From the Bookshelf of Philip K Dick…

Dr. Bloodmoney or How We Got Along after the Bomb

Philip K. Dick,

Jack Gaughan (Illustrator)

Start date: May 1, 2014

Finish date: May 20, 2014

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Sep 14, 2012 Jack Stovold rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

My Philip K. Dick Project

Entry #25 - Dr. Bloodmoney Or How We Got Along After the Bomb (written 1964, published June 1965)

Dr. Bloodmoney continues Dick’s winning streak hot on the heels of Martian Time-Slip. This is another of my favorites so far. There’s a lot going on here in this very trippy and atmospheric novel.
Many of Dick’s novels (actually, most of them it feels like), take place in a future shaped by the aftermath of some cataclysmic war or apocalypse, but well in the past. The differ My Philip K. Dick Project

Entry #25 - Dr. Bloodmoney Or How We Got Along After the Bomb (written 1964, published June 1965)

Dr. Bloodmoney continues Dick’s winning streak hot on the heels of Martian Time-Slip. This is another of my favorites so far. There’s a lot going on here in this very trippy and atmospheric novel.
Many of Dick’s novels (actually, most of them it feels like), take place in a future shaped by the aftermath of some cataclysmic war or apocalypse, but well in the past. The difference in Dr. Bloodmoney is that the cataclysm in question takes place near the beginning of the novel and we see the world rebuilding through the course of the book. This allows Dick to create a very intriguing post-apocalyptic world, and we see how society rebuilds itself after the ashes. If you’re wondering where the bulk of the action plays out, anyone who has been following these reviews probably won’t be surprised to hear it’s Marin County and Berkeley.
Even stranger is that the cause of the cataclysm is a mystery. Nuclear bombs detonated all around the world, but nobody knows how or why they were detonated. Mentally troubled Dr. Bruno Bluthgeld, the title character (German for Bloodmoney), a nuclear physicist, blames himself, believing his paranoia and guilt over a previous nuclear catastrophe that left him universally despised has somehow magically manifested itself and brought about the apocalypse. After the cataclysm, he goes into hiding as a sheep farmer in the Marin County commune under the name Jack Tree.
There is no single main character, Dick goes with his multiple viewpoints structure. In the Marin County commune we have Bonny Keller, friend and former colleague of Bluthgeld, and the only one aware of his secret identity, her seven-year old daughter with an imaginary friend Bill, who is not so imaginary, tobacco-maker Andrew Gill, former psychiatrist Dr. Stockstill, now a general practitioner, Hal Barnes, schoolteacher and Bonny’s secret lover, and of course, Hoppy Harrington, the oddly named phocomelus (thalidomide baby born with out limbs), who becomes much happier and disturbingly powerful in this new world. In Berkeley, we follow Stuart McConchlie, a black dealer of mutant animal traps and former TV salesman and co-worker of Hoppy, and his boss. And in space, we have Walter Dangerfield. On the day of the attacks, he and his wife were sent up in a rocket to become the first colonists of Mars, but he ends up endlessly orbiting the earth and becomes a glorified DJ of sorts, and the last link for the people to the old world.
Hoppy is one of the first of the many mutants to emerge, having been born long before the attacks, but he had always envisioned this world coming to be. With his self-constructed cart that gives him greater mobility and freedom than normal-bodied people and his ever strengthening pyscho-kinetic powers, Hoppy becomes the quintessential “fixer”, an essential part of the Marin County commune with his ability to repair anything. Hoppy is one of Dick’s most intriguing characters, a handicapped man with a lot of rage for all the prejudice he faced in the old world. In the new world, his gifts make him powerful, and this power goes to his head, and we see him become more vindictive and child-like, culminating in his ultimate dream to replace Dangerfield and become the voice of the people.
But he didn’t count on some other mutants, namely Edie and Bill Keller, conceived on the day of the attacks. Edie goes on and on to anyone who will listen about her “imaginary” brother Bill, but little does anyone suspect Bill is real, an unborn twin inside Edie, who communicates with her and is desperate to see the world for himself. The whole little saga of Bill and what happens to him is weird and creepy, one of the strangest things Dick has written. And there’s a lot of strange in this book, from mutant dogs beginning to speak and reason, degenerates who will eat a horse to the bone, even when it’s “parked” and belongs to someone, rats who play music, and the strange politics and economics of a devastated world where everyone tunes into a marooned DJ in space who plays requests and chatters on amiably, trying to stave off his own pychosomatically induced death.
The characters are well drawn. I particularly like level-headed Stuart, not sure how to make his way in this world, but at the same time realizing he never had much better luck in the old world anyway. One of my favorite scenes occurs when Stuart, having had made the arduous journey from Berkeley across the bay to the Marin commune gives his pitch to tobacco roller Gill to go into business with a rolling machine together. Gill recognizes in Stuart a true salesman, and his simple joy at hearing an old-fashioned sales pitch even in this ruined world is one of many simple, beautiful moments in this story. Whatever his weaknesses as a storyteller may be, Dick had a great imagination, and its fun to watch all the out-there things he piles up in his stories collide with his simple workaday folk.
I recommend this one highly.

Stray thoughts: # Dick apparently absolutely hated the title of this book, which was forced on him by an editor who was a big fan of Dr. Strangelove.

#Dick liked to reuse names, characters, and places from his unpublished novels. Jim Fergesson and Modern TV reappear here from Dick's first novel Voices From the Street, although Jim is now a progressive who makes a point of hiring Hoppy (and Stuart). Stuart McConchlie shares a name and profession with Stuart Hadley from that book too, working at Modern TV. Jim Fergesson also appeared in name only as one of the leads of Humpty Dumpty in Oakland.

My edition: Arrow Books, paperback, 1977

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September 14th, 2012
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