Customer Reviews

Counter-Clock World (The Gregg Science Fiction Series)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Dick attempts the impossible task of making time seem to flow backwards as the reader moves forward through the book. An eerie and unforgettable premise has the dead being "born" in their graves, crying out to be exhumed so they can begin their reverse trek through life. In other scenes food is excreted onto plates and then boxed and returned to the shelf, while bodily wastes are ingested through a "sogum pipe," a process alluded to several times but mercifully never depicted. Eventually the book reaches an action-packed climax (shouldn't it have occurred at the beginning?), in which bullets are sucked back into firearms and so forth, but by that time the paradoxes have come so fast and furious that the reader's brain has imploded. As in so many of his novels, Dick throws too many balls in the air to keep the juggling act going, and as scientifically plausible fiction, it's a mess, but only a genius would have attempted an idea as weird as this one, and taken it as far Dick does.

Do you love PKD? Have you read a lot of his books?

If you answered yes then you'll love this. If not I would try one of his more approachable titles first (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, or one of his short-story collections). I would not recommend this to a first time Dick reader; if you don't know what you're getting yourself into you probably will not like it.


With that said, I love PKD, and have read quite a few of his works. I, having been aclimated to his style, found it very enjoyable. The only concerns I have are that some of the ideas, with reguards to the backwards flow of time, are somewhat garbled. A good example is how cigeretts are smoked by inhaling the fumes and blowing into the filter- yet the people still manage to communicate while inhaling. Try it yourself, see it's not so easy. I know it's nit-picky, I can't help it.

All in all a great book for anyone who already enjoys PKD.

PKD faced the old problem of commercialism vs. integrity. I consider this book to be a testament to Dick's integrity. Exploring often mentioned, but never developed, ideas.
For example, the Wizard Merlin supposedly lived backwards in time. Yet this idea has only been presented, not developed in the stories I have read. Several religions suggest a rapture or ressurection of the dead, without filling us in on the details.
Dick must have really felt the avenue of backwards time was worth exploring or he never would have finished it. It was brave for Dick to see these ideas through to their conclusion. While facing the realities of rent and editors, etc.
This book is not as morbid as earlier reviews might suggest. The characters are sincere and even light-hearted at times.
I found this to be one of Dick's easier and smoother reads.
I break it down this way. If you go to a movie and willingly submit to a fantasy experience, read this book. If you go to movies to test your analytical and deductive skills don't bother.
If you suspect that time is really just one big cosmic "Wow!" that has already ensued, I highly recommend it.

Anyone who has seen the Red Dwarf episode "Backwards" will know the basic premise of Counter-Clock World. Based on Dick's short story "Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday", Counter-Clock World has time running backwards, curiously only on Earth, due to the naturally occuring 'Hobart Phase' (in the short story the Hobart Phase was artificially created).
Logic would dictate that everything would have to run backwards but in Counter-Clock World people have a forward-pointing 'arrow of time' while the world they are living in has a reverse arrow of time. Dick selctively has his characters doing certain things in backwards (such as 'imbibing' Sogum and later on uneating a plate of food) and other things forwards like driving a car or carrying on a conversation.
Even though the environment of Counter-Clock World is a bit hard to buy it nonetheless a good story and is as worth reading as any of his other novels.

Started of with too many characters and too many conversations, this book almost forced me to give it up straight away. But perseverance to read until the middle will be rewarded.

The concept itself is interesting. A world when times move backwards. When the deads are 'revived' from the grave, being sold as a property to anyone who would bid the highest.
And when the one who's coming back to life is a religious figure, interesting things can happen.

There are two kinds of sci-fi books: one that is written by a scientist and one written by a non-scientist. This book is the latter. Sci-fi Books written by scientist contains the actual correct science or science of what would be possible in the future. While non-scientist writers tends to use science as basis and props for futuristic situation, emphasizing more on (perhaps) psychological and philosophical issues.

This book puts forward some interesting religion and philosophical issues such as how a person who live in the period where times move backwards reacts to the mind that move forwards. However, a reader with a scientific background might be put off by the some of the logic and science in this book, that are rather inconsistent and incorrect at times.

Take the example of this: [A person in a coffin in a grave just woke up]
" 'Get air down to me!' he tried to yell, but since there is no longer air he could not breathe; he was suffocating. `Hurry!' he called, but his call became soundless in the absence of air; he lay compressed, crushed, by an enormous vacuum; the pressure grew until, silently, his ribs broke. He felt that, too, his bones one by one snapping."

