Like Mayor Amalfi, James Blish has made the perilous crossing into another state of being, where perhaps little survives but mathematics. In the words of Browne, he is ‘by this time no Puny among the mighty Nations of the Dead; for tho’ he left this World not many Days past, yet every Hour you know largely addeth unto that dark Society; and considering the incessant Mortality of Mankind, you cannot conceive that there dieth in the whole Earth so few as a thousand an Hour.’
As for the works Blish left behind, there were, as we might anticipate, several that will remain incomplete and uncompleted; for those that are complete we must be grateful. At their best, the cadences of his prose are spare, capable of keeping us alive to the unsparing intellect behind them. His originality, his unquenchable thirst for knowledge, must always ensure that we remember his name when the rolls of leading science fiction writers are called; but he would seek no finer epitaph than that which one of his characters bestowed on mankind: ‘We did not have the time to learn everything that we wanted to know.’
‘The trail levelled out and became wider. And all was in shadow; cold and damp hung over everything, as if they were treading within a great tomb. The vegetation that grew thin and noxious along the surface of rocks had a dead quality to it, as if something had poisoned it in its act of growing. Ahead lay a dead bird on the path, a rotten corpse that might have been there for weeks; he could not tell.’
Arnie Kott is on his way back into a schizoid variant of the recent past. Philip K. Dick is in the middle of one of his most magical novels, Martian Time-Slip.[1]
The setting is Mars, which is now partly colonised. Colonists live along the water system, where conditions of near-fertility exist.
This web of civilisation is stretched thin over utter desolation. There is no guaranteeing that it can be maintained. Its stability is threatened by the Great Powers back on Earth. For years, they have neglected Mars, concentrating dollars and man-hours on further exploration elsewhere in the system; now they may interfere actively with the balance of the colony.
Behind this web exists another, even more tenuous: the web of human relationships. Men and women, children, old men, bleekmen – the autochthonous but non-indigenous natives of Mars – all depend, however reluctantly, on one another. When poor Norbert Steiner commits suicide, the effects of the event are felt by everyone.
Behind these two webs lies a third, revealed only indirectly. This is the web connecting all the good and bad things in the universe. The despised bleekmen, who tremble on the edge of greater knowledge than humanity, are acutely aware of this web and occasionally succeed in twitching a strand here and there, to their advantage; but they are as much in its toils as anybody else.
These three webs integrate at various coordinate points, the most remarkable point being AM-WEB, a complex structure which the UN may build some time in the future in the FDR Mountains. The structure is visible to Steiner’s autistic son, Manfred, who sees it in an advanced stage of decay.
Its function in the novel is to provide a symbol for the aspirations and failures of mankind. The structure will be a considerable achievement when completed; which is not to say that it is not ultimately doomed; and part of that doom may be decreed by the miserable political and financial manoeuvrings which form one of the minor themes of this intricately designed novel.
Martian Time-Slip comes from the middle of one of Dick’s most creative periods. The Man in the High Castle was published in 1962. In 1963 came The Game-Players of Titan and then, in 1964, The Simulacra, The Penultimate Truth, Clans of the Alphane Moon, and the present volume. Although Dick is a prolific author, with some thirty novels appearing in fifteen years, his production rate is modest when compared with many other writers in the prodigal field of science fiction.
One of the attractions of Dick’s novels is that they all have points at which they inter-relate, although Dick never reintroduces characters from previous books. The relationship is more subtle – more web-like – than that. There is a web in Clans of the Alphane Moon, made by ‘the world-spider as it spins its web of destruction for all life’. The way in which Mars in the present novel is parcelled up between various nationalities is reminiscent of the parcelling up of Earth into great estates in The Penultimate Truth, and The Game-Players of Titan. The horrifying corrupt world of Manfred’s schizophrenia, the realm of Gubble, reminds us of the tomb world into which John Isidore falls in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or of one of the ghastly fake universes of Palmer Eldritch in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. When Jack Bohlen, in the first few pages of the novel, awaits the arrival of his father from Earth, change is about to creep in; and change is often paradoxically embodied in someone or something old, like the Edwin N. Stanton lying wrapped up in newspaper in the back of Maury Rock’s Jaguar, in the opening pages of We Can Build You. And so on.
Such building blocks are by no means interchangeable from book to book; Dick’s kaleidoscope is always being shaken, new sinister colours and patterns continually emerge. The power in the Dickian universe resides in these blocks, rather than in his characters; even when one of the characters has a special power (like Jones’s ability to foresee the future in The World Jones Made) it rarely does him any personal good.
If we look at two of the most important of these building blocks and observe how they depend on each other for greatest effect, we come close to understanding one aspect of Dickian thought. These blocks are the concern-with-reality and the involvement-with-the-past.
Most of the characteristic themes of science fiction are materialist ones; only the concern-with-reality theme involves a quasimetaphysical speculation, and this theme Dick has made peculiarly his own. Among his earliest published stories is ‘Impostor’ (1953), in which a robot believes himself to be a man; the faking is so good that even he cannot detect the truth until the bomb within him is triggered by a phrase he himself speaks. Later, Dickian characters are frequently to find themselves trapped in hallucinations or fake worlds of various kinds, often without knowing it or, if knowing it, without being able to do anything about it. In The Man in the High Castle, the world we know – in which the Allies won World War II and the Axis Powers lost – is itself reduced to a hypothetical world existing only in a novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which the victorious Japanese and Germans have banned.
And it is not only worlds that are fake. Objects, animals, people, may also be unreal in various ways. Dick’s novels are littered with fakes, from the reproduction guns buried in rock in The Penultimate Truth which later are used, and so became genuine fakes, to the toad which can hardly be told from real in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, to the androids masquerading as human in the same novel. Things are always talking back to humans. Doors argue, medicine bags patronise, the cab at the end of Now Wait for Next Year advises Dr Eric Sweetscent to stay with his ailing wife. All sorts of drugs are available which lead to entirely imaginary universes, like the evil Can-D and Chew-Z used by the colonists on Mars in Palmer Eldritch, or the JJ-180 which is banned on Earth in Now Wait for Next Year.
The colonists on the Mars of this present novel use only the drugs available to us, though those are generally at hand – in the very opening scene we come across Silvia Bohlen doped up on phenobarbitone. Here the concern-with-reality theme is worked out through the timeslip of the title, and through the autistic boy, Manfred.
Manfred falls into the power of Arnie Kott, boss of the plumbing union which, because water is so scarce, has something of a stranglehold on Mars (a typical piece of wild Dickian ingenuity). Arnie worries a lot. He asks his bleekman servant, Helio, if he has ever been psychoanalysed.
‘No, Mister. Entire psychoanalysis is a vainglorious foolishness.’
‘Howzat, Helio?’
‘Question they never deal with is, what to remold sick person like. There is no what Mister.’
‘I don’t get you, Helio.’
‘Purpose