In this sardonically funny gem of speculative fiction, Philip K. Dick creates a novel that manages to be simultaneously unpredictable and perversel...
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Nov 17, 2011
Charles Dee
rated it: 
"Anyhow, Pete Garden, you were psychotic and drunk and on amphetamines and hallucinating, but basically you perceived the reality that confronts us..."
PKD must have dreamed that any one of his five wives or several girlfriends would one day sit across the breakfast table and speak those words to him. I don't know that he was ever psychotic, that term was tossed around differently in the 1960's than it would be today. But drunk and on amphetamines,? Yes. Hallucinating? During More...
PKD must have dreamed that any one of his five wives or several girlfriends would one day sit across the breakfast table and speak those words to him. I don't know that he was ever psychotic, that term was tossed around differently in the 1960's than it would be today. But drunk and on amphetamines,? Yes. Hallucinating? During More...
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Feb 13, 2009
D_Davis
rated it:
Very good.
Although, there are a few too many double-crosses at the end.
It's a solid mid-level PKD novel.
***
Almost finished with this one, and it is fantastic.
I am starting a months-long research project on PKD for an article I am writing examining Phil's obsession with the dark haired girl and what she represents in his stories.
It should be a fascinating study.
Although, there are a few too many double-crosses at the end.
It's a solid mid-level PKD novel.
***
Almost finished with this one, and it is fantastic.
I am starting a months-long research project on PKD for an article I am writing examining Phil's obsession with the dark haired girl and what she represents in his stories.
It should be a fascinating study.
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Mar 12, 2009
Jim
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It's the story of a future in which humans' ability to reproduce has become severely limited. At the same time, the gene which lets people age really slowly has been discovered. This results in a very sparsely populated world in which a person might have a whole town to himself.
On top of that, Earth has been conquered by the Titanians, or "vugs" as they are perjoratively called. These overlords encourage humans to play a bluffing board game that they like, simply called Blu More...
On top of that, Earth has been conquered by the Titanians, or "vugs" as they are perjoratively called. These overlords encourage humans to play a bluffing board game that they like, simply called Blu More...
Nov 19, 2011
Felix
rated it: 
Война землян против захватчиков с Титана закончилась очень быстро. Просто в один прекрасный день красные китайцы шарахнули по врагу своей химической бомбой, и человечество после этого фактически прекратило свое существование. Выжившие после этого армагеддона представители людской расы обнаружили со временем, что радиация почти убила у них возможность к размножению. В подобной ситуации оккупировавшие планету титанийцы-вуги проявили неожиданное благородство и стали оказывать людям посильную помощь
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Aug 18, 2011
Sandy
rated it:
Philip K. Dick's 10th novel, "The Game-Players of Titan," was originally released in 1963 as an Ace paperback (F-251, for all the collectors out there), with a cover price of a whopping 40 cents. His follow-up to the Hugo Award-winning "The Man in the High Castle," it was one of six novels that Phil saw published from 1962-'64, during one of the most sustained and brilliant creative bursts in sci-fi history. Like so many of the author's works, the action in "Game-Players
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Jun 16, 2010
Eric
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The Game-Players of Titan is a book without a solid structure, which is why it falls apart towards the end, but the first 3/4s of the book are fantastic.
PKD is not at his preachiest, and there is almost no mention of religion, but The Game has taken on the importance of a religion.
Humans and Vugs from Titan went to war a century ago. The Vugs won with a little help from the Red Chinese and the fact that they are all psychics.
In an effort to repopulate the wo More...
PKD is not at his preachiest, and there is almost no mention of religion, but The Game has taken on the importance of a religion.
Humans and Vugs from Titan went to war a century ago. The Vugs won with a little help from the Red Chinese and the fact that they are all psychics.
In an effort to repopulate the wo More...
Nov 21, 2011
Randy
rated it: 
I've only read one other novel by Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, but based on these two novels, I'm not really that interested in his writing. The Game-Players of Titan is strong on plot but weak on characterization. The book has too many characters, all of whom are pretty one-dimensional, and it switches perspectives from character to character too often. The book does present several intriguing ideas, like the post-apocalyptic world with a tiny population, the game of "
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Nov 18, 2010
Marko
rated it:
Written to swallow as always. Telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis and even interplanetar psychokinesis between humans and Titanians, called vugs, in a form of gamble-wars. Interesting look through the eye of a vug close to the end of a novel. Interplanetar and interracial cultural differences. I also notice the same character cast like in his previous two novels. Main character is male and confused, have a business partner in hard times, in love with weird but strong and much younger female a
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Aug 03, 2008
Debbie
rated it:
A bit short, but thoroughly enjoyable.
