Talk Back

[el dogo]

I've been a fan of Philip K. Dick for years, but there's still a bunch of his novels I haven't read yet. Now I've got A Maze of Death under my belt. It might be the most philipkdickian novel of his I've read. All of his trademark elements are here. Paranoia, reality in flux, and the fascination with religion. But it does also include his negative trademark elements. No sympathetic female characters, future worlds that are essentially indistinguishable from the modern day, and the fascination with religion.

The book was written in 1970, so it sort of bridges Dick's earlier, pulpier, more straightfoward science-fiction and his later, weirder, more philosophical speculative fiction.

A group of people have been chosen to live on a new colony world, Delmak-O. There's no apparent rhyme or reason as to why they've been chosen. There isn't even an established reason for starting the colony. There are strange little robots running around that don't seem to have any set purpose. And there's a state mandated religion, very vaguely like Christianity, in which prayers are beamed out into the cosmos and, at least intermittently, seem to actually work.

Please don't let the god stuff scare you off. This is the Dickeverse we're talking about here. Nothing is what it seems.

Eventually, the colonists start getting killed. But what is behind the killing? Is it the colonists themselves? The military? Some malevolent force on the planet? God itself? Dick does a great job of making tons of possibilities, no matter how crazy, all seem plausible. There's layers and layers of paranoia built up in the story. But it never collapses in on itself, the plot never loses track of itself or its foward momentum.

I don't think this novel is quite in the top tier of Dick's other works, like The Man in the High Castle, A Scanner Darkly or Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. But it's a considerable jump up from all those Ace paperbacks he wrote in a week or so in the Fifties, when he needed to eat. As a transition between straight pulp and a more quote literary novel unquote, it's now one of my new favorites of his work.