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The Man Who Japed
In The Man Who Japed, a world that has survived a nuclear holocaust has given way to a rigid system of oppressive morality. Highly mobile and miniature robots monitor the behavior of every citizen, and the slightest transgression can spell personal doom. Allen Purcell is one of the few people who has the capacity to literally change the way of the world, and once he's offered a high-profile job that acts as guardian of public ethics, he sets out to do precisely that, but first he has to deal with the head in his closet.
168 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1956
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2067 people want to read
About the author
Philip K. Dick
2,005 books22.4k followersPhilip Kindred Dick was a prolific American science fiction author whose work has had a lasting impact on literature, cinema, and popular culture. Known for his imaginative narratives and profound philosophical themes, Dick explored the nature of reality, the boundaries of human identity, and the impact of technology and authoritarianism on society. His stories often blurred the line between the real and the artificial, challenging readers to question their perceptions and beliefs.
Raised in California, Dick began writing professionally in the early 1950s, publishing short stories in various science fiction magazines. He quickly developed a distinctive voice within the genre, marked by a fusion of science fiction concepts with deep existential and psychological inquiry. Over his career, he authored 44 novels and more than 100 short stories, many of which have become classics in the field.
Recurring themes in Dick's work include alternate realities, simulations, corporate and government control, mental illness, and the nature of consciousness. His protagonists are frequently everyday individuals—often paranoid, uncertain, or troubled—caught in surreal and often dangerous circumstances that force them to question their environment and themselves. Works such as Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and A Scanner Darkly reflect his fascination with perception and altered states of consciousness, often drawing from his own experiences with mental health struggles and drug use.
One of Dick’s most influential novels is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which served as the basis for Ridley Scott’s iconic film Blade Runner. The novel deals with the distinction between humans and artificial beings and asks profound questions about empathy, identity, and what it means to be alive. Other adaptations of his work include Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle, each reflecting key elements of his storytelling—uncertain realities, oppressive systems, and the search for truth. These adaptations have introduced his complex ideas to audiences well beyond the traditional readership of science fiction.
In the 1970s, Dick underwent a series of visionary and mystical experiences that had a significant influence on his later writings. He described receiving profound knowledge from an external, possibly divine, source and documented these events extensively in what became known as The Exegesis, a massive and often fragmented journal. These experiences inspired his later novels, most notably the VALIS trilogy, which mixes autobiography, theology, and metaphysics in a narrative that defies conventional structure and genre boundaries.
Throughout his life, Dick faced financial instability, health issues, and periods of personal turmoil, yet he remained a dedicated and relentless writer. Despite limited commercial success during his lifetime, his reputation grew steadily, and he came to be regarded as one of the most original voices in speculative fiction. His work has been celebrated for its ability to fuse philosophical depth with gripping storytelling and has influenced not only science fiction writers but also philosophers, filmmakers, and futurists.
Dick’s legacy continues to thrive in both literary and cinematic spheres. The themes he explored remain urgently relevant in the modern world, particularly as technology increasingly intersects with human identity and governance. The Philip K. Dick Award, named in his honor, is presented annually to distinguished works of science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States. His writings have also inspired television series, academic studies, and countless homages across media.
Through his vivid imagination and unflinching inquiry into the nature of existence, Philip K. Dick redefined what science fiction could achieve. His work continues to challenge and inspire, offering timeless insights into the human condition a
Raised in California, Dick began writing professionally in the early 1950s, publishing short stories in various science fiction magazines. He quickly developed a distinctive voice within the genre, marked by a fusion of science fiction concepts with deep existential and psychological inquiry. Over his career, he authored 44 novels and more than 100 short stories, many of which have become classics in the field.
Recurring themes in Dick's work include alternate realities, simulations, corporate and government control, mental illness, and the nature of consciousness. His protagonists are frequently everyday individuals—often paranoid, uncertain, or troubled—caught in surreal and often dangerous circumstances that force them to question their environment and themselves. Works such as Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and A Scanner Darkly reflect his fascination with perception and altered states of consciousness, often drawing from his own experiences with mental health struggles and drug use.
One of Dick’s most influential novels is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which served as the basis for Ridley Scott’s iconic film Blade Runner. The novel deals with the distinction between humans and artificial beings and asks profound questions about empathy, identity, and what it means to be alive. Other adaptations of his work include Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle, each reflecting key elements of his storytelling—uncertain realities, oppressive systems, and the search for truth. These adaptations have introduced his complex ideas to audiences well beyond the traditional readership of science fiction.
In the 1970s, Dick underwent a series of visionary and mystical experiences that had a significant influence on his later writings. He described receiving profound knowledge from an external, possibly divine, source and documented these events extensively in what became known as The Exegesis, a massive and often fragmented journal. These experiences inspired his later novels, most notably the VALIS trilogy, which mixes autobiography, theology, and metaphysics in a narrative that defies conventional structure and genre boundaries.
Throughout his life, Dick faced financial instability, health issues, and periods of personal turmoil, yet he remained a dedicated and relentless writer. Despite limited commercial success during his lifetime, his reputation grew steadily, and he came to be regarded as one of the most original voices in speculative fiction. His work has been celebrated for its ability to fuse philosophical depth with gripping storytelling and has influenced not only science fiction writers but also philosophers, filmmakers, and futurists.
Dick’s legacy continues to thrive in both literary and cinematic spheres. The themes he explored remain urgently relevant in the modern world, particularly as technology increasingly intersects with human identity and governance. The Philip K. Dick Award, named in his honor, is presented annually to distinguished works of science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States. His writings have also inspired television series, academic studies, and countless homages across media.
Through his vivid imagination and unflinching inquiry into the nature of existence, Philip K. Dick redefined what science fiction could achieve. His work continues to challenge and inspire, offering timeless insights into the human condition a
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 232 reviews
March 8, 2025
If ever a Philip K. Dick novel needs to be made into a film by the Coen Brothers, it is The Man Who Japed.
This is Dick’s brilliant, quirky tribute to Dostoyevsky, I loved it.
In the VALIS trilogy, Dick demonstrated that he is a master at that most oblique of sub-genres, theological science fiction. Here, he displays his virtuosity with a swaggering, lighthearted tale of pranks and a solemn message, like a schizophrenic reading Shakespeare while listening to The Grateful Dead and watching Animal House.
Eclectic, confusing, and thoroughly entertaining. Kilgore Trout speaks with the voice of Raskolnikov, and he tells a joke.
Dick also pays homage to James Joyce and borrows themes from Bradbury. This is the story of a future where the morality reclamation, Morec, force has taken over, but our hero is not ready to give in just yet.
Written 13 years before Ubik, Dick’s masterpiece, this has some of the same tone and images that would come to fruition in the later work by a more mature writer.
The final scenes are a rare gem, classic PKD but having fun.
*** 2025 reread -
First published in 1956, this is one of his earlier, good books. To be fair, they’re all good in their way but when Phil was on he was very good and he shows some signs here of how good he could be.
PKD fans will recognize several ubiquitous themes in his cannon but the dystopian idea of morality reclamation was delicious and the concepts of media manipulation from the 50s was particularly intriguing considering the Cold War perspective.
Classic Phil.
This is Dick’s brilliant, quirky tribute to Dostoyevsky, I loved it.
In the VALIS trilogy, Dick demonstrated that he is a master at that most oblique of sub-genres, theological science fiction. Here, he displays his virtuosity with a swaggering, lighthearted tale of pranks and a solemn message, like a schizophrenic reading Shakespeare while listening to The Grateful Dead and watching Animal House.
Eclectic, confusing, and thoroughly entertaining. Kilgore Trout speaks with the voice of Raskolnikov, and he tells a joke.
Dick also pays homage to James Joyce and borrows themes from Bradbury. This is the story of a future where the morality reclamation, Morec, force has taken over, but our hero is not ready to give in just yet.
Written 13 years before Ubik, Dick’s masterpiece, this has some of the same tone and images that would come to fruition in the later work by a more mature writer.
The final scenes are a rare gem, classic PKD but having fun.
*** 2025 reread -
First published in 1956, this is one of his earlier, good books. To be fair, they’re all good in their way but when Phil was on he was very good and he shows some signs here of how good he could be.
PKD fans will recognize several ubiquitous themes in his cannon but the dystopian idea of morality reclamation was delicious and the concepts of media manipulation from the 50s was particularly intriguing considering the Cold War perspective.
Classic Phil.
May 27, 2019
A Freudian Future
Sigmund Freud published his Civilization and Its Discontents in 1930. 25 years later P. K. Dick wrote The Man Who Japed. Both cover the same ground: the impossible paradox of an independent mind in a society which both promotes it and suppress it. And it looks like Dick liked what Freud had to say. Freud was concerned with the remarkable tendency of people, who ostensibly value their freedom, to band together in order to restrict not only other people’s freedom but also their own. Dick has the same concern but in reverse, namely the non-rational impulse of an individual, who is highly successful in a rigid and moralistic society, to subvert it.
Dick’s protagonist, Allen, lives in a future-world which through technology is insulated from the effects of Nature. The Earth is entirely civilised, that is, covered by one vast city. All its needs are supplied by colonial producers of food and resources spread throughout the galaxy. Its government is a sort of socialist/capitalist/corporatist melange, the policies of which are primarily those of a 1950’s conservative America. Any behaviour outside the norms of strict Calvinism result in censure and possible exile to the colonies at the discretion of the rather Maoist local block committees.
Allen, unaccountably even to himself, has committed clandestinely the highest form of sacrilege, the obscene defacement of a statue of the founding father of this society of Moral Reclamation (Morec). Simultaneously, he is offered the very senior government post as head of all TeleMedia for Morec. He recognises his situation as one of neurotic contradiction, what Freud might diagnose as a battle between the primitive id and the culturally-determined superego for control over his ego.
In his new position of power, Allen is torn between what Freud calls Eros, the drive to form community with others, and Thanatos, the drive to destroy those who are not part of one’s community. For Allen, these latter include his former competitive business rivals. Caught between these two forces, Allen feels just how Freud predicted: guilty.
Allen in fact seeks assistance at the Resort, a psycho-analytical exception to the strict social oeuvre of mutual criticism dominant in the rest of Morec culture. The founder’s wife, a devotee of Jung as it happens, had insisted on making such an island of honest communication available as a sort of cultural safety valve. Employees of the Resort are forbidden from proselytising their psychiatric services but word inevitably leaks out to those who can afford the fees. And Allen of course can.
The employees of the Resort know something that Freud knew but that most of the other residents of Earth do not, namely that societies as well as individuals can become neurotic, pathologically imbalanced in their mechanisms for reconciling Eros and Thanatos, the collective id and super-ego. Societies cannot be aware of their guilt in the same way that individuals can; but they can demonstrate the same kinds of destructive responses to this guilt. Through the Resort, Allen gets to understand the literally cosmic import of his own feelings.