After the Earth is devastated by a biological weapon, the vugs from Titan come to help--or is that why they're here? Or is there a sinister plot to 'win' the entire Earth in "The Game", a plot opposed only by Earth's few Psionics?
The Game, a version of Monopoly played for real real estate is also part of an attempt to breed more humans to repair the shattered population. Lives extended by the removal of a gland, humans swa More...
After the Earth is devastated by a biological weapon, the vugs from Titan come to help--or is that why they're here? Or is there a sinister plot to 'win' the entire Earth in "The Game", a plot opposed only by Earth's few Psionics?
The Game, a version of Monopoly played for real real estate is also part of an attempt to breed more humans to repair the shattered population. Lives extended by the removal of a gland, humans swa More...
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Jun 21, 2008
Jonathan
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This is typical of a mid-level Philip K. Dick novel: not quite sociologically original or narratively innovative enough to be brilliant, but neither incoherent, sloppy, nor silly enough to qualify as a failure. The material mostly draws on obsessions and motifs that Dick has done much better with elsewhere: an emotionally detached everyman anti-hero and pawn of unseen forces, an improvised suburban post-apocalyptic society featuring swinging couples that intermingle their figurative sex games wi
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Feb 25, 2008
Mike
rated it:
In the future there’s nothing more important the board game ‘Bluff’. A great war with the Vugs, an alien race from the planet Titan, has seriously decimated the human race. Mankind finds a way to win a decisive victory against the Vugs, but at the cost of infertility throughout the majority of those few humans who survive the conflict. There really are no more than a few thousand Americans left on the planet. They spend most of their time playing Bluff, those that have no psi-ability - psis are
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Dec 29, 2011
Paul
rated it:
This is another of Philip K. Dick's paranoid fantasies. This isn't as good a mind bender as is Do Andriods Dream of Electric Sheep, but still a page turner regardless. The actual game resembles the game of life, only you can catch other people bluffing or making things up. The Titans are obesessed with the game as they are obessessed with human beings. I really hoped this would end with the most obvious mind bender, but it doesn't. Still an interesting reading experince.
Feb 10, 2011
Clark
rated it:
Dick was a mentally plaugued man, and his unique affliction was a sort of hyper-perception. This story is not nearly so dark as some others, but the idea of a doomed world whose final inhabitants jockey for position and status in a silly, dishonest, and rigged game is not just a fine science fiction story, it's also pure, venomous allegory. PKD's insight was a penetrating and radioactive Xray. It burned the world and eventually it fried him alive. Genius as curse.
Feb 26, 2011
Rafael
rated it:
Entertaining, but the story line can be unnecessarily confusing sometimes. One thing I liked about the book is how humans endowed with the ability to foresee the future (or pre-cogs, as they are called) visualize future possibilities at different degrees of clarity, depending on how probable the events are. As time ticks by, some outcomes become more likely and therefore more nitid in the pre-cogs' minds, while others are dumped on the growing pile of impossible outcomes.
Mar 28, 2011
Rainbowgardener
rated it:
I usually like Philip K. Dick, but somehow this one didn't move me very much. The premise of the Game, sort of real life Monopoly should have been more intriguing, but the game play, the use of the bluff, etc wasn't elaborated enough to be very involving. Characters are kind of pathetic people, the aliens ("vugs" which I found a dumb and irritating name) aren't very believable and the end kind of gets sloppy and rambles off.
Jul 19, 2011
Mike
rated it:
I was inspired to read this as my next PKD after seeing a bunch of Settlers of Catan players get together on a rainy afternoon in a Cosi's in NYC. Not the best PKD, especially in the last half, though the first half is great. However it does have plenty of my favorite PKD feature: complicated internal monologues and thought processes that really bring home the author's own paranoias and instabilities but represent his own, unique method of characterization. I'm still happy I have plenty of PKD
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Jan 24, 2009
Jesse
rated it:
Big fan of Philip Dick. I held off to read this one for years since it's an older one (1963) and sometimes his older ones are duds. I was pleasantly surprised. As is often the case with Dick the characters are one-dimensional. Love the details though. Like the vug stick. A household implement used to prod uncooperative alien vugs out of one's domestic space.
