The Ganymede Takeover

This was the last PKD novel I still had on my to-read list, and I've got to say, I was pleasantly surprised. Going by the other reviews here, I was expecting this to be pretty terrible, but actually, I thought it was brilliant. Just maybe not for everybody.

A better title for this work would have been "Oblivion Therapy", after a mad psychologist character's magnum opus. Does that sound like a book you'd like to read? If so, go ahead. If you're looking to read about a Ganymedian invasion of Earth, then sorry. That's not what this is about. The outlandish monsters conjured up for a ground battle are only in like one scene. It's not about them at all.

My favorite part of the story has to be the worm/snake-type aliens, completely inhuman but show more still relatable. Their telepathic civilization is based on regular fusions of their minds into one "Common". One of the major characters stops fusing and develops a more human ego. It's left to us to decide whether this is a good or bad thing in principle.

The whole book is focused on the tension between the individual and the community, or in more extreme terms the self and the universe. The goal of transcendental meditation is to eliminate the self and embrace the universe as it is, with no worry or judgement or attachment. That's on the extreme end, obviously, and not workable for any length of time. But the other extreme is just as bad: complete egocentrism and isolation.

This book explores the horror of both extremes and winds everything up with an attempt at reconciling them into something like the "Middle Way" of Buddhism or Taoism, or just pragmatic moderation if that works better for you.

I read most of this while sick in bed with fever, so that may have had an effect on my interpretation, but it certainly left me with an uneasy feeling, at least. The story comes to a close, but we don't get a sense of finality like we've just won the Big War and everything's going to be OK now. That may leave some readers unsatisfied, but I just find it true to life. It's reassuring, in a way, the message that the struggle is unending but we can still find little chances to enjoy ourselves and appreciate the beauty of it all.

That's the optimistic pessimism that PKD never fails to deliver. Now that I've read all his novels, it's kind of sad there are no more to discover. Any suggestions for another author I could start obsessing over? show less

What a mixed bag Philip K. Dick was. it's very hard to take any of this pot-boiler with giant worms running the Earth seriously. It reads like his early "anything for a dollar" pulp, but appeared after some of his best work in the 1960s, including Man in the High Castle and Martian Time-Slip. According to the Intertubes, it began as a sequel the High Castle. The Nelson/Dick collaboration is seamless to my eye, and there are the usual Dick tropes -- philosophical taxicabs, psycho-babble, and illusion generating machines. But none of them catch hold, not even the loss of reality, in the way that those tropes do in the best of Dick.

For Dick completists.

Two authors. Both of them on drugs and a least one of them insane. This is an incompetently written novel.

The premise is that alien space worms have taken over the earth. The last hold-out against the invaders is a band of Nation of Islam guerrilla fighters who are holed up in the hills of Tennessee.

The novel is chock full of ideas, any one of which could be expanded in to novel of it’s own, but none of which appear to have any real connection to the plot in a way which brings meaning to the book. The most developed theme (if theme is a word that can be applied to this novel) is that of American racial politics. Do the authors have anything to say on the matter? I have no idea, and I’ve literally just finished reading it. You can show more look for meaning, but just when you think you’ve found it the authors will contradict themselves. They appear to be in as great a state of confusion as I am. Looking for meaning here is like looking for canals on Mars.

Early on in the novel we’re told that a precog has predicted that the occupation of earth will fail. So we’re in a deterministic universe. This immediately sucks all tension out of something about a struggle for survival. And we’re told this very early on so it must be important, yet it never has any impact on anything ever again. show less

Earth has been taken over by the highly intelligent serpent-like beings from Ganymede. All of civilized society is under their dominion - the only place left on earth that does not cowtow to the Ganys is rural Tennessee. The military administrator assigned to pacify Tennessee can't get the job done, so a civilian is brought in to quell the unreset. Unfortunately for Ganymede, this administrator becomes obsessed with the writings of a brilliant but deranged psychiatrist named Balkani. And the fate of two worlds rests in the disinterested hands of a former Gany sympathizer.

This was a very, very quick read - maybe four hours to go cover to cover. While there were some interesting ideas, I dislike Balkani being the sole source of everything show more associated with Earth's only hope: Percy's telepathy, the robots used to facilitate Percy and Jane's escape, the writings used to confound and corrupt Mekkis, and the ultimate weapon that ensures Earth's freedom. That seems to be an awful lot to come from a single man, no matter how brilliant or ground-breaking he may be.

The only thing that was slightly surprising at the end was the disposition of Gus. I had assumed he'd be dead - but he ends up getting what he wants but, of course, it's not going to be the way he wants it show less

This is just silly.

You can try making it something else – I notice a blog interpreting it as an allegory for the war in Vietnam – but it isn’t worth investing meaning into. Dick’s co-author, is in fact quoted as saying:

Since we were “only practicing” for “the big one”, we wrote the book we did in a spirit of almost hysterical hilarity, enclosing weird newspaper clippings and Beatle bubblegum cards in the installments of the ongoing story we mailed back and forth. When we met –first at his place in East Oakland and later at his other place in Marin County near the water, we often spent more time smoking grass, dropping acid and flirting with each others’ wives than working.

Rest here:


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Well, that was weird as all get out.

Une des particularités les plus frappantes de ce roman est le fait que touts les protagonistes sont incroyablement déplaisants. Si l'on peut apprécier leur but ultime (comment en serait -il autrement?) de libération de l'espèce humaine de la subjugation qui lui a été infligée, leur personnalité est si rebutante qu'on se complairait bien à les voir tous se faire sauter la gueule, du raciste fini qu'est Gus Swenesgard au fanatique paranoïaque et bourré de préjugés qu'est son adversaire, en passant par Balkani, qui semble un plaisir quasi sexuel à détruire la personnalité de quiconque lui est confié au bénéfice des envahisseur.

La conclusion est convenue, malgré des passage beaucoup plus originaux l'ayant précédée, show more et certains éléments sur lesquels la elle est basée ne sont jamais expliqués au lecteur, ce qui n'est non plus pour me satisfaire. show less