The revival of hyper-conservative Trumpian Republican culture in the US provides at least one good reason for returning to Dick as a prophet of the absurd. He’s probably a better social analyst than any professional sociologist. And he’s certainly more readable than Freud.
Sigmund Freud published his Civilization and Its Discontents in 1930. 25 years later P. K. Dick wrote The Man Who Japed. Both cover the same ground: the impossible paradox of an independent mind in a society which both promotes it and suppress it. And it looks like Dick liked what Freud had to say. Freud was concerned with the remarkable tendency of people, who ostensibly value their freedom, to band together in order to restrict not only other people’s freedom but also their own. Dick has the same concern but in reverse, namely the non-rational impulse of an individual, who is highly successful in a rigid and moralistic society, to subvert it.
Dick’s protagonist, Allen, lives in a future-world which through technology is insulated from the effects of Nature. The Earth is entirely civilised, that is, covered by one vast city. All its needs are supplied by colonial producers of food and resources spread throughout the galaxy. Its government is a sort of socialist/capitalist/corporatist melange, the policies of which are primarily those of a 1950’s conservative America. Any behaviour outside the norms of strict Calvinism result in censure and possible exile to the colonies at the discretion of the rather Maoist local block committees.
Allen, unaccountably even to himself, has committed clandestinely the highest form of sacrilege, the obscene defacement of a statue of the founding father of this society of Moral Reclamation (Morec). Simultaneously, he is offered the very senior government post as head of all TeleMedia for Morec. He recognises his situation as one of neurotic contradiction, what Freud might diagnose as a battle between the primitive id and the culturally-determined superego for control over his ego.
In his new position of power, Allen is torn between what Freud calls Eros, the drive to form community with others, and Thanatos, the drive to destroy those who are not part of one’s community. For Allen, these latter include his former competitive business rivals. Caught between these two forces, Allen feels just how Freud predicted: guilty.
Allen in fact seeks assistance at the Resort, a psycho-analytical exception to the strict social oeuvre of mutual criticism dominant in the rest of Morec culture. The founder’s wife, a devotee of Jung as it happens, had insisted on making such an island of honest communication available as a sort of cultural safety valve. Employees of the Resort are forbidden from proselytising their psychiatric services but word inevitably leaks out to those who can afford the fees. And Allen of course can.
The employees of the Resort know something that Freud knew but that most of the other residents of Earth do not, namely that societies as well as individuals can become neurotic, pathologically imbalanced in their mechanisms for reconciling Eros and Thanatos, the collective id and super-ego. Societies cannot be aware of their guilt in the same way that individuals can; but they can demonstrate the same kinds of destructive responses to this guilt. Through the Resort, Allen gets to understand the literally cosmic import of his own feelings.
The revival of hyper-conservative Trumpian Republican culture in the US provides at least one good reason for returning to Dick as a prophet of the absurd. He’s probably a better social analyst than any professional sociologist. And he’s certainly more readable than Freud.
Read
May 23, 2019
Wow! I was really taken by this early PKD.
Published in 1956 when the author was age twenty-eight, this post-nuclear devastation tale contains all sorts of ideas and themes as relevant today as back then. There’s so much going on, I’ll jump right to my top seven list a reader can look forward to when cracking the pages of The Man Who Japed. For both avid sf fans and all other readers, this novel is so worth it.
1. Newer York - New York City in the year 2114, decades following a worldwide nuclear holocaust. The only grass growing for hundreds of miles is located in The Park of the Spire (formally Central Park) and Long Island is now Hokkaido, a vast radioactive expanse of rubble forcing its handful of residents to reside in subsurface fallout shelters. Oh, Hokkaido, home of the nonconformist, those rugged souls who refuse to join their fellow Newer Yorkers in living under a totalitarian-like moral system known as Morec.
2. Major Streiter - A genius at orchestrating media from South Africa (spooky likeness to Rupert Murdock), the leader and guiding light in establishing the moral foundation of this futuristic society. A large statue of Major Streiter is located in The Park of the Spire, the moral and spiritual center for Newer Yorkers. Major Jules Streiter also founded the worldwide media conglomerate known as Telemedia (again, spooky likeness to Murdock’s News Corp, owners of FOX and many other worldwide media).
3. Block Wardens - In this highly moral society, each city block has its Block Warden heading a Parent Citizens Committee overseeing and judging the activities of people residing within the city block. Predictably, Block Wardens tend to be prissy older women forever pointing the finger at younger men and women engaged in illicit sexual activity or unacceptable displays of emotion or unaccounted for visits beyond the city block. Sound suffocating? This 2114 society is rigid, unfeeling and nearly 100% numbed out.
4. Juveniles – Technically sophisticated monitoring devices, 18 inches long, that look like thin insects. These mechanical creatures see all and hear all and record the speech and actions of all citizens within society. Juveniles usually operate in packs and can move along the ground or up and down walls at incredible speed. The Block Wardens and Parent Citizens Committees will play back what the juveniles have recorded during one of their sessions. In other words, if anybody does anything outside the moral code (the Morec), their misconduct will be recorded by a juvenile so the committee can dish out the offender's appropriate punishment.
5. Cohorts - A body of bland, humorless men that appear to crawl all over the city. These male decedents of Major Streiter wear drab khaki uniforms and function as both security guards and chauffeurs for the people at the top. I'm quite sure it's no accident PKD has these Cohorts outfitted in light brown uniforms reminiscent of Hitler’s Brownshirts.
6. The Domino Method - In this society the general assumption is that individuals believe what their assigned group believes, no more or no less. An individual who thinks or acts independently upsets the “block domino” and is automatically suspect and probably will be ostracized and sent to join other dissenters on a distant colony planet. Such is the current culture: either be exactly like us or we’ll judge you as mentally unfit or an egghead or oddball and kick you off our planet. And worst of all is to be judged a Noose, that is, one whose thinking is so bizarre, there must be a brain defect - ergo automatic expulsion.
7. Allen Purcell - the novel’s man character and hero. Allen is a man in conflict. He’s interested in working for the greatest good of society and wants to continue his family tradition of owning a premier apartment overlooking the park (picture a prime 5th Ave apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan overlooking Central Park) but, but, but, on some level, Allen is also aware something is terribly wrong with a civilization based on Morec. Indeed, Allen senses the whole moral system developed by Major Streiter and enforced by such as Block Wardens, committees, juveniles and cohorts is not the world he would like to live in.
The story opens when Allen Purcell walks into his apartment in the morning with mud and red paint on his shoes. Turns out, under cover of darkness the previous night, he japed the statue of Major Streiter in the park. As Allen explains to his wife Janet, “jape” is a term used back when he was working on the assembly line: “When a theme is harped on too much you get parody. When we make fun of a stale theme we say we’ve japed it.” And the exact manner in which Allen japed the statue was to smear it with red paint and then take a power saw and slash it, severing its head, placing the head in Major Streiter’s outstretched hand and reposition a leg so it appears the headless major is about to give his very own head a good kick as if a goalie kicking a soccer ball. So the question is: Why would he do such a thing? After all, he has so much to lose.
Coincidentally, when Allen arrives at his office at Allen Purcell, Inc. where he heads up a research agency staffed by artists, historians, dramatists and other creative types attempting to accurately anticipate future trends by thinking out of the box, an executive from the largest media company in the world, Telemedia, which also happens to be his sole client, is waiting to offer him the top position with her company. Wow! Now that’s something! Allen would get the most powerful job on the planet at age twenty-nine.
The next day Allen leaves a message that he’ll need a number of days to think the offer over, after all, he has so much independence where he is. And in his own mind, Allen still has to figure out why he japed the statue of Major Streiter. We as readers are given a clue why Allen did his japing – when he is under the influence of a psychoanalyst’s drug propelling Allen back on that night where he relives the sequence of events.
As we learn, Allen visited a couple of creative intellectuals in Hokkaido where he was given a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. He reads a few lines and is deeply affected, much more than he himself realizes at the time. And when he is told that all of James Joyce’s books have been burned and banished from Morec, Allen feels deeply wounded. Shortly thereafter, he makes a beeline for the statue.
You will have to read this early PKD classic for yourself to see how it all plays out. Let me conclude with a bold statement: the scene of Allen Purcell discovering the elegance, beauty and truth in the writing of James Joyce is one of the most moving scenes I’ve encountered in all of literature.
American Science Fiction author Philip K. Dick, 1928-1982
November 4, 2021
The Man Who Japed teaches a lesson every New Yorker already knows: When you’ve got a halfway decent apartment, hold on to it at all costs.
It’s almost funny how prescient Dick was about apartments. The unit Allen and Janet Purcell live in could easily be a contemporary microapartment. And the space-saving automation that allows furniture to slip in and out of the living space is already being featured in some of the newly designed microapartments.
But of course, the tiny apartment is not the main point of Dick’s story. The Man Who Japed is about McCarthyism and the witchhunts that invaded the private lives of ordinary citizens. It’s about a moral code enforced by busybodies who peer into every aspect of their neighbors’ personal lives. And it’s about the alternative to this society ~ which is just as unsatisfying.
I was impressed that Dick rejected the Resort just as thoroughly as he rejected the Morec society. It’s easy to reject the Morec society. Who would want mandatory meetings where you get called out for your moral lapses in front of all of your neighbors? But the Resort is not desirable either. Dick mocks the psychology and parapsychology of the Resort just as ruthlessly as he mocks the values of the Morec society.
So what is Dick’s solution? Humor, of course. Allen Purcell’s prank is a spontaneous act. He is not even aware of what he is doing. Yet it is his rebellion. The joke, in all its beautiful irrationality, is natural human creativity breaking through the Morec society’s artificially-imposed restrictions on thought and behavior. It is a subversive act, not just because it involves vandalism, but because it rejects the false dilemma of the Morec society and the Resort.
What will the new society look like if Purcell succeeds in undermining the Morec society? There is one example of true morality in The Man Who Japed and it gives me reason to hope for the best with the new society. It is Mr. Wales and his attack of conscience.
Mr. Wales is the little old man who always stood up for Allen at the block meetings. He finally gets the apartment he long desired, but as he tries to enjoy his good fortune, he realizes the price he has paid. He is no longer a member of Allen’s unit, so he no longer attends the same block meetings as Allen. And now Allen and Janet are being evicted. Something he might have prevented. Realizing what he has done, poor Mr. Wales calls himself Judas and accuses himself of betraying Allen and leaving him to be crucified.
In a world of enforced and fake morality, the spontaneous eruption of remorse in Mr. Wales is a good sign. Perhaps in the end, conscience and compassion will replace the mere façade of morality.
It’s almost funny how prescient Dick was about apartments. The unit Allen and Janet Purcell live in could easily be a contemporary microapartment. And the space-saving automation that allows furniture to slip in and out of the living space is already being featured in some of the newly designed microapartments.
But of course, the tiny apartment is not the main point of Dick’s story. The Man Who Japed is about McCarthyism and the witchhunts that invaded the private lives of ordinary citizens. It’s about a moral code enforced by busybodies who peer into every aspect of their neighbors’ personal lives. And it’s about the alternative to this society ~ which is just as unsatisfying.
