I
have not read enough from the great Philip K. Dick. I have read The Ganymede Takeover, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, but not Through a Scanner Darkly or The Man in the High Castle or Ubik.
Well, the other day I found Counter-Clock World sitting on the bookshelf at the Oud West inloophuis on Bilderdijkstraat... It took me a little while to get into reading it.
It didn't actually occur to me how everything goes backwards until the characters started saying "food" for shit and eating is called Disgorging and taking a shit is called Sogum... Cigarettes you unsmoke them and eventually leave a whole unburned cigarette in the ashtray and they are packed back into packs...
The Hobart Phase is the name of what causes this to happen, and people are rising from the dead, and have to be dug out and healed in hospitals and sold to the highest bidder.
The story centers around the return of a notorious spiritual leader who was part of what lead to the beginning of the Hobart Phase.
If you have seen the movie "Memento" you may be familiar with the idea of time going backwards in a narrative. Well, anyway, in somewhat similar vein as Flow My Tears, psychedelic drugs changing reality... Characters perceive time going forwards but processes go backwards... Some things don't really seem different but many things are backwards.
The only thing about this book is I think you need to read it several times because I think certain or most of the causal chains in the story are in reverse. People unage, and are dug up, then slowly reverse to infancy and eventually find a woman who unbirths them and 9 months later they have to have sex... I think the story has woven in backwards something a whole other story that you most likely won't grasp until you know it well.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, and I am glad I bumped into it. Some day I will read all of Dick's works...
We can't stop here! This is Whale country!
Loki was born in Australia, now is wandering Amsterdam again after 9 months in Sofia, Bulgaria. IT generalist, physics theorist, futurist and cyber-agorist.
Loki's life mission is to establish a secure, distributed layer atop the internet, and enable space migration, preferably while living in a beautiful mountain house somewhere with a good woman, and lots of farm animals and gardens, where he can also go hunting and camping.
All images in the above post are either original from me, or taken from Google Image Search, filtered for the right of reuse and modification, and either hotlinked directly, or altered by me.