what was real (in his universe) and what I should believe. This is what Dick does so well – make you wonder if what he already told you is the truth, or what he is telling you now. And then there was the other fascinating level to the book wherein the main protagonist has battled and (apparently) won against schizophrenia – a disease that Dick was diagnosed (or mis-diagnosed – depending on what you read) as having. This is brought into the plot early and, recognizing Dick’s history, I was fascinated to see how he handled it. Then, as I have already mentioned, he turns the story on its head. And, as he always does, he made that alternate reality believable. Maybe, in this case, it was because he was writing (somewhat) about himself – but there appears to be a lot of himself in this book.

I think the one thing that amazes me most about Dick’s writing is that, in spite of the strange directions they take, he is still true enough to the content for me to feel content with the resolutions. The same is true for this story. It is a conclusion that makes sense to the content of the tale. And, once again, it is Dick forcing us to see things through a slightly skewed lens – one that doesn’t appear to be reality, but portrays it nonetheless show less