I was impressed that Dick rejected the Resort just as thoroughly as he rejected the Morec society. It’s easy to reject the Morec society. Who would want mandatory meetings where you get called out for your moral lapses in front of all of your neighbors? But the Resort is not desirable either. Dick mocks the psychology and parapsychology of the Resort just as ruthlessly as he mocks the values of the Morec society.
So what is Dick’s solution? Humor, of course. Allen Purcell’s prank is a spontaneous act. He is not even aware of what he is doing. Yet it is his rebellion. The joke, in all its beautiful irrationality, is natural human creativity breaking through the Morec society’s artificially-imposed restrictions on thought and behavior. It is a subversive act, not just because it involves vandalism, but because it rejects the false dilemma of the Morec society and the Resort.
What will the new society look like if Purcell succeeds in undermining the Morec society? There is one example of true morality in The Man Who Japed and it gives me reason to hope for the best with the new society. It is Mr. Wales and his attack of conscience.
Mr. Wales is the little old man who always stood up for Allen at the block meetings. He finally gets the apartment he long desired, but as he tries to enjoy his good fortune, he realizes the price he has paid. He is no longer a member of Allen’s unit, so he no longer attends the same block meetings as Allen. And now Allen and Janet are being evicted. Something he might have prevented. Realizing what he has done, poor Mr. Wales calls himself Judas and accuses himself of betraying Allen and leaving him to be crucified.
In a world of enforced and fake morality, the spontaneous eruption of remorse in Mr. Wales is a good sign. Perhaps in the end, conscience and compassion will replace the mere façade of morality.
July 25, 2020
This is my seventh Philip K. Dick experience and this one stands with Clans of the Alphane Moon as one of the more comedic works of Dick's career.
Allen Purcell one day wakes up to find that he's "japed" a statue. Not just any statue, but the statue of the world's hero General Streiter, who formed our glorious totalitarian society. Why did he do it? Honestly, he has no clue... and it's extremely awkward, as he's just been offered a position to essentially create all future propaganda praising the general's legacy.
Like many of Dick's books, the plot is honestly a bit of a mess. It bounces all over the place and a few plot lines kind of go nowhere... but the ones that do come together do so beautifully. I've noticed over my past reads that Dick was great with ideas, but couldn't tell a full story to save his life, but that incomplete nature of his tales works well with his paranoid storytelling, constantly making you, like the characters, guess what is real and what even matters at all.
This one was honestly almost a four star read, but lost one star right at the end as it felt unfinished. I delighted in the last couple of chapters (this book is really just the set up for one long punchline and it is hilarious) but that last chapter just kind of fizzled out. While it by no means ruined the book, it did knock down my overall enjoyment of the piece.
Do I suggest it? Yes. While the ending is a bit of a letdown in the final chapter, the book overall is very amusing. It wouldn't be my suggestion to start with Dick, but there are certainly worse places. 3/5 stars
Allen Purcell one day wakes up to find that he's "japed" a statue. Not just any statue, but the statue of the world's hero General Streiter, who formed our glorious totalitarian society. Why did he do it? Honestly, he has no clue... and it's extremely awkward, as he's just been offered a position to essentially create all future propaganda praising the general's legacy.
Like many of Dick's books, the plot is honestly a bit of a mess. It bounces all over the place and a few plot lines kind of go nowhere... but the ones that do come together do so beautifully. I've noticed over my past reads that Dick was great with ideas, but couldn't tell a full story to save his life, but that incomplete nature of his tales works well with his paranoid storytelling, constantly making you, like the characters, guess what is real and what even matters at all.
This one was honestly almost a four star read, but lost one star right at the end as it felt unfinished. I delighted in the last couple of chapters (this book is really just the set up for one long punchline and it is hilarious) but that last chapter just kind of fizzled out. While it by no means ruined the book, it did knock down my overall enjoyment of the piece.
Do I suggest it? Yes. While the ending is a bit of a letdown in the final chapter, the book overall is very amusing. It wouldn't be my suggestion to start with Dick, but there are certainly worse places. 3/5 stars
May 20, 2019
“A term we use in packet assembly. When a theme is harped on too much you get parody. When we make fun of a stale theme we say we’ve japed it.”
“A term we use in packet assembly. When a theme is harped on too much you get parody. When we make fun of a stale theme we say we’ve japed it.”
In a post-apocalpyse world where you are tyrannized by not just your nation (aka the Moral Reclamation, or Morec), but your HOA, it is hard to be creative, to sin, to deviate from the norm. Enter Allen Purcell. His wife is bored to near hysterics. He is different. He is creative. He has a sense of humor. This impulse to speak his mind and periodically, late at night, screw with statues of sacred leaders will either destroy him or make him great. It might just do both.
This is Dick's third novel I believe and it is almost a perfectly constructed PKD novel. The tension is built in. You have him moving up in government at the same time he is secretly taking more and more risks in his own life. PKD builds this natural tension to the last few pages. The book is funny, odd, and for Dick fairly reserved.
It seems like a perfect novel for a revolution. Dick is kicking against conformity, government-sanctioned 'watching', and moral witch hunts. God -- would Dick ever flip at the current state of our nation. The novel seems to hark back to those revoutionay novellas from the turn of the century like Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Orwell's 1984. It belongs to the whole "man against tyranny" genre, but pushed through the hose of PKD it is funny, dark, and funky. Not his best, but definitely one not to miss.
“A term we use in packet assembly. When a theme is harped on too much you get parody. When we make fun of a stale theme we say we’ve japed it.”
In a post-apocalpyse world where you are tyrannized by not just your nation (aka the Moral Reclamation, or Morec), but your HOA, it is hard to be creative, to sin, to deviate from the norm. Enter Allen Purcell. His wife is bored to near hysterics. He is different. He is creative. He has a sense of humor. This impulse to speak his mind and periodically, late at night, screw with statues of sacred leaders will either destroy him or make him great. It might just do both.
This is Dick's third novel I believe and it is almost a perfectly constructed PKD novel. The tension is built in. You have him moving up in government at the same time he is secretly taking more and more risks in his own life. PKD builds this natural tension to the last few pages. The book is funny, odd, and for Dick fairly reserved.
It seems like a perfect novel for a revolution. Dick is kicking against conformity, government-sanctioned 'watching', and moral witch hunts. God -- would Dick ever flip at the current state of our nation. The novel seems to hark back to those revoutionay novellas from the turn of the century like Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Orwell's 1984. It belongs to the whole "man against tyranny" genre, but pushed through the hose of PKD it is funny, dark, and funky. Not his best, but definitely one not to miss.
September 30, 2024
My 15th PKD novel. ~ an unexpected treat.
Perhaps you have pondered life as a series of pendulum swings; I did, while I read this book. ~ thinking a 'status quo' is always up for grabs, and can swiftly move to one extreme or the other. If it's ever something pleasant, it will never stay a comfy chair.
Oddly, 'TMWJ' reads like a paean to the 1960s - but, since it was written in 1955, the '60s hadn't even happened yet. The story's protagonist - Allen Purcell - seems to 'mourn' a time in which people sailed the fullness of emotional / intellectual freedom. He feels that loss on a subliminal level - and he isn't even sure of what exactly he's feeling. There's just something stirring - bothering him - in his solar plexus.
It's nothing he can really act on (or can he? ~ and how?). His job as head of a propaganda bureau - as its main advertising guy - won't allow it. But, of course... one can always rebel. Maybe life *was* better before the book's atomic war, that affected the world; the war that resulted in a return to a more severe, a more fundamentalist way of thinking - and living.
~ a world only less harsh than something Chairman Mao would have cooked up. ~ in which people tend to feel "a deep spiritual residuum [reminding them] that work and sacrifice were their own reward."
'TMWJ' stands apart as a very accessible early PKD work. Yes, it's set in the year 2114 (and, yes, a few loony things happen) but - unlike the typical multi-layered Dick narrative - the storytelling doesn't feel all that structurally complex. I mean, gee - it's almost... straightforward!
The book does seem like one of PKD's shortest - almost like there's stuff left out, things you wish Dick would expound on. At the same time, much of what has power in the novel can be pulled from what is not much more than inferred. (Bonus Non-Content!)
Somehow, in spite of the theme of authoritarian suppression, Dick's mordant humor periodically peeps through:
In short, I sense that 'TMWJ' is a much better novel than it might seem at first sight.
Perhaps you have pondered life as a series of pendulum swings; I did, while I read this book. ~ thinking a 'status quo' is always up for grabs, and can swiftly move to one extreme or the other. If it's ever something pleasant, it will never stay a comfy chair.
Oddly, 'TMWJ' reads like a paean to the 1960s - but, since it was written in 1955, the '60s hadn't even happened yet. The story's protagonist - Allen Purcell - seems to 'mourn' a time in which people sailed the fullness of emotional / intellectual freedom. He feels that loss on a subliminal level - and he isn't even sure of what exactly he's feeling. There's just something stirring - bothering him - in his solar plexus.
It's nothing he can really act on (or can he? ~ and how?). His job as head of a propaganda bureau - as its main advertising guy - won't allow it. But, of course... one can always rebel. Maybe life *was* better before the book's atomic war, that affected the world; the war that resulted in a return to a more severe, a more fundamentalist way of thinking - and living.
~ a world only less harsh than something Chairman Mao would have cooked up. ~ in which people tend to feel "a deep spiritual residuum [reminding them] that work and sacrifice were their own reward."
'TMWJ' stands apart as a very accessible early PKD work. Yes, it's set in the year 2114 (and, yes, a few loony things happen) but - unlike the typical multi-layered Dick narrative - the storytelling doesn't feel all that structurally complex. I mean, gee - it's almost... straightforward!
The book does seem like one of PKD's shortest - almost like there's stuff left out, things you wish Dick would expound on. At the same time, much of what has power in the novel can be pulled from what is not much more than inferred. (Bonus Non-Content!)
Somehow, in spite of the theme of authoritarian suppression, Dick's mordant humor periodically peeps through:
"Who was that girl?"In terms of 'The PKD Experience', it's probably true - and I may have said elsewhere - that most of the author's books (his sci-fi books, anyway) would benefit from a second read. Not so much because the first read is impenetrable - but the richness of the vision can unravel more.
Allen grimaced. "Just a friend. A niece visiting from the country. My daughter. Why do you ask?"
In short, I sense that 'TMWJ' is a much better novel than it might seem at first sight.
June 21, 2019
This 50's PKD is a real keeper. I might really enjoy re-reading it in the next few years, but you know what I really want?
A MOVIE. This novel is a comedic GEM. It's funny as hell. A very McCarthy-era satire mixing post-apocalypse with uber-concerns with public morality in a paranoid state with tiny robots spying on everyone.
The witch-hunts never stopped.
And yet... a man with a sense of humor in the right place at the right time can change the world.
