Martian Time-Slip

A PK Dick schizophrenic novel I somehow had not yet read. It's good! It's not great. There's such a plodding inhuman quality to Dick's narratives, his characters are wooden. Which is at least true to type.

What's great in this book is the existential horror of the psychotic breaks, the actual time slips. And the gubble gubble. It's just dropped in with no warning or explanation, the reader is expected to keep up with the writer. But in this early book Dick is fully coherent and it's reasonable to expect us to keep up. It works great.

I kind of like the dated 50s stuff, the union boss and his girlfriend and the housewives cheating on their husbands with the milkman.

Good book but not essential reading. I think it'd make for a really interesting movie adaptation, or maybe a miniseries. The psychological themes might hew a little too closely to A Scanner Darkly to do this one too though. There's not enough hard sci-fi to really carry it in a different direction, this book could just as easily been in California as Mars.