The Zap Gun

My copy of this book is one of the nice trade paperback editions published under the Bluejay imprint shortly after the author Philip K. Dick's death. It includes a thoughtful afterword by Maxim Jakubowsky, who was at that time working toward a biography of Dick. He notes that in a 1981 interview, Dick had called this book a "turkey" and expressed his dissatisfaction with it. It is interesting to see Jakubowsky pleading for Dick as an underrated talent even after the success of Blade Runner. One might fairly argue that transmedia reception of his stories and the durability of his epistemological themes have since made Dick as recognized as the any of "big three" of 20th-century sf.

The Zap Gun was written in the mid-1960s as Operation show more Plowshare shortly after The Penultimate Truth and at about the same time as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and it shows some of the same concerns. The 1985 edition appeared during the descending arc of the Cold War, and the novel is much preoccupied with that contest, continuing it through the story's setting of 2004. The "Plowshare agreement" involves the bilateral rehabilitation of military Keynesianism, repurposing new military technologies for peaceful purposes ("plowsharing" them) as quickly as they are produced.

The continual production of such devices relies on the imaginative faculties of scarce and privileged "weapons fashion designers," and the protagonist of the story is Lars Powderdry, the sole such designer for the Western bloc. He operates in the manner of a trance medium, going into profoundly altered states of consciousness to bring back sketches of new devices to be built as weapons, plowshared into consumer items, and mass produced. His trances are cultivated with a psychedelic drug regimen.

The story relies on a lot of future argot to characterize changed social conditions. Most important is the distinction between the elite cogs (presumably from "cognoscenti," although the pun is salient) and plebeian pursaps ("poor saps"). While the US police and espionage faculties of FBI and CIA have remained operative under UN-W Natsec, democratic governance in America has retreated into dysfunctional obscurity. Wes-bloc is run by General Nitz from a subterranean headquarters in Fortress Washington D.C.

The first half of the book--over which Dick later expressed such dismay--is mostly concerned to establish this setting and the mundane personal and professional challenges of Powderdry. The second half takes off with an emergency concerning an invasion by non-human extraterrestrials, and the plot is further complicated with time travel elements and Powderdry's infatuation with his opposite number in Peep-East, the eighteen-year-old weapons fashion designer Lilo Popchev.

One of the most metatextual and Phildickian touches is the in-story existence of a 3-D comic book called The Blue Cephalopod Man from Titan, "the lurid kind that wiggles when you look at it. I mean, the girls wiggle--breasts, pelvic area, all there is to wiggle. The monsters salivate" (173). This entertainment published for African readers has somehow predicted the specifics of many, if not all, of the designs from both Powderdry and Popchev. Or perhaps the designers were inspired by it, without ever having read a copy. The enigma is never fully resolved.

The Zap Gun is not a Dick novel of the first rank, but it is still highly readable, with scattered flashes of brilliance. show less

Though a serialized novel, The Zap Gun isn't as dry and long-winded as one would expect. Set in the past-future of 2004, the Cold War still rages on between the West (Wes-Bloc) and the East (Peep-East). Rather than using nuclear warfare, because it's like people hitting themselves over the head with a hammer, the weapons of the Cold War have developed with certain specializations in mind - missiles that exploded, land, and at 10pm emit loud noises for days on end, for example.

The story itself follows the premier weapons designers for both sides as they come together to figure out how to stop the invasion of an unknown alien force that seems to be arriving on Earth's doorstep. What is presented is a witty, quick-flowing novel full of show more humor and sarcasm directed at both the Cold War and, interestingly enough, our world today. Not just a novel of war-time humor, but a look at the way our world is run, from the Cogs (governments) to pursaps (pure saps - or, the average person), and from war toys to, well, toys. show less

Un mondo drogato di armi, diviso tra i cons, i capi occulti sui quali pesa l'onere della consapevolezza, e la gente comune, i fin troppo moderni consumatori. Un mondo nel quale persino i due blocchi storici sono fasulli e al servizio del mantenere la gente comune nel suo stato di non consapevolezza.
E al centro di tutto ciò ci sono i potentissimi sognatori d'armi, che attraverso la trance ipnotica progettano sempre nuove armi che mantengono nel popolino l'illusione della sicurezza.
Ma è tutto un bluff, è la metafora di un Dick straordinario che cerca di farci capire come il potere, soprattutto quello di stampo militare, cerchi in ogni modo di tenerci in ostaggio.

Set in a 2004 Cold War where the US and Sino-Soviet bloc, having ceased true arms production, secretly manufacture useless plowshare fashion-weaponry. Designer Lars Powderdry must combat a real alien threat, navigating intrigue and romance in this cynical, surreal exploration of the military-industrial complex.

The world is divided between Wes-Bloc and Peep-East, both pretending to arm themselves, while actually converting weapons into consumer products.

Lars Powderdry is a psychic weapon designer who creates designs while in a trance. When unknown aliens threaten Earth, the phony war becomes serious, forcing designers to create a real, functional weapon. He faces romantic and professional entanglements with his counterpart/competitor, show more Lilo Topchev. show less

In the afterword to the edition of The Zap Gun that I read, there is a quote from an interview with Philip K. Dick in which he calls it a terrible novel and says that, "[he] can't even understand the entire first half of it." This would be a surprising statement from almost any author, but it's especially illuminating coming from Dick, considering how confusing his fiction tends to be in general.