Not to spoil things, but car chases at 30 miles per hour and punting the head of a statue is just icing on the cake.
I can totally see Jon Hamm taking the lead with his totally confident smile as charges of public indecency are leveled against him or when he picks up James Joyce's Ulysses or when the homage to Swift's A Modest Proposal airs on public tv.
My imagination adds a rioting crowd of B-52's and horn-rimmed glasses, and oh! such outrage!
Who will stand with me? One last practical joke to topple society? Let me see a show of hands! :)
A MOVIE. This novel is a comedic GEM. It's funny as hell. A very McCarthy-era satire mixing post-apocalypse with uber-concerns with public morality in a paranoid state with tiny robots spying on everyone.
The witch-hunts never stopped.
And yet... a man with a sense of humor in the right place at the right time can change the world.
Not to spoil things, but car chases at 30 miles per hour and punting the head of a statue is just icing on the cake.
I can totally see Jon Hamm taking the lead with his totally confident smile as charges of public indecency are leveled against him or when he picks up James Joyce's Ulysses or when the homage to Swift's A Modest Proposal airs on public tv.
My imagination adds a rioting crowd of B-52's and horn-rimmed glasses, and oh! such outrage!
Who will stand with me? One last practical joke to topple society? Let me see a show of hands! :)
August 4, 2023
Certainly not bad, but considered within PKD's works overall this feels generally underwhelming. In his better works he's got more balls in the air, interacting in unexpected and absurd ways, and more effectively conveys deep set feelings of paranoia and disdain for authority. Notably absent are any theological or ontological themes. Perhaps not surprising given this is a very early work, though I saw more promise in Eye in the Sky which was also written in 1955, and even The Cosmic Puppets from 1953.
January 2, 2019
“In this room a man’s business was everybody’s business. Centuries of Christian confessional culminated when the block assembled to explore its members’ souls.”
There is a certain mixture of secularized Calvinism and quasi-theological political self-righteousness (or self-lefteousness) prevalent in our day and age that made Dick’s third novel, The Man Who Japed, quite an interesting text for me. Dick describes us a post-nuclear-war society, in which parts of the planet are apparently irretrievably contaminated, which makes housing space very costly. This works as a lever for securing people’s good conduct because a lease of an apartment – and they are often quite small – depends on a person’s moral rectitude, which is inspected on a weekly basis in semi-public meetings. Good conduct, in this society, consists in abstaining from extra- or pre-marital sex, from alcohol, from cuss words and in generally falling in line with the precepts of Morec society, which was founded, in the throes of war, by the infallible Major Jules Streiter – haven’t we all heard a similar name before? –, whose descendants still hold the key positions in the framework of power. Dick links the atmosphere of moral and political witch hunts with a system that is akin to fascism, but the fifties, when this novel was published, showed that even democratic systems are not necessarily incompatible with an atmosphere of snooping out people’s convictions, and with making the private sphere political. It might be useful to bear this in mind!
In Morec society, Allen Purcell, a rather successful propagandist, surprises himself when finding out that he has “japed” the statue of Major Streiter by cutting its head of. Whatever could have motivated him, a man who is one of the pillars of the Morec system, to commit such a respectless and subversive act? Probably the same thing that made PKD turn all his ideas into science fiction …
Nevertheless, for all the importance of the basic idea of this novel, it is, on the whole, not on a par with Dick’s later works. One senses that the pacing is all too often awkward, that the structure of the novel is unbalanced and that it was probably written in haste. It is strange that the writer himself should think better of this early piece than he did of subsequent gems like The Man in the High Castle but then a parent is probably not always the wisest judge of their children. This child here is rather clever, but unable to walk in a straight line …
By the way, Allen Purcell is not too innovative a japer in that his jape concerning the statue of Major Streiter was originally performed in February 1990 by a young boy named Bart Simpson, in the ubiquitous town of Springfield, when that self-same boy, out of both braggadocio and his mind, beheaded the statue of the town’s founder Jebediah Springfield. The other jape, the one on active assimilation, was first performed in 1729 by that Jekyll of all japers, Jonathan Swift when he had A Modest Proposal to make.
There is a certain mixture of secularized Calvinism and quasi-theological political self-righteousness (or self-lefteousness) prevalent in our day and age that made Dick’s third novel, The Man Who Japed, quite an interesting text for me. Dick describes us a post-nuclear-war society, in which parts of the planet are apparently irretrievably contaminated, which makes housing space very costly. This works as a lever for securing people’s good conduct because a lease of an apartment – and they are often quite small – depends on a person’s moral rectitude, which is inspected on a weekly basis in semi-public meetings. Good conduct, in this society, consists in abstaining from extra- or pre-marital sex, from alcohol, from cuss words and in generally falling in line with the precepts of Morec society, which was founded, in the throes of war, by the infallible Major Jules Streiter – haven’t we all heard a similar name before? –, whose descendants still hold the key positions in the framework of power. Dick links the atmosphere of moral and political witch hunts with a system that is akin to fascism, but the fifties, when this novel was published, showed that even democratic systems are not necessarily incompatible with an atmosphere of snooping out people’s convictions, and with making the private sphere political. It might be useful to bear this in mind!
In Morec society, Allen Purcell, a rather successful propagandist, surprises himself when finding out that he has “japed” the statue of Major Streiter by cutting its head of. Whatever could have motivated him, a man who is one of the pillars of the Morec system, to commit such a respectless and subversive act? Probably the same thing that made PKD turn all his ideas into science fiction …
Nevertheless, for all the importance of the basic idea of this novel, it is, on the whole, not on a par with Dick’s later works. One senses that the pacing is all too often awkward, that the structure of the novel is unbalanced and that it was probably written in haste. It is strange that the writer himself should think better of this early piece than he did of subsequent gems like The Man in the High Castle but then a parent is probably not always the wisest judge of their children. This child here is rather clever, but unable to walk in a straight line …
By the way, Allen Purcell is not too innovative a japer in that his jape concerning the statue of Major Streiter was originally performed in February 1990 by a young boy named Bart Simpson, in the ubiquitous town of Springfield, when that self-same boy, out of both braggadocio and his mind, beheaded the statue of the town’s founder Jebediah Springfield. The other jape, the one on active assimilation, was first performed in 1729 by that Jekyll of all japers, Jonathan Swift when he had A Modest Proposal to make.
February 14, 2020
A fülszöveg enyhén spoileres, inkább ne olvasd el, ha eddig nem tetted.
A borító zseniális, mint mindig.
A történet tagadhatatlanul egy korai PKD agyszülemény, ahol még a világ nem hullik darabokra, nem csúszik ki kezünkből, akár a homokszemcsék, azonban érezhető, hogy már az utolsó napjait rúgja, olyan rideg és törékeny, akár egy porcelán: összeomlásra készen áll, amely meg is történik, PKD későbbi regényeiben.
Az utolsó tréfa azonban még megragadja az utolsó lehetőséget, hogy kiragadja az embert a komfortzónájából, a sterilizált társadalmi normák fogságából. Görbe tükröt mutat egy olyan társadalomnak; ahol ún. kopingerek figyelik meg az embereket minden egyes percben; ahol elég egy rossz szó, egy becstelen közösülés, egy aprócska kihágás, és máris áldozat lehetsz az ún. tömbgyűléseken a névtelen sárdobálók számára, s elveszítheted a munkád, lakásod, mindened, hogy aztán száműzzenek az Egészségközpontba azok közé, akik hasonlóan különcök próbáltak lenni egy olyan világban, hol a közerkölcs pontról pontra színtisztán meg van határozva a… a hozzád hasonlóan halandó emberek által. Mert élhettél példamutató életet egész életedben, ha egy rossz napodon a háztömb közös fürdőszobájában önként szeretkezel valakivel.
Ez a könyv megmutatja, hová vezet az, ha valamit – most épp az erkölcsöt –, megpróbáljuk definiálni egészen a végletekig. Elveszünk a részletekben és saját szabályaink fognak felzabálni minket. Ebben a felettébb erkölcsös társadalomban az emberek szoronganak, megfigyelnek és megfigyeltetnek egymás – és a kopingerek – által. Eltűnnek a huncutságok, a csínytevések, a szórakozások, a kihágások, a kritikus attitűd valami ellen, ami ellenkezik azzal, ami te vagy. Ezzel a furcsa, idegenszerű adottsággal rendelkezett Allen Purcell, melynek humor a neve.
„Ha egyszer rájössz, mekkora vicc minden, csak egynek van értelme: ha Komédiás az ember.” (Alan Moore: Watchmen)
A borító zseniális, mint mindig.
A történet tagadhatatlanul egy korai PKD agyszülemény, ahol még a világ nem hullik darabokra, nem csúszik ki kezünkből, akár a homokszemcsék, azonban érezhető, hogy már az utolsó napjait rúgja, olyan rideg és törékeny, akár egy porcelán: összeomlásra készen áll, amely meg is történik, PKD későbbi regényeiben.
Az utolsó tréfa azonban még megragadja az utolsó lehetőséget, hogy kiragadja az embert a komfortzónájából, a sterilizált társadalmi normák fogságából. Görbe tükröt mutat egy olyan társadalomnak; ahol ún. kopingerek figyelik meg az embereket minden egyes percben; ahol elég egy rossz szó, egy becstelen közösülés, egy aprócska kihágás, és máris áldozat lehetsz az ún. tömbgyűléseken a névtelen sárdobálók számára, s elveszítheted a munkád, lakásod, mindened, hogy aztán száműzzenek az Egészségközpontba azok közé, akik hasonlóan különcök próbáltak lenni egy olyan világban, hol a közerkölcs pontról pontra színtisztán meg van határozva a… a hozzád hasonlóan halandó emberek által. Mert élhettél példamutató életet egész életedben, ha egy rossz napodon a háztömb közös fürdőszobájában önként szeretkezel valakivel.
Ez a könyv megmutatja, hová vezet az, ha valamit – most épp az erkölcsöt –, megpróbáljuk definiálni egészen a végletekig. Elveszünk a részletekben és saját szabályaink fognak felzabálni minket. Ebben a felettébb erkölcsös társadalomban az emberek szoronganak, megfigyelnek és megfigyeltetnek egymás – és a kopingerek – által. Eltűnnek a huncutságok, a csínytevések, a szórakozások, a kihágások, a kritikus attitűd valami ellen, ami ellenkezik azzal, ami te vagy. Ezzel a furcsa, idegenszerű adottsággal rendelkezett Allen Purcell, melynek humor a neve.
