The Crack in Space in Philip K Dick

Nov 18, 2012 Jack Stovold rated it liked it

My Philip K. Dick Project

Entry #31 - The Crack In Space (written Sep. 1963-Mar. 1974, published Feb. 1966)

Jim Briskin, everyone's favorite news clown, is back for Round III, and this time, he's black! More accurately, in The Crack in Space, Briskin is a former news clown, and in the running to become America's first black president (sorry, Obama!)

One of the more depressing thing about PKD's stories is how long he often (not always) predicted that flagrant and public racial discrimination would My Philip K. Dick Project

Entry #31 - The Crack In Space (written Sep. 1963-Mar. 1974, published Feb. 1966)

Jim Briskin, everyone's favorite news clown, is back for Round III, and this time, he's black! More accurately, in The Crack in Space, Briskin is a former news clown, and in the running to become America's first black president (sorry, Obama!)

One of the more depressing thing about PKD's stories is how long he often (not always) predicted that flagrant and public racial discrimination would exist. Race plays a large role in Crack, with America stratified between the Cols (colored people, including hispanics and other dark-skinned peoples), and whites.

Briskin's campaign is sinking, and he needs something to save it. Help comes in the form of the titular crack in space, a portal into what turns out to be a parallel, alternate Earth.

What really grabbed me straight away, however, was when I noticed that this book, while not necessarily a direct sequel, takes place in the same continuity as a rather minor Dick story he wrote 10 years before this, “Prominent Author”, in 1954. In it, people use “jiffi-scuttlers”, a new device that eliminates the need for commuting by creating a sort of dimensional walkway between two points in space. One commuter, while walking through, finds a tiny opening in the dimensional “fabric”, and within there is a primitive world of tiny people who worship him, and ask him questions in a strange language. Using a translating machine, he answers them, only to find later it was not an alien world, but that he had been communicating with the ancient Hebrews and that he himself was the author of the Holy Bible. Although he freely resuses names, characters, and sometimes concepts, Dick very, very rarely wrote sequels or continuations of any kind, which makes it so exciting when they do happen. And I happened to like “Prominent Author” quite a bit.

Some seventy years or so later, it happens again, but this time, it’s not a rip in time, or even in space, but instead in reality, or at least our reality. What lies beyond the rift is a parallel world. Earth, choking to death with “bibs”, millions of unemployable youths placed in suspended animation until a solution can be found, is desperate for that solution. When a seemingly pristine world is found in the rift, presidential hopeful Jim Briskin jumps on the chance to save his flailing campaign, promising a new world ripe for colonization. But he has some opposition in the form of CLEAN, a racist grassroots political action group, and George Walt, the disturbing Siamese Twins who own the Golden Doors of Bliss, a brothel orbiting Earth which Briskin decries.

Despite that description, and aside from the usual crazily inventive Dick set pieces, plot-wise Crack turns out to be one of Dick's most straight-forward stories. In fact, that may be my main problem with it. Once the mystery of the parallel world is solved (and anyone familiar with Dick’s interests around this time will see it coming from pretty far off), the plot loses steam, and never comes near to filling its potential. I was hoping for a plot about the cultural, social and political issues that would follow from men from our world coming face to face with the people from the parallel world, but this never really happens. We hardly even get to meet them.

There is some great stuff in here. George Walt is a suitably creepy villain, two men who share a head connected at the base of the skull. They both talk, identifying themselves as either George or Walt at the beginning of each sentence, with eyes moving independently. There is something very wrong about it, perfectly encapsulated by one of the technicians for the jiffi-scuttlers recounting the sort of primordial fear he remembers upon first encountering him. And it’s a nice change of pace for this period not to have some huge marital or relationship quarrel hovering over the proceedings. But it would have been nicer to get more story about race and politics in our world, and more about the people in the other world. What we have here is squandered potential in both worlds. This book is still very enjoyable, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not up to par with a lot of Dick’s work from this period.

My edition: Mariner books paperback, 2011

Up next: “The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol. 5 - The Eye of the Sibyl”!

September 24, 2012 ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Apr 13, 2023 Joseph rated it liked it

Shelves: writer-p-k-dick, read-in-2023

I think it's funny how Dick sometimes uses breast-centric terminology to describe things. For example:

" [...] it slowed, came to rest on the breast-shaped vehicle board of the satellite, a dozen yards from the pink nipple that served as a location signal device."

This is somewhat early Dick that is somewhat middling, and yet it has some really great ideas within it. Namely the conjoined brothers that share but one head, George/Walt, accessing their own hemisphere of their common brain to operate ...more

Like · see review

Mar 01, 2019 Scott rated it it was ok

Not one of his best and there are even others in this vein like The Simulacra that I’d recommend first

Like · see review

May 17, 2015 Pickle rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi, philip-k-dick

2 themes i picked up on are:

1. Homosapiens are the same regardless of race
2. homosapiens are untrustworthy liars :)

This was a very short book but really enjoyable. I kept imagining Jim Briskin as Obama :)

Like · see review