Overall it's an enjoyable book if you somehow can disregard the incorrectness of the science behind it.

[NO SPOILERS]

If there's one thing that I love about PKD stories it's this:

He almost always has a plot or concept that will blow your mind.

This time around, the plot deals with the idea that "The dead grow young", meaning that those already dead eventually come alive in their coffins and after being exhumed begin living life as usual, but getting younger as the years go by.

As you can imagine, this is a difficult concept to grasp and even PKD seemed to have a bit of a hard time with it. For example, there isn't a whole lot of consistency or reason as to how things work.

Why are their food and other natural processes done backwards?
Why do the characters say "Goodbye" for "Hello" and vice versa? If they're going to go to that extreme, then shouldn't they be talking backwards as well?
What happens if you were cremated instead of buried? (I think the book lightly touches on this, but still didn't do a very good job of explaining how this situation would play out.)

As usual, the main character is plagued with marital problems, something PKD was well familiar with, unfortunately. It does make for some very interesting reading by shifting the spotlight so it's not on the "dead grow young" concept 100% of the time.

There are some neat bits of technology mentioned here, including a CEPHALIC-WAVE DETECTOR which is used to track people and their movements, as well as a LOCK-ANALYZER which can open doors. Later on in the novel there is even a MATRIX-style action scene.

There is also a bit of prophecy with the mention of the one-way trips to Mars. Once you get to Mars, never expect to return to Earth.

Plot-wise, I found the original premise rather intriguing, but despite that I spent the first half of the book struggling to figure out how this crazy world worked and what exactly was going on (something to do with a resurrected religious leader who knows the secrets of the Afterlife). Fortunately the last half of the book starts to make more sense and even has a little action, however, the last sentence of the book lacks any punch.

Although I rate this book 3 stars, it is actually closer to a 3.5, the fun premise is one of the better ones put out by PKD, but the execution of it is a little inconsistent and confusing.

If you finish the book you will vicariously experience death and rebirth more than once. The quotes from Erigena placed at the head of many chapters guide the reader into a Neo-Platonic world that is explicitly described as fundamental reality later in the book. Quite an experience.

I personally found the play on the library, which is in the reversed-time world of the novel destroying books and knowledge, an interesting comment on Ray Bradbury's basically simple Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury's book was the book of the month here in Los Angeles a few years ago. I would be interested in living in any city that would make Dick's Counter-Clock World as its book of the month. Very.

Read the book.

"-"

It's kinda a cliche to be labeling one of Dick's books as, "underrated." This one has gotten a few "average" reviews which I don't think are deserved. This is my fourth Dick book and first time I've commented on Amazon about him, I feel I've read enough PKD to make an accurate comment.

This book gets a lot of average reviews because of the world depicted. Time is traveling backwards, people are born from the grave and end their lives in the womb, cigarette butts are lit from ashtrays and are finished when they're "new" again. The world, in anyone's stretch of the mind, isn't believable, in fact it's a bit silly. But that doesn't matter, it's VERY entertaining. Dick slowly reveals more and more about this world throughout the book, always leaving you with more and more questions. A real page-turner.

For those of you who are new to PKD, I think Counter-Clock World is a great introduction. Unlike some of his other books, this one starts off very exciting. And for the newbies, it's much easier to follow than the other books I've read of his ("Ubik", "Flow My Tears...", and "A Scanner Darkly") - Unfortunately, it doesn't have that huge weird ending like in his other books, but that doesn't matter. The end is very climatic and has millions of twists and turns all throughout the entire book. Highly recommended.

This novel, first published in 1967, has a more serious and darker tone than most of Dick's earlier works. It is an ambitious novel, underread and underrated in the Dick canon, in which the author attempts to integrate religious and metaphysical thought from a wide variety of writers across history. The premise is that time has started to run backwards due to something called the Hobart Phase. Dead people come back to life in their graves; living people grow continually younger until they reenter their mothers' wombs. Food is regurgitated into its original form, and while eating is considered obscene, waste ("sogum") is "imbibed" through tubes in public. People say "goodbye" when they greet each other and "hello" when they part. Critics have derided Dick's use of time reversal as completely illogical and inconsistent. That doesn't seem to matter really. The novel's serious concerns, about the frailty of life and love in the face of monolithic external forces, lift it above its own contrivances.