„Ha egyszer rájössz, mekkora vicc minden, csak egynek van értelme: ha Komédiás az ember.” (Alan Moore: Watchmen)
May 15, 2019
Una risata vi seppellirà
2114: in un mondo dove la morale puritana è diventata legge Allen Purcel ha un ruolo importate, è uno sceneggiatore per la TV (principale veicolo di controllo e diffusione di questa particolare moralità). A un certo punto, però, qualcosa va storto…
In una società bacchettona e oppressiva (in cui non è difficile riconoscere il maccartismo), dapprima quasi inconsciamente e via via con crescente consapevolezza e lucidità, Purcel incomincia a compiere eclatanti gesti di disobbedienza. Perché? Perché ha una tara congenita, il senso dell’umorismo, che gli fa vedere le cose in una prospettiva diversa. La ribellione di Purcel non sarà coronata dal successo (e lui ne accetterà stoicamente tutte le conseguenze), ma intanto il seme è stato gettato.
Non il miglior Dick, ancora acerbo (è uno dei suoi primi romanzi), ingenuo, contorto, a tratti confuso, ma io voglio bene a questo scrittore e ai suoi millemila difetti.
2114: in un mondo dove la morale puritana è diventata legge Allen Purcel ha un ruolo importate, è uno sceneggiatore per la TV (principale veicolo di controllo e diffusione di questa particolare moralità). A un certo punto, però, qualcosa va storto…
In una società bacchettona e oppressiva (in cui non è difficile riconoscere il maccartismo), dapprima quasi inconsciamente e via via con crescente consapevolezza e lucidità, Purcel incomincia a compiere eclatanti gesti di disobbedienza. Perché? Perché ha una tara congenita, il senso dell’umorismo, che gli fa vedere le cose in una prospettiva diversa. La ribellione di Purcel non sarà coronata dal successo (e lui ne accetterà stoicamente tutte le conseguenze), ma intanto il seme è stato gettato.
Non il miglior Dick, ancora acerbo (è uno dei suoi primi romanzi), ingenuo, contorto, a tratti confuso, ma io voglio bene a questo scrittore e ai suoi millemila difetti.
September 1, 2019
A Morális Megújhodás ideológiájára épülő társadalmi berendezkedésben még a művészek és a kreatív ügynökségek is kizárólag a cenzúrázott populizmust szolgálják ki. A csalódott vagy kritikus szemléletűeket az Egészségközpontban kezelik. Már ha ők meg akarnak "gyógyulni"; mert mindenki előtt nyitva áll egy másik lehetőség: a közösség elhagyása, önkéntes száműzetés a gyarmatokra. Mindez a társadalmi konszenzus megnyugtató védőernyője alatt történik, és főhősünk lelkesen építené is ezt a rendszert, csakhogy kiderül, van egy kis tréfás rendellenesség az agyában...
Korai Dick-regény, vagyis nem az elborultabb szériából való, cserébe szellemes és korrektül felépített. A világ hangulata távolról emlékeztetett az Álmodnak-e az androidok-éra, de annál valamivel könnyedebbnek hat. A könyv ikonikus jelenetei, a rendes havi ún. tömbgyűlések viszont elég hátborzongatóak. Amolyan lakógyűlésnek álcázott fegyelmi eljárások ezek, ahol arctalan közösségi vádaskodás formájában a lakótársak nyilvánosan meghurcolják egymást (egy közös mikrofon torzítja el az egyedi hozzászólásokat, hogy felismerhetetlenek legyenek). A tét a lakhatási engedély megtartása avagy megvonása. Számot kell adni minden apró-cseprő ügyről: éjszakai kimaradásokról, alkalmi flörtökről, trágár beszédről, bármilyen apró furcsaságról, ami elüt az illedelmes és puritán fősodortól. A jóravaló polgárok lépteit drónok (itt: kopingerek) követik mindenhova, a begyűjtött adatokat pedig szorgosan eljuttatják a Bizottság képviselőinek kiértékelésre - utóbbiak egytől-egyig virágos ruhákba öltözött, pirospozsgás középkorú hölgyek. Egy szép, új, egyszerű és kényelmes kis világ ez, amitől futkos a hátadon a hideg. Mindennek fényében a regény drámai csúcspontján lejátszott trollkodós tévéműsor könnyen átértelmezhető magasművészeti performansznak. Szerintem.
"És senki ne gondolja, hogy a könyvek nem valóságos helyek."
Neil Gaiman
Korai Dick-regény, vagyis nem az elborultabb szériából való, cserébe szellemes és korrektül felépített. A világ hangulata távolról emlékeztetett az Álmodnak-e az androidok-éra, de annál valamivel könnyedebbnek hat. A könyv ikonikus jelenetei, a rendes havi ún. tömbgyűlések viszont elég hátborzongatóak. Amolyan lakógyűlésnek álcázott fegyelmi eljárások ezek, ahol arctalan közösségi vádaskodás formájában a lakótársak nyilvánosan meghurcolják egymást (egy közös mikrofon torzítja el az egyedi hozzászólásokat, hogy felismerhetetlenek legyenek). A tét a lakhatási engedély megtartása avagy megvonása. Számot kell adni minden apró-cseprő ügyről: éjszakai kimaradásokról, alkalmi flörtökről, trágár beszédről, bármilyen apró furcsaságról, ami elüt az illedelmes és puritán fősodortól. A jóravaló polgárok lépteit drónok (itt: kopingerek) követik mindenhova, a begyűjtött adatokat pedig szorgosan eljuttatják a Bizottság képviselőinek kiértékelésre - utóbbiak egytől-egyig virágos ruhákba öltözött, pirospozsgás középkorú hölgyek. Egy szép, új, egyszerű és kényelmes kis világ ez, amitől futkos a hátadon a hideg. Mindennek fényében a regény drámai csúcspontján lejátszott trollkodós tévéműsor könnyen átértelmezhető magasművészeti performansznak. Szerintem.
"És senki ne gondolja, hogy a könyvek nem valóságos helyek."
Neil Gaiman
April 19, 2012
It's 2114, and Al Gore's vision has come to fruition: All art is sanitized for your protection; everything is bland and environmentally, ergonomically and politically correct. Yuppie-of-the-future Allen Purcell is set to take over as director of Telemedia, a giant edutainment conglomerate responsible for producing a steady diet of pap programming to keep the population from thinking too hard (sort of like Fox). Things are definitely looking up for Purcell and his heavily tranquilized wife, Janet. So why does he subconsciously commit subversive pranks against society, such as defacing (beheading, rather) a venerated statue of a military leader? I wonder if Terry Gilliam ever read Philip K. Dick. Parts of "The Man Who Japed" are reminiscent of "Brazil." PKD pulls off the odd feat of being simultaneously ahead of his time and goofily dated. He remains in print and continues to be read and critically appreciated because his writing was more psychologically and philosophically complex than much of the science fiction by his contemporaries in the '50s and '60s. But Dick's novels remain firmly rooted in the martinis-n-cigarettes aesthetic of the Esquivel Space Age Lounge. Which is part of their charm to me. It's like "Mad Men" with rocketships and laserbeams.
December 12, 2020
Ho trovato per caso questo romanzo e, amando Philip Dick, non potevo non essere incuriosito e così l'ho letto. Scritto a 38 anni, si può definire tra i suoi romanzi di esordio e poco conosciuti ma che già contiene le tematiche che meglio svilupperà nei suoi romanzi più celebri.
Nel 2114, dopo un catastrofico conflitto avvenuto più di un secolo fa, nel mondo c'è un regime politico chiamato ReMo (per esteso Redenzione Morale), un governo che esaspera i valori etici e morali rendendoli sempre più oppressivi nei confronti dei singoli individui. Infatti ci sono dei robot, gli Avanguardisti, che spiano e registrano il comportamento di ogni singolo cittadino (come non pensare agli occhi del Grande Fratello di George Orwell!) e tra le trasgressioni più frequenti affiorano tradimenti extra-coniugali, uso di alcolici in pubblico, e anche un semplice abbraccio o bacio è considerato un reato. Il simbolo di questo regime autoritario è il maggiore Steiner, il fondatore di questa nuova società. In questa società distopica vive il nostro protagonista, Allen Purcell, che è a capo di un'agenzia di informazione e comunicazione pubblica connessa con gli organi di governo. Egli produce degli sceneggiati (dai contenuti strettamente morali) che il regime attraverso la Telemedia trasmette a livello mondiale su ogni tipo di mass media. Allen una sera, finito il lavoro, di ritorno a casa decide di ubriacarsi e vandalizza una statua di Steiner. Anche lui non sa spiegarsi di quel gesto di ribellione e si affida a una clinica psichiatrica, su consiglio di una ragazza conosciuta al parco. Ma viene narcotizzato dal dottor Malparto e portato su un altro pianeta dove si ritrova in un mondo opposto al suo, in cui i valori sono ozio ed edonismo.
In questo romanzo di Philip Dick vengono affrontate diverse tematiche: il controllo e la censura governativa (a un certo punto il protagonista inizierà a leggere l'Ulisse di Joyce e ne rimarrà sconvolto perché i libri sono spariti e sopravvivono in luoghi nascosti, così come quelli erotici), la moralità (si viene spiati sia in pubblico che in privato e le assemblee di condominio diventano veri e propri processi), l'immoralità (la vita nell'Altro Mondo, completamente opposta a quella della Terra), il lavoro (che produce grande stress ma il nostro protagonista lo userà a suo favore), il senso dell'umorismo e l'irrisione (Allen riuscirà a sbeffeggiare in mondo visione la sua società dissacrandone i suoi ideali).
Ciò che colpisce di questa storia è la voglia del protagonista che, ad un certo punto, esce fuori: la voglia di sentirsi libero davvero, di uscire dall'oppressione che la sua società ha creato per evitare nuove violenze, esagerando. Allen sembra uscire da uno stato di trance e l'immagine di lui che fugge via dal parco tenendo tra le braccia la testa della statua del maggiore Steiner ben descrive questo suo nuovo stato d'animo. Dick così come Orwell e Bradbury ci vogliono dire che per quanto la libertà individuale venga soffocata dai regimi totalitari, la natura umana non permetterà mai che essa venga totalmente distrutta.
Risulta evidente che Dick si sia ispirato a due grandi romanzi della letteratura mondiale nello scrivere questo romanzo: 1984 di Georges Orwell e Fahrenheit 451 di Ray Bradbury.
Nel 2114, dopo un catastrofico conflitto avvenuto più di un secolo fa, nel mondo c'è un regime politico chiamato ReMo (per esteso Redenzione Morale), un governo che esaspera i valori etici e morali rendendoli sempre più oppressivi nei confronti dei singoli individui. Infatti ci sono dei robot, gli Avanguardisti, che spiano e registrano il comportamento di ogni singolo cittadino (come non pensare agli occhi del Grande Fratello di George Orwell!) e tra le trasgressioni più frequenti affiorano tradimenti extra-coniugali, uso di alcolici in pubblico, e anche un semplice abbraccio o bacio è considerato un reato. Il simbolo di questo regime autoritario è il maggiore Steiner, il fondatore di questa nuova società. In questa società distopica vive il nostro protagonista, Allen Purcell, che è a capo di un'agenzia di informazione e comunicazione pubblica connessa con gli organi di governo. Egli produce degli sceneggiati (dai contenuti strettamente morali) che il regime attraverso la Telemedia trasmette a livello mondiale su ogni tipo di mass media. Allen una sera, finito il lavoro, di ritorno a casa decide di ubriacarsi e vandalizza una statua di Steiner. Anche lui non sa spiegarsi di quel gesto di ribellione e si affida a una clinica psichiatrica, su consiglio di una ragazza conosciuta al parco. Ma viene narcotizzato dal dottor Malparto e portato su un altro pianeta dove si ritrova in un mondo opposto al suo, in cui i valori sono ozio ed edonismo.