And The Zap Gun is, indeed, a confusing mess of a novel. It takes place in a future where, despite humanity having colonized most of the solar system, the Cold War between the Western democracies and the Eastern communist dictatorships has continued to escalate until the alliances of NATO and the Warsaw Pact have coalesced into giant nations, show more with both sides employing what can only be described as psychic weapon designers who go into trances and pull weapon schematics out of thin air. But secretly, the two sides have signed an agreement to make sure all these weapons are actually useless for their stated purpose, and instead are "plowshared" into mass-manufactured consumer junk. The so-called "cogs" who run the governments and industries of the world know the truth, but the vast majority of people ("pursaps", or "poor saps") have been fooled into believing that there are hundreds of incredible weapons at their government's disposal, ready to lay waste to their enemies if war should come.

The plot in itself is fairly straightforward. Alien satellites suddenly appear in Earth's orbit, seemingly out of nowhere. This creates a panic in both governments as they suddenly realize that, with the very real threat of an alien invasion upon them, they have no weapons with which to resist such an incursion. (I guess nukes don't count. Or maybe they've all been dismantled. It isn't really touched on in the book.) Thus the "weapon" designers of each government -- they only have one at a time, for some reason -- are forced to work together to attempt to devise a real weapon that can destroy the alien probes.

The protagonist of the novel is the Western bloc's weapon designer, Roy Lederby, a man completely out of his depth. Throughout the book he is manipulated by virtually everybody else, including his mistress, his government contacts, the Eastern government, and Lilo Topchev, the East bloc's weapon designer, a woman who Roy is unaccountably fascinated by despite not knowing anything about her.

The weapon that ultimately defeats the aliens turns out to be one of psychology rather than brute force. Unfortunately, like much of the book, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

There is also a fairly pointless subplot about a conservative gun-nut stereotype who gets randomly selected to be one of the "concomodies", the citizens who decide what the various parts of the weapons Lederby designs will be made into for the plowsharing program. It's pretty much just there for padding, but it does provide the only humor in the novel, so it isn't a complete waste of time.

While The Zap Gun has some interesting ideas, a lot of them get thrown away almost as soon as they are introduced. Characters appear and are dropped only to appear again a hundred pages later, and many of them lack any real characterization. The climax of the book relies on possibly the stupidest concept for a weapon ever conceived, and the ending seems to serve no purpose except to pave the way for a sequel that never materialized.

Bottom line: This is not one of PKD's better works. If you're already a PKD fan and are just wondering if you should bother with The Zap Gun, I would advise you to give it a try, but not to expect too much. If you've never read a novel by Mr. Dick, however, this is not the place to start. I'd advise you to try Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or Time Out of Joint. show less

My raw reactions on reading this book in 1990 -- spoilers follow:

In a certain sense, Dick’s negative assessment of the novel’s first half being utterly unreadable is correct. The opening is boring and confusing. We never do get a coherent explanation of “plowsharing”. It seems to be conversion of mass produced weapons’ components -- which seem to work -- into civilian consumer goods hence giving the illusion of security and providing an economic boost and salvation from the cost of the arms race.

Like The Penultimate Truth this is a fake Cold War perpetrated by the power elite of East and West for their benefit though it is unclear exactly what the populace believes to be true. Here the weapons are not those horrifying weapons show more of mass destruction of old but rather silly, if inventive weapons like the Garbage Can Banger that keeps the enemy awake, produce obnoxious odors, or merely mess up his bureaucratic records. That is a funny element.

I thought Surley G. Febbs was totally unnecessary to the plot but occasionally funny in his arrogance.

I thought the novel really only took off when Dick began to pile on the baroque, van Vogtian plot twists starting with the revelation that Powderdry and Lilo Topchev are not tapping into a mystical dimension with their trances but the mind of an obscure comic book artist. (Dick’s works of the period often seem to feature creative people in rather despised jobs). The book got really fun then. The toy designed to psychologically corrupt the enemy (here with “empathy”) is much like Dick’s “War Game” and a touch I liked along with that of the uncurious Sirians.

I found the relationship between Powderdry and Topchev (as many of the relationships between man and women in Dick’s works) strange, troubling, and realistic. While not as disturbing and memorable as Norbert Steiner’s suicide in Martian Time-Slip, Maren Faine’s suicide was moving. There are plenty of usual Dick touches: authoritarian states, private police forces, troubled relationships, peculiar plot twists, appearances questioned, fakes proposed, fakes debunked, and fakes reaffirmed. Dick called it his null-null Y plots after critic Warrick’s observation), and humor. show less

Cold-War paranoia fueled with Dick's intensive drive of science fiction, eccentric characters, and webs of alliances and partnerships. This book was a delightful surprise. I enjoyed the rapid pace of the plot and the way Dick maneuvers his characters with his story-line, slowly revealing more and more to entice the reader to continue the tale. Additionally, the dialogue in this book rang more true and I enjoyed all the little science fiction devices that Dick invented, and detailed, in this novel. Overall, a solid effort.

3.25 stars: worth reading.