You might say that science fiction tells two kinds of stories most of the time, "if this goes on" stories and "what if" stories. "What if" stories give more play to the author's imagination, but there's a problem with them; you can't tell stories about whole worlds. They have to be about people. That is, you can't write a story about what would happen if time ran backwards; the real question is, How would people get along in their lives if time started to run backwards? That's what Philip K. Dick gets into here.

He was no quantum physicist, he was in many ways a mystic, and therefore the anti-time technicalities in "Counter-Clock World" don't quite come off. Inconsistencies abound. This story occurs some years after time has started to rewind, and people have been crawling out of their graves, growing younger, and eventually creeping back into the womb. They take cigarette and cigar butts out of packages, puff on them until they get longer, then put them in ashtrays. The even regurgitate food instead of eating it, cursing by saying "Oh, food!" and "You're a mouth-hole!" instead of the idioms you and I are used to. Nevertheless, they continue to walk forwards, they speak English that we recognize, and as far as I can determine the sun continues to rise in the East.

Take the scene where a man wakes up in the morning, opens up a box of whiskers, smears them all over his face and roots around for dirty clothes to put on before going into the kitchen to disgorge his breakfast. Fine, he's doing the reverse of the usual morning routine, but shouldn't he be waking up in the evening? And disgorging his dinner? And...well, you get the idea.

Don't try to figure this thing out. If you want a time-reversal story that makes logical sense, check "Time's Arrow" by Martin Amis. You don't come to PKD for logical consistency anyway, so if that's what you want you're in the wrong house. This isn't really a story about time reversal; as I said before, it's about how people cope with time reversal.

Sebastian Hermes is a twice-born - someone dug him out of his grave some years before (or after) our story begins. Now he's in business doing the same thing. He, his much younger wife and his staff find people calling out from their coffins, dig them up, and make them available for sale to the highest bidder, usually some relative. It's distasteful, obviously, but it's a living. Then he locates the grave of a man named Thomas Peake, who founded a new religion based on the idea that all humans are one, and developed a sacrament to demonstrate that truth by means of a drug-induced collective experience. Since his death, the Udi have turned their services into a kind of circus attraction - it's become quite popular and a source of enormous power to its leadership. Now Peake is about to wake up.

Here's another important detail; Sebastian sends his wife to do research on Peake and the Udi at the People's Topical Library, a place dedicated to eradicating all knowledge, bit by bit, as time flows backwards. That is, if Philip K. Dick emerged from the grave and had to un-write "Counter-Clock World", the Library staff would be there to make sure he did it. (Shouldn't that happen automatically if time is running backwards?) When it comes to Peake, though, they're concerned - what if he wakes up and tells everyone what life after death is really like? He's a religious figure that people would listen to. A new thing would be created rather than eradicated.

So, having located Peake's grave and determined that the man will be resurrecting soon, Sebastian Hermes has a lot of decisions to make and a lot of people after him. That's what this book is about.

Like all great sf and most of the good stuff, the technical speculation is really just an excuse. In this case, it's an excuse not only to take a look at what ordinary people under pressure are capable of, it's also an excuse for some surprisingly subtle metaphysical speculation. There's no point in getting into specifics about this, but what else can you say about a book that kicks off by asking what rights a person might have by saving another person's life? That's just for openers. PKD spent a good part of his life examining gnostic Christianity, and each chapter in "Counter-Clock World" begins with a quote from a metaphysical philosopher like Aquinas or Boethius on the nature of God, the human experience of time, the power of relationships, and all like that there.

The characters, too, spend way more time discussing the morality of their deeds than pretty nearly anyone else would do in a futuristic adventure tale. And that's what this is, make no mistake about it; unlike some of PKD's weaker stuff, "Counter-Clock World" is full of desperate flight, battles large and small, love and hatred. Some of the characters go so far as to die, and others grieve piteously for them. PKD was prone at times to get distracted, but not this time; this novel begins at the beginning and goes right through to the end with few, if any, tangents, despite the philosophical debates.

"Counter-Clock World" is, I gather, considered by many to be minor PKD, hardly worth mentioning. I can't imagine why. Its closing scene is overwhelming; a man stands in a graveyard at night listening to the dead wake up and beg for help. What's more, the novel earns that dramatic close. On second thought, don't bother with "Time's Arrow" - good as it is, read this one first.

Benshlomo says, Rejoice, PKD fans - the critics were wrong.