In questo romanzo di Philip Dick vengono affrontate diverse tematiche: il controllo e la censura governativa (a un certo punto il protagonista inizierà a leggere l'Ulisse di Joyce e ne rimarrà sconvolto perché i libri sono spariti e sopravvivono in luoghi nascosti, così come quelli erotici), la moralità (si viene spiati sia in pubblico che in privato e le assemblee di condominio diventano veri e propri processi), l'immoralità (la vita nell'Altro Mondo, completamente opposta a quella della Terra), il lavoro (che produce grande stress ma il nostro protagonista lo userà a suo favore), il senso dell'umorismo e l'irrisione (Allen riuscirà a sbeffeggiare in mondo visione la sua società dissacrandone i suoi ideali).
Ciò che colpisce di questa storia è la voglia del protagonista che, ad un certo punto, esce fuori: la voglia di sentirsi libero davvero, di uscire dall'oppressione che la sua società ha creato per evitare nuove violenze, esagerando. Allen sembra uscire da uno stato di trance e l'immagine di lui che fugge via dal parco tenendo tra le braccia la testa della statua del maggiore Steiner ben descrive questo suo nuovo stato d'animo. Dick così come Orwell e Bradbury ci vogliono dire che per quanto la libertà individuale venga soffocata dai regimi totalitari, la natura umana non permetterà mai che essa venga totalmente distrutta.
Risulta evidente che Dick si sia ispirato a due grandi romanzi della letteratura mondiale nello scrivere questo romanzo: 1984 di Georges Orwell e Fahrenheit 451 di Ray Bradbury.
May 28, 2020
Mad Men meets The Jetsons meets 1984. I think this would make an amazing Fifth Element style movie. Listening to the audiobook, the story was a little too crazy for me to really get into it. The narrator used cartoon voices for some of the side characters which threw me off, even though I see why it would work with this story.
August 9, 2012
Originally posted at www.fantasyliterature.com
In 2114, Allen and Janet Purcell live in Newer York, a post-apocalyptic city that strictly regulates morality so that all citizens understand exactly how to fit in. Robotic spies film suspect behavior and turn it in to the committee members who are in charge of renting out apartments to law-abiding citizens. Citizens who get drunk, curse, or engage in sexual or other misconduct are brought to trial by the peers who live in their apartment complexes. A guilty verdict usually means losing your lease and having to move to one of the faraway planets that supplies Earth with food.
Allen Purcell has just been offered the top position in the government’s ad agency which produces propaganda meant to maintain public ethics. The job is very prestigious, but there’s only one problem: The night before, in his sleep, he japed (made a joke of) the statue of General Streiter, the man who started the current governmental regime. Allen wasn’t conscious of his activity, and he doesn’t think there’s any evidence that he’s the culprit, but he needs to find out why he did it before he takes a job that puts him in charge of promoting the government’s agenda. But when he decides to visit a psychoanalyst, things just go from bad to worse.
The Man Who Japed (1956) is Philip K. Dick’s third published novel, and it contains many of the same themes and types of characters seen in most of his works — a bewildered male protagonist with a neurotic wife, a society obsessed with the morality of its neighbors, bad psychoanalysis, fascism, paranoia, fear of nuclear war, media propaganda, McCarthy-like witch hunts, synthetic food, and drug trips. Unusually, women are in positions of power in The Man Who Japed, and the Purcells actually seem to love each other (bad marriages are the norm for this author).
Perhaps I’ve read too much PKD, or perhaps it’s because I had just finished another of his novels, but I was not truly entertained by The Man Who Japed until the last 20% of the story. The final jape and its aftermath was hilarious and completely satisfactory, but much of the story up until that point lacked the constant humor and bizarreness that I love about Philip K. Dick. There were certainly some funny moments (such as the joke with the statue and Allen’s visit to a black market dealer in banned 20th century novels), but most of the novel is obvious hit-‘em-over-the-head social commentary, and none of it is anything I haven’t previously seen many times from Dick.
Compared to his other works, The Man Who Japed is short, linearly-plotted, and not at all confusing (if you’re a fan, you know what I mean). I listened to Brilliance Audio’s recent production which is 5½ hours long. Luke Daniels, who I’ve come to love, reads the story and does a great job highlighting Dick’s weird sense of humor. The Man Who Japed isn’t one of Philip K. Dick’s best novels, but it’s one of his first, so just for that reason, it’s worth reading.
In 2114, Allen and Janet Purcell live in Newer York, a post-apocalyptic city that strictly regulates morality so that all citizens understand exactly how to fit in. Robotic spies film suspect behavior and turn it in to the committee members who are in charge of renting out apartments to law-abiding citizens. Citizens who get drunk, curse, or engage in sexual or other misconduct are brought to trial by the peers who live in their apartment complexes. A guilty verdict usually means losing your lease and having to move to one of the faraway planets that supplies Earth with food.
Allen Purcell has just been offered the top position in the government’s ad agency which produces propaganda meant to maintain public ethics. The job is very prestigious, but there’s only one problem: The night before, in his sleep, he japed (made a joke of) the statue of General Streiter, the man who started the current governmental regime. Allen wasn’t conscious of his activity, and he doesn’t think there’s any evidence that he’s the culprit, but he needs to find out why he did it before he takes a job that puts him in charge of promoting the government’s agenda. But when he decides to visit a psychoanalyst, things just go from bad to worse.
The Man Who Japed (1956) is Philip K. Dick’s third published novel, and it contains many of the same themes and types of characters seen in most of his works — a bewildered male protagonist with a neurotic wife, a society obsessed with the morality of its neighbors, bad psychoanalysis, fascism, paranoia, fear of nuclear war, media propaganda, McCarthy-like witch hunts, synthetic food, and drug trips. Unusually, women are in positions of power in The Man Who Japed, and the Purcells actually seem to love each other (bad marriages are the norm for this author).
Perhaps I’ve read too much PKD, or perhaps it’s because I had just finished another of his novels, but I was not truly entertained by The Man Who Japed until the last 20% of the story. The final jape and its aftermath was hilarious and completely satisfactory, but much of the story up until that point lacked the constant humor and bizarreness that I love about Philip K. Dick. There were certainly some funny moments (such as the joke with the statue and Allen’s visit to a black market dealer in banned 20th century novels), but most of the novel is obvious hit-‘em-over-the-head social commentary, and none of it is anything I haven’t previously seen many times from Dick.
Compared to his other works, The Man Who Japed is short, linearly-plotted, and not at all confusing (if you’re a fan, you know what I mean). I listened to Brilliance Audio’s recent production which is 5½ hours long. Luke Daniels, who I’ve come to love, reads the story and does a great job highlighting Dick’s weird sense of humor. The Man Who Japed isn’t one of Philip K. Dick’s best novels, but it’s one of his first, so just for that reason, it’s worth reading.
October 15, 2017
Redenzione Immorale, un altro grande romanzo di P. K. Dick: fa parte delle sue prime produzioni letterarie, degli anni 50, anni di forte tensione e paura verso il pericolo nucleare, la Guerra Fredda, la Guerra di Corea...
Un altro manifesto alla libertà: di vivere, di espressione, di pensiero, contro ogni totalitarismo, potere precostituito... che il buon Dick ci racconta in questo romanzo, dove il potere totalitario è "impersonato" dalla Moralità!
Le lettura è molto scorrevole, ma non per questo priva di riflessioni, anche forti, anzi in alcuni passaggi si legge quanto Dick si senta intrappolato in una "morsa" che lo soffoca, lo opprime, poi passando a capitoli di dialoghi semplici di vita quotidiana, di pensieri che attanagliano le persone comuni, quali: lavoro, relazioni sociali ecc... Il tutto, "speziato" dal solito stile ironico e graffiante, verso una società alla deriva, ma se ognuno di noi volesse... :-D
"Tu hai questo incarico, direttore della Telemedia, un alto posto di moralità. Guardiano dell'etica pubblica... Ma non è l'etica di questa società. Le riunioni di caseggiato... tu le odii. Gli accusatori senza volto. Gli avanguardisti... il continuo spionaggio. L'ansia. La tensione. E le sfumature di colpa e sospetto. Tutto diviene... contaminato. La paura della contaminazione; la paura di commettere un atto indecente; il sesso è morboso; la gente è perseguitata per aver compiuto atti naturali. Questa struttura è come una gigantesca camera di tortura, in cui ognuno spia gli altri, cercando di coglierli in fallo, cercando di abbatterli. La caccia alle streghe. La paura e la censura e i libri messi al bando. I bambini che non devono sentir parlare del 'male'. La ReMo (Redenzione Morale) è stata inventata da menti malate e crea menti più malate ancora."
Un altro manifesto alla libertà: di vivere, di espressione, di pensiero, contro ogni totalitarismo, potere precostituito... che il buon Dick ci racconta in questo romanzo, dove il potere totalitario è "impersonato" dalla Moralità!
Le lettura è molto scorrevole, ma non per questo priva di riflessioni, anche forti, anzi in alcuni passaggi si legge quanto Dick si senta intrappolato in una "morsa" che lo soffoca, lo opprime, poi passando a capitoli di dialoghi semplici di vita quotidiana, di pensieri che attanagliano le persone comuni, quali: lavoro, relazioni sociali ecc... Il tutto, "speziato" dal solito stile ironico e graffiante, verso una società alla deriva, ma se ognuno di noi volesse... :-D
"Tu hai questo incarico, direttore della Telemedia, un alto posto di moralità. Guardiano dell'etica pubblica... Ma non è l'etica di questa società. Le riunioni di caseggiato... tu le odii. Gli accusatori senza volto. Gli avanguardisti... il continuo spionaggio. L'ansia. La tensione. E le sfumature di colpa e sospetto. Tutto diviene... contaminato. La paura della contaminazione; la paura di commettere un atto indecente; il sesso è morboso; la gente è perseguitata per aver compiuto atti naturali. Questa struttura è come una gigantesca camera di tortura, in cui ognuno spia gli altri, cercando di coglierli in fallo, cercando di abbatterli. La caccia alle streghe. La paura e la censura e i libri messi al bando. I bambini che non devono sentir parlare del 'male'. La ReMo (Redenzione Morale) è stata inventata da menti malate e crea menti più malate ancora."