Jul 27, 2011
weird future where humans are becoming sterile - and they have to, by law, copulate with lots of diferent people , one per week, to spark a human life. the game of the title is the random lottery of who u get to sleep with and where in the world that takes you. basic PDick reality merge plot as well.
7/10
7/10
Jan 16, 2012
Melby
rated it:
I wasn't entirely sure about this book when I first started reading, but after getting a little into it I was caught up, and ended up enjoying it quite a bit. I liked how things unfolded slowly and so you weren't sure of everything that was going on, but had to be brought up to speed as the story went along.
May 01, 2009
David
rated it:
Interesting and weird, as expected from this author. The game (and situation) bears some resemblance to "The Days of Perky Pat". I would like to have seen more development of the game-playing rather than a direction reminiscent of Heinlein's "The Puppet Masters", but I'm not the author.
Aug 18, 2009
Tim
rated it:
I learned SO much from this book! Like how mind-numbingly bad so much of Dick's prose is. Like how irreducibly odd Dick's imagination was. Like how NOT to write good sci-fi, but maybe how TO write a twisted work bristling with infernal fires, or something....
May 03, 2011
Jeff
rated it:
This was a pretty cool excursion into the sci-fi brilliance of P K Dick, even if it didn't bring in quite as many crazy ideas as some of his other books. Secretly, I believe that the Game Players of Titan were playing Trump: The Game.
Apr 30, 2009
Dan
rated it:
I liked this book. It was paced nicely and was full of the standard PKD tricks. I still think I prefer Ubik and Do Androids Dream... I never felt as paranoid reading this as I did in the other two books. I am definitely looking forward to reading more PKD.
Sep 20, 2011
Brett
rated it:
Not the strongest but still interesting. I liked the interactions between the people in this more than some of his other works but it still lacked the depth and immersion necessary to make it an essential book.
Jun 25, 2009
Norah
rated it:
Definitely not my favorite Philip K. Dick book but, as always, he paints a very vivid picture of his future society and provides lots of fun stuff like sentient cars/appliances with major attitudes. It did leave an impact on my life in that it's given me a new user name for online activities: PrettyBlueFox, stolen from the name of the main characters' gaming syndicate.
Mar 02, 2011
Sean
rated it:
Full of PKD's favorite ideas: paranoia, uncertainty of identity, aliens, drugs, pre-cogs, and talking cars/medicine cabinets/etc. For the most part a fun little read that maybe goes off the rails a bit by the end. Not one of his very best, but a good one.
Oct 08, 2011
Martina
rated it:
This is one of my favorite novels by P.K. Dick. Perhaps it's not one of his best, but it's lively, fast-paced and an overall delightful read. The novel incorporates many of Dick's leitmotives - (not so benevolent) aliens, the possible eradication of the human race, drugs, mind control and all that jazz.
As some of his other novels, this one is also pretty much insane. Dick is one of the rare writers who can establish crazy connections between people and events, and he does that very skillful More...
As some of his other novels, this one is also pretty much insane. Dick is one of the rare writers who can establish crazy connections between people and events, and he does that very skillful More...
Nov 26, 2010
I've only read around 1/3 of this book, but its a great book. If you are a Sci-Fi fan or like fiction with a political purpose then I definitely recommend this and any book by Philip K. Dick.
Feb 06, 2011
Chris
rated it:
Mind-bending and awesome. With everything you expect from a Philip K Dick novel: A setting and plot which shifts and dissolves, characters with shifting memories and powers of perception, and basically a book which goes from very cool to increasingly challenging and crazy. No point in discussing whether this is among his best, they are all great.
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Dec 23, 2010
Sonic
rated it:
Excellent! Touches on most of Dicks favorite themes, questions of identity and self, pre-cognition and fate, aliens and humans and imposters, depression and drugs, and as you might have surmised from the title, ... game-playing!
With interesting and even likable characters, this is a tight and well-crafted work.
With interesting and even likable characters, this is a tight and well-crafted work.
