His output hit or miss, it’s easy to be skeptical cracking
open a book by Philip K. Dick. The
psychotic craziness of Dick’s personal life so often leaking into his writing,
on more than one occasion his works feature plots and themes derailed by a chaos
seemingly external to the text. In the rare moments Dick was able to focus
his drug and paranoia fueled energies into a synergistic story, the sci-fi
world benefited. Martian Time-slip, just falling shy of The Man in the High Castle or A Scanner Darkly, is one of these occasions.
The setting Mars thousands of years in the future,
the red planet is experiencing its second wave of civilization. The Bleekmen (Dick’s less than subtle name
for Africans) are being pushed to the wastelands while those of European
descent terraform the planet in capitalist fashion. The main character is Jack Bohlen, a
recovering schizophrenic electronics repairman (sound Dickian??) whose day to
day life can only be described as quotidian.
Spiritually and morally grey, his dull love affairs do not prevent him from sympathizing
with the Bleekmen, the group treated poorly by Union bosses like Arnie Kott. The moderately sized cast revealed slowly,
readers are eventually introduced to Bohlen’s bored wife, his uncle Leo the land
speculator, Otto the salesman, and Steiner the suicidal importer whose
autistic, perhaps schizophrenic son may hold the key to Kott’s plays for power
as Mars develops one parcel of land at a time.
Unlike such novels as Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said that feature plots wandering digressively, Dick maintains focus
throughout Martian Time-slip. Though
seeming to tread close to no-plot land on a couple of occasions, he never crosses the border. The conclusion fully
cohesive and satisfying, 1964 must have been a good year for Dick. Making this statement all the more
complimentary is the successful manner in which he experiments with the center of
the book’s narrative. Shifting
viewpoints like building blocks (imagine an asterisk), the resulting narrative structure
may look like an M.C. Escher creation, but is fully supportive of the story—a profitable
gamble that pays dividends at the conclusion.
Minor themes of Martian Time-slip include the
treatment of disabled children, suicide, schizophrenia, and artificial
intelligence (a la Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)—all under the
umbrella concept of colonial dystopia on Mars.
The main theme of the novel, however, is materialism (in the commercial
sense) versus traditional ways of life, particularly Africans and their
perennial philosophy. Like our world, encounters
between the development-minded colonists and the nomadic hunter-gatherer Bleekmen
prove awkward and one-sided. Though not
in-depth, Dick weaves voodoo magic, time warps, and wisdom of the ancients into
the novel’s satisfying conclusion, drawing in the ethnic concerns of his,
and unfortunately still, our time.
In the end, Martian Time-slip is in the upper
echelon of Dick novels. The story
well-conceived and presented, only typical Dickian complaints remain, e.g. poor
prose, wacky anachronisms, etc. These,
however, can be overlooked given the strength of the thought provoking storytelling. While stylistically perhaps most similar to Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, thematic content is, however, of a different mold. Ethnic values and capitalist conceits often
taking backseat roles in other Dick novels, they come to the forefront in Martian Time-slip. The result is story
featuring a dystopian Mars with many other elements Dick fans will enjoy,
paranoid schizophrenia, sentient androids, and for good measure, a little
voodoo…