April 25, 2014
This if Dick's third published novel and the third I've read from his body of work. Reading the books in chronological order has been interesting as I notice a few trends developing from book to book. Having read the first three novels, I'll now move into his later work with a sense of where Dick is coming from; specifically, from those strange, post-war years of 1950's California, where all is sunny and bright and prosperous on the surface, but underneath there is the fear of nuclear annihilation and fantasies of a post-war society.
This book starts in 2114, nearly a century and a half after an all-out nuclear war created havoc on earth. Into this strange world came General Streiter to create a new society based on a strict moral code for all citizens. Streiter doesn't actually appear in the book, but his legacy and the resulting societal dysfunction is the milieu in which the protagonist, Allen Purcell, operates. An up-and-coming player in the propaganda machine that keeps the society "working", Purcell finds himself taking unexplained and illogical actions which bring him in conflict with the regime and which threaten his own security and the stability of the existing Morec government.
The book is certainly written in a hasty manner and there are parts that seem underdeveloped, but on balance, this is an enjoyable book, especially in how it captures the ambiance of the 1950's pulp sci-fi environment. Once again, there is gratuitous mention of womens breasts and nipples, slipped into the story to boost sales amongst the pimple-faced adolescents who were the target audience of this genre. Wonderful in its way....
This book starts in 2114, nearly a century and a half after an all-out nuclear war created havoc on earth. Into this strange world came General Streiter to create a new society based on a strict moral code for all citizens. Streiter doesn't actually appear in the book, but his legacy and the resulting societal dysfunction is the milieu in which the protagonist, Allen Purcell, operates. An up-and-coming player in the propaganda machine that keeps the society "working", Purcell finds himself taking unexplained and illogical actions which bring him in conflict with the regime and which threaten his own security and the stability of the existing Morec government.
The book is certainly written in a hasty manner and there are parts that seem underdeveloped, but on balance, this is an enjoyable book, especially in how it captures the ambiance of the 1950's pulp sci-fi environment. Once again, there is gratuitous mention of womens breasts and nipples, slipped into the story to boost sales amongst the pimple-faced adolescents who were the target audience of this genre. Wonderful in its way....
August 30, 2012
It is a post-nuclear war society run by a reactionary government that pushes a puritanical morality via the media. A Philip K Dick world if there ever was one. And this is only his third novel.
Jape is an intransitive verb meaning to say or do something jokingly or mockingly. Philip K Dick is a japer. It is also a transitive verb meaning to make mocking fun of. Alan Purcell, successful creator of propaganda, in a moment of madness, japes the statue of the current government's founder.
You can imagine the rest but reading the book is worth it because Philip K Dick wrote it. I am finally starting to figure out, though vaguely, his female characters. They are subtle commentaries on the effects of a straight-laced society on the female psyche.
Alan Purcell reminded me of Winston Smith in 1984. His moment of madness becomes his first attempt at freedom. How he finally breaks loose is the story.
Pretty good. I still like Solar Lottery best of the four I've read so far.
March 10, 2023
24th book for 2023.
A hallucinatory ChatGPT review:
"The Man Who Japed" is a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick, first published in 1956. The story is set in a post-apocalyptic future world, in which a man named Allen Purcell lives in a society that has been divided into two factions: the "Pares" and the "Eptes".
The Pares are the ruling class, who have imposed a strict system of government control over the populace. The Eptes are the oppressed lower class, who are kept in check through the use of drugs that suppress their emotions and creativity.
Purcell, a government official, becomes disillusioned with the oppressive system and begins to question its legitimacy. He starts to use his position to secretly rebel against the system and to spread subversive ideas among the population.
As Purcell becomes more involved in the resistance movement, he begins to experience a series of strange and unsettling events. He receives mysterious messages that seem to come from beyond the grave, and he begins to have visions of a world beyond the one in which he lives.
The novel explores themes of political oppression, freedom, and the nature of reality. It also features typical PKD elements, such as surrealism, paranoia, and alternate realities. Overall, "The Man Who Japed" is considered to be one of Philip K. Dick's lesser-known works, but it is still a fascinating and thought-provoking read for fans of the author and the science fiction genre.
3-stars.
A hallucinatory ChatGPT review:
"The Man Who Japed" is a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick, first published in 1956. The story is set in a post-apocalyptic future world, in which a man named Allen Purcell lives in a society that has been divided into two factions: the "Pares" and the "Eptes".
The Pares are the ruling class, who have imposed a strict system of government control over the populace. The Eptes are the oppressed lower class, who are kept in check through the use of drugs that suppress their emotions and creativity.
Purcell, a government official, becomes disillusioned with the oppressive system and begins to question its legitimacy. He starts to use his position to secretly rebel against the system and to spread subversive ideas among the population.
As Purcell becomes more involved in the resistance movement, he begins to experience a series of strange and unsettling events. He receives mysterious messages that seem to come from beyond the grave, and he begins to have visions of a world beyond the one in which he lives.
The novel explores themes of political oppression, freedom, and the nature of reality. It also features typical PKD elements, such as surrealism, paranoia, and alternate realities. Overall, "The Man Who Japed" is considered to be one of Philip K. Dick's lesser-known works, but it is still a fascinating and thought-provoking read for fans of the author and the science fiction genre.
3-stars.
August 18, 2011
Cult sci-fi author Philip K. Dick's third novel, "The Man Who Japed," was originally published in one of those cute little "Ace doubles" (D-193, for all you collectors out there), back to back with E.C. Tubb's "The Space-Born," in 1956, and with a cover price of a whopping 35 cents. (Ed Emshwiller's cover for "The Man Who Japed" was his first of many for these beloved double deckers.) As in Dick's previous novel, "The World Jones Made" (1955), the story takes place on an Earth following a nuclear Armageddon that has considerably changed mankind's lot. In "Japed," by the year 2114, around 130 years after the war's end, society is run in accordance with the principles of Morec (Moral Reclamation). It is a highly puritanical society, in which 18" long, buglike robots spy on the populace, weekly neighborhood block meetings chastise the residents' slightest peccadilloes, cursing and neon signs are banned, and premarital sex is taboo. In this world that is still staggering back to self-sufficiency, the citizens live in tiny apartments, drive steam-powered cars at top speeds of 35 mph, and depend on Earth's off-world colonies for its NONsynthetic foodstuffs. Against this backdrop, Dick introduces us to Allen Purcell and his wife, Janet. Purcell is the founder of a small agency, similar to our current-day ad agencies, except that Purcell's bureau makes up "packets" of propagandistic fodder for Telemedia, the government's communications arm. When Purcell is offered the opportunity to become the head of Telemedia, he is sorely conflicted, as he has recently begun--for reasons unknown, even to himself--to somnambulistically desecrate the statue of Morec's founder in the local park. Why Purcell has been acting so mysteriously, and what he ultimately does as regards Morec, are at the heart of Dick's underrated yet very entertaining short dystopian novel.
And yet, short as it is, this is a book that's just chock-full of imaginative touches. Those weekly block meetings, during which neighbor passes judgment on neighbor, are extremely well depicted, and come off as analogies of sorts to the then-recent McCarthy hearings. ("More harm is done in one of these sessions than in all the copulation between man and woman since the creation of the world," Allen satisfyingly tells the witch hunters.) Although Dick's pet theme of the elusiveness of objective reality is not explored in this early work, there is still one quite "trippy" segment--in which Allen awakes in what seems to be another world--that should surely please all the hard-core Dick fans out there. Another bit of strangeness: the "Yoda talk" that the world's citizens are apt to utilize at any given moment (such as in "This an order is" and "This serious is"). Also unusual: the fact that the leader of Morec's government, as well as Telemedia's head, AND all the block wardens, are women; blue-haired bluenoses doing their darnedest to protect society from anything blue! As usual, Dick exhibits a great deal of empathy for his "little characters" caught up in bizarre situations, and the reader will most likely grow to like the Purcells for the sweet couple they are, despite Janet's incessant pill popping and Allen's dubious mental state. The book is also laced with a fair amount of humor; for example, a few "high-speed" car chases, a look at verboten reading material (such as "The Saturday Evening Post" and James Joyce's "Ulysses") in the radioactive wastes of Hokkaido, and, of course, Purcell's final "jape" on Morec. The book is consistently, compulsively readable, and an early triumph for Phil, then a young novelist but soon to be recognized as one of the most distinctive and fascinating talents that the sci-fi field has yet produced.
And yet, short as it is, this is a book that's just chock-full of imaginative touches. Those weekly block meetings, during which neighbor passes judgment on neighbor, are extremely well depicted, and come off as analogies of sorts to the then-recent McCarthy hearings. ("More harm is done in one of these sessions than in all the copulation between man and woman since the creation of the world," Allen satisfyingly tells the witch hunters.) Although Dick's pet theme of the elusiveness of objective reality is not explored in this early work, there is still one quite "trippy" segment--in which Allen awakes in what seems to be another world--that should surely please all the hard-core Dick fans out there. Another bit of strangeness: the "Yoda talk" that the world's citizens are apt to utilize at any given moment (such as in "This an order is" and "This serious is"). Also unusual: the fact that the leader of Morec's government, as well as Telemedia's head, AND all the block wardens, are women; blue-haired bluenoses doing their darnedest to protect society from anything blue! As usual, Dick exhibits a great deal of empathy for his "little characters" caught up in bizarre situations, and the reader will most likely grow to like the Purcells for the sweet couple they are, despite Janet's incessant pill popping and Allen's dubious mental state. The book is also laced with a fair amount of humor; for example, a few "high-speed" car chases, a look at verboten reading material (such as "The Saturday Evening Post" and James Joyce's "Ulysses") in the radioactive wastes of Hokkaido, and, of course, Purcell's final "jape" on Morec. The book is consistently, compulsively readable, and an early triumph for Phil, then a young novelist but soon to be recognized as one of the most distinctive and fascinating talents that the sci-fi field has yet produced.
December 5, 2020
I've read a lot of PDK over the last 60 years and now that I am retired I decided to go back and try to read them all again in the order they were written, not published. I already read the 5 SF novels he wrote according to Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_... I couldn't find a copy of the 6th novel "Eye in the Sky" so I jumped to this one. I now have a copy of "Eye in the Sky" and will read it next.
I found the novel slow going in the beginning. Like most SF novels of this time it was basing the technological aspects of a time in the early 22nd century on 1950's style technology. But PDK doesn't seem concerned about the material trappings as long as it doesn't get in the way of the ideas he is trying to project.
This is a future where we have a backlash against immorality and the idea that it is one of the elements that led to a serious war in the late 20th century. Now there are strict morel rules and and swift punishment for those who reject the morel injunctions. Media and the related advertising is solely for the purpose of reinforcing those rules in the minds of everyday people.
The protagonist Purcell is part of that advertising arm but subconsciously is rebelling against it and is committing pranks against the symbols of morality while in a blacked out state. He goes for psychological help but only encounters a therapist who is hung up on ESP and has him go through ridiculous tests to prove if he has any PSI powers. I'm not sure how that fits in with the rest of the plot.
