Review: Philip K. Dick – Martian Time-Slip (1964)

Books about Mars need red covers, not blue

7.5/10

I bought this book because I like the title. Isn’t it mysterious? (And I’m a big fan of PKD) So, what is going on on Mars?

Isolated homesteaders are eking out a living on the dusty plains of the red planet. Emigration to Mars is slow, and the soil ill suited for crops and cattle. The cows are skinny, and there are always water shortages. Power is in the hands of the self-absorbed, coarse Arnie Kott, head of the Water Workers union. Kott meets a nonverbal autistic boy, Manfred Steiner, who lives accelerated through time and Kott wants to exploit him to get knowledge of the future. The more Kott tries, the more disorienting the story gets.

The writing is vibrant and energetic, with good character introductions that often have a dry, exaggerated tone to them. In Arnie Kott’s introduction, for example, we first meet him in his wasteful steam bath, soaping himself up and being surrounded by yes-men who nod their heads at his rambling speeches. Dick wants to bring his stories in imaginative and entertaining ways, and his books are never about realism anyway, so why be so serious? They’re about fragmenting, confusing realities, and often funny. 

There is a lot going on in this short novel in terms of plot lines, character perspectives, themes, and a lot more worldbuilding than Dick usually takes on. But this Mars is some kind of nonsense future, not meant to be a prediction but the 1960s transplanted; just an outlandish setting for human greed, narcissism, guilt, rationalisations and so on. No clear main character drives the story, which makes the first half a bit jumbled. 

A second storyline involves Jack, a schizophrenic repairman whose story intersects with Arnie Kott’s. Jack’s story shows us how the Martian community’s creepy AI education system tries to imprint a type of life that was normal on Earth but at odds with Mars, and everyone who cannot handle that is automatically labeled autistic and institutionalised. (Making autism a catch-all term for anything out of the ordinary, like Manfred Steiner’s slippage through time.) This ties into a common theme of Dick’s that sometimes it is an appropriate response to reality to go insane. Jack’s story also involves the native aliens of Mars (the Bleekmen) and their religion. It all sort of comes together eventually.

Time has not been kind to this novel. If you feel like going on a righteous moral crusade you can pick and choose between questionable use of mental illness for the plot, hamfisted commentary on racism and casual sexism thrown about by the characters. Partially this is just Dick inhabiting the heads of vile characters and not necessarily his own opinions, and the Martian culture has its own definition of what is autism or schizophrenia for the reality-questioning story. I don’t find this a particularly interesting discussion, though. It’s an old book. 

And it’s a bit of a slow burn. The plot is as scatterbrained as its inhabitants and needs patience, but there is an impressive part where Dick is scratching the internal timeline like a DJ and we feel the same disorientation as the schizophrenic Jack. Some great final chapters offer the payoffs that were sorely needed and make this into one of Dick’s best. Good, but messy. Approach with care.

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