false 3 0 false false Thu Mar 12 12:08:30 -0700 2009 Thu Mar 12 12:27:07 -0700 2009
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 Bluff, and gamble cities and wives on it. The exchange of properties they could care less about. What the Titanians want is to match as many different pairs of mates together to get them to reproduce. Some humans don't mind this either.

It starts off quite tight, ends a bit sloppily, much like many of Dick's second-tier books. Still, it's a mostly enjoyable book. He's an entertaining futurist that somehow always gets in some future verisimilitude that holds up now, even though he was writing in the sixties.

The book contains a lot of tropes that Dick commonly works with:

- Questionable perception, unreliable narrators.
- Who are the aliens or robots among us?
- Precogs and the consequences of knowing the future.
- Which side is for us?
- Drugs are trouble, but also useful psionic enhancers.

It's definitely enjoyable, but don't expect an ending that makes total sense. Still, it's not total nonsense like Valis or something.]]>