The story finally gets interesting when Purcell consciously realizes his true feelings about the oppressiveness of this overly moral focus and uses his temporary position in charge of the advertising arm of the government to unleash a huge prank that he feels will change things for the better. But we never know if it actually does when the book ends. I was debating whether to give this 2 or 3 stars but the form of the final prank was so outrageously funny that it pushed me towards a 3.
I found the novel slow going in the beginning. Like most SF novels of this time it was basing the technological aspects of a time in the early 22nd century on 1950's style technology. But PDK doesn't seem concerned about the material trappings as long as it doesn't get in the way of the ideas he is trying to project.
This is a future where we have a backlash against immorality and the idea that it is one of the elements that led to a serious war in the late 20th century. Now there are strict morel rules and and swift punishment for those who reject the morel injunctions. Media and the related advertising is solely for the purpose of reinforcing those rules in the minds of everyday people.
The protagonist Purcell is part of that advertising arm but subconsciously is rebelling against it and is committing pranks against the symbols of morality while in a blacked out state. He goes for psychological help but only encounters a therapist who is hung up on ESP and has him go through ridiculous tests to prove if he has any PSI powers. I'm not sure how that fits in with the rest of the plot.
The story finally gets interesting when Purcell consciously realizes his true feelings about the oppressiveness of this overly moral focus and uses his temporary position in charge of the advertising arm of the government to unleash a huge prank that he feels will change things for the better. But we never know if it actually does when the book ends. I was debating whether to give this 2 or 3 stars but the form of the final prank was so outrageously funny that it pushed me towards a 3.
January 20, 2025
Pare che in tutti i libri di Dick ci sia un governo autoritario, arrivato al potere dopo la devastazione della bomba atomica, sicuramente instaurato con la promessa di non commettere mai più gli stessi errori passati.
Nel primo romanzo, Il disco di fiamma, il governo autoritario decideva chi era meritevole di vita o meno in base alla classe di provenienza.
Nel secondo romanzo, Il mondo che Jones creò, il protagonista che dice di poter profetizzare il futuro, incolpa, grazie a una propaganda (falsa) accattivante, un intero gruppo di persone di voler attaccare la Terra e organizza una guerra contro di essi.
In questo terzo romanzo, il sistema decide cosa è morale e si infila nelle vite dei cittadini; la polizia, la tecnologia e persino i medici, sono al servizio della morale; nessuno è al sicuro, tutti si sentono in dovere di intromettersi e di fare la spia.
C’era sempre il pericolo che in un angolo della stanza ci fosse un cittadino con un antico astio sepolto, un deposito di odio nutrito e accumulato per un’occasione simile. Durante gli anni in cui aveva abitato in quell’unità di alloggio. Allen aveva potuto mancare di riguardo a quell’anima innominata; la mente umana era quello che era, e lui avrebbe potuto dare il via a una instancabile sete di vendetta semplicemente passando davanti a qualcuno in una coda, dimenticando di salutare, pestando un piede o facendo qualcosa di simile.
Il governo moralizzatore, che come tutti i governi che nella Storia si dichiarano un modello di efficienza, poggia le sue fondamenta nella prevaricazione, colonizzazione e nella violenza, e decide, in base alla moralità di ogni cittadino, se questi sono meritevoli di una casa o di un lavoro.
Bevuto in pochissime ore, sto cercando senza successo un passo falso di Dick. Fino ad ora è riuscito (dai lontani anni '50) a mettere per iscritto gli incubi peggiori che potrebbero accadere in un regime dittatoriale, ma è paradossalmente, tutto ciò che la società di oggi già vive nei governi chiamati democratici.
Nel primo romanzo, Il disco di fiamma, il governo autoritario decideva chi era meritevole di vita o meno in base alla classe di provenienza.
Nel secondo romanzo, Il mondo che Jones creò, il protagonista che dice di poter profetizzare il futuro, incolpa, grazie a una propaganda (falsa) accattivante, un intero gruppo di persone di voler attaccare la Terra e organizza una guerra contro di essi.
In questo terzo romanzo, il sistema decide cosa è morale e si infila nelle vite dei cittadini; la polizia, la tecnologia e persino i medici, sono al servizio della morale; nessuno è al sicuro, tutti si sentono in dovere di intromettersi e di fare la spia.
C’era sempre il pericolo che in un angolo della stanza ci fosse un cittadino con un antico astio sepolto, un deposito di odio nutrito e accumulato per un’occasione simile. Durante gli anni in cui aveva abitato in quell’unità di alloggio. Allen aveva potuto mancare di riguardo a quell’anima innominata; la mente umana era quello che era, e lui avrebbe potuto dare il via a una instancabile sete di vendetta semplicemente passando davanti a qualcuno in una coda, dimenticando di salutare, pestando un piede o facendo qualcosa di simile.
Il governo moralizzatore, che come tutti i governi che nella Storia si dichiarano un modello di efficienza, poggia le sue fondamenta nella prevaricazione, colonizzazione e nella violenza, e decide, in base alla moralità di ogni cittadino, se questi sono meritevoli di una casa o di un lavoro.
Bevuto in pochissime ore, sto cercando senza successo un passo falso di Dick. Fino ad ora è riuscito (dai lontani anni '50) a mettere per iscritto gli incubi peggiori che potrebbero accadere in un regime dittatoriale, ma è paradossalmente, tutto ciò che la società di oggi già vive nei governi chiamati democratici.
February 16, 2011
I was going to say that The Man Who Japed was for Philip K. Dick completists only, but then I read that in the mid 60's he considered it the best thing he had written to date. And this was after Man in the High Castle had won the Hugo Award.
I don't know why he was so fond of it. The Man Who Japed was originally half of an Ace Double, so it could almost pass as a novella. It is also just one of about five book-length works Dick wrote or put under copyright in 1956. Familiar PKD elements are all in place: a postwar dystopian future, a lone hero going against the code, incredibly fast pacing, digs at psychiatry, a brief trip to another planet. This is a moral world where the morality is enforced by neighborhood watch societies headed by middle-aged women in floral print dresses. They get their information from "the juveniles," two-foot-long mechanical centipedes charged with keeping a watch on things. Alan Purcell is part of this system. He works in a form of advertising that broadcasts campaigns with moral lessons that are good for the populace. During the course of the book he falls very afoul of the system and plots to overthrow it.
Satire and action here are good, but Dick's most prescient insights here have to do with real estate. In the 22nd century people with tiny apartments close to the center of town live in fear of code violations that will exile them to the what I suppose are tenements or something unpleasant further out.
I don't know why he was so fond of it. The Man Who Japed was originally half of an Ace Double, so it could almost pass as a novella. It is also just one of about five book-length works Dick wrote or put under copyright in 1956. Familiar PKD elements are all in place: a postwar dystopian future, a lone hero going against the code, incredibly fast pacing, digs at psychiatry, a brief trip to another planet. This is a moral world where the morality is enforced by neighborhood watch societies headed by middle-aged women in floral print dresses. They get their information from "the juveniles," two-foot-long mechanical centipedes charged with keeping a watch on things. Alan Purcell is part of this system. He works in a form of advertising that broadcasts campaigns with moral lessons that are good for the populace. During the course of the book he falls very afoul of the system and plots to overthrow it.
Satire and action here are good, but Dick's most prescient insights here have to do with real estate. In the 22nd century people with tiny apartments close to the center of town live in fear of code violations that will exile them to the what I suppose are tenements or something unpleasant further out.
September 9, 2020
"¿Qué acabo de leer?" Es lo primero que me he preguntado al terminar el libro.
No sé si habrá sido la traducción, pero me he enterado de la mitad. No parece un libro muy bien construido.
A pesar de todo el potencial que tiene el hecho de vivir en una sociedad hipermoral, da la sensación de que Dick navega por la superficie todo el rato y no termina de meterse en la historia, terminando con un final que no parece ni final.. más bien un corte que no te esperas y que te deja un sabor algo amargo. A pesar de esto, el punto positivo que le he visto es que tiene moraleja, aunque no es muy novedosa y no parece profundizar en ella.
No lo recomiendo, tristemente.
No sé si habrá sido la traducción, pero me he enterado de la mitad. No parece un libro muy bien construido.
A pesar de todo el potencial que tiene el hecho de vivir en una sociedad hipermoral, da la sensación de que Dick navega por la superficie todo el rato y no termina de meterse en la historia, terminando con un final que no parece ni final.. más bien un corte que no te esperas y que te deja un sabor algo amargo. A pesar de esto, el punto positivo que le he visto es que tiene moraleja, aunque no es muy novedosa y no parece profundizar en ella.
No lo recomiendo, tristemente.
March 17, 2015
An great early work from PKD. Originally an Double ACE novel. It's a sort of a "give it to the man" kind of thing. A good fifties anti-establishment yarn written the way that only PKD could. It's packed with a bunch of cool (and comedic) ideas such as slow 30 mile per hour car-chases with nuke-pile driven steam cars that are steered by tiller and mini "juvenile" robots that report everything you might say and do to some kind of authority, mandatory weekly confessional tell-all meetings at you communal residence. The satire and action is plentiful in this rather short novel.
March 28, 2019
I haven't read Philip K. Dick in years, and so when a friend gave me his stack of PKD paperbacks I thought I would give it a shot. And then I waited two years to crack one.
I really loved this book for the way it tackled the absence of personality in authority. PKD manages to capture a troubling reality where people's social score is rooted in the absence of anything that would be considered normal humanity, so much so that a simple act of vandalism is an offense that can have one exiled and, even worse, evicted from their home. Allen Purcell vandalizes such a statue and sets about a course of events which will eventually see him become a kind of revolutionary.
This is early PKD, so the reader gets a sense of the possibilities that will eventually arrive in Dick's later work. Honestly and truthfully I kept having flashbacks to Terry Gilliam's Brazil, and while normally this would make Dick's book seem less by comparison, I actually enjoyed this book a lot. Works about the facelessness of authority, and the vitality of individual idiosyncrasy can become cliche, but it's the talent of a great artist to tell a story that's been told over and over again in their own voice so that, even if we know the story, we still can't wait to see how it's told.
I really loved this book for the way it tackled the absence of personality in authority. PKD manages to capture a troubling reality where people's social score is rooted in the absence of anything that would be considered normal humanity, so much so that a simple act of vandalism is an offense that can have one exiled and, even worse, evicted from their home. Allen Purcell vandalizes such a statue and sets about a course of events which will eventually see him become a kind of revolutionary.
This is early PKD, so the reader gets a sense of the possibilities that will eventually arrive in Dick's later work. Honestly and truthfully I kept having flashbacks to Terry Gilliam's Brazil, and while normally this would make Dick's book seem less by comparison, I actually enjoyed this book a lot. Works about the facelessness of authority, and the vitality of individual idiosyncrasy can become cliche, but it's the talent of a great artist to tell a story that's been told over and over again in their own voice so that, even if we know the story, we still can't wait to see how it's told.
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