Customer Reviews

The Crack in Space

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

 

 

After passing the half-way point in this book, I began anticipating the traditional "Dick-twist". You know, the part where the book takes an extremely unexpected and bizarre twist and the story you thought you were reading is completely changed. Take, for example, the LSD dart in "Lies Inc", or the "grubbish" from Martian Time-Slip.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that he didn't go that way with this one, and instead gives us a story with a reasonable beginning, middle, and end. The book starts as many do- Dick presents us with the usual large cast of amusing and seemingly independent characters, that eventually become completely interwoven with each other. The plot- a hole in a "Jifi-Scuttler" turns out to be a door to a parallel Earth (of course we never learn just what a "Jifi-Scuttler" is supposed to do normally), long after our Earth has been crowded past maximum capacity.

I don't need to tell you any more than that. Dick gives us a wonderful, entertaining premise for a science fiction story, and then tells us that story from beginning to end, complete with the usual hilarious Dick ideas and character dialogue.

I recommend this one 110% for any Dick fan. The only reason The Crack in Space gets 4 stars is because it's just a shade below his obvious 5-star classics that every Dick fan is already aware of. 4.5 - 4.75 stars would be more appropriate, if Amazon allowed such ratings.

Philip K. Dick's The Crack in Space follows the story of Jim Briskin, the first black person to be nominated for the presidency of the United States, as he attempts to deal with the ramifications of a device that opened a doorway to an alternate Earth, an Earth that does not possess the severe population problems that plague Briskin's. Briskin, obviously, sees this alternate Earth as a means of alleviating the overpopulation problems on his Earth. But there are other people who want to use the alternate Earth to their own ends. And what initially seems like a gift -- an empty world with plenty of space to support millions of people -- quickly becomes a curse when it is discovered that the alter-Earth is populated...and not by Humans as we know them. Now Briskin and others are in a race to figure out the best way to deal with the situation. Can the inhabitants of alter-Earth be negotiated with?

Published in 1966 at the height of the civil rights movement, The Crack in Space is primarily a hyperbole in racial relations in the country at the time. At one point in the story, one of the characters even makes note that what difference does the amount of pigment is in someone skin make when they were dealing with an entirely different species...the characters' predicament of dealing with this species effectively wiped away the racial lines.

While PKD's story is laudable for its statements on race, the story itself falls somewhat flat...the lack of details caused this story to miss the mark. Published just after Kennedy's assassination, I was expecting PKD to spend a bit more effort drawing out just how much potential danger there was for Briskin to be the first black candidate for the presidency and then to tie that into the overall story of the different species from different Earths colliding, but PKD never really, despite a laughable attempt on Briskin's life, picked up that torch. I also would have liked to have seen the characters interact with the species on alter-Earth more on their territory...we the cursory edges of this, but the details were heavily glossed over.

The Crack in Space was the first PKD book I have picked up. While there was certainly a good story in the pages with a commendable message of racial equality, I would not recommend The Crack in Space to others for an introduction to this author. Despite this, I will, however, likely pick up other PKD tales in the future.

I really like this book. This book is an incredibly interesting tale of the political and social ramifications of the existence of an alternative Earth. Truly magnificent story with a great deal of surprises.

CRACK IN SPACE is, in my opinion, a minor effort in Philip K. Dick's career. One will find in it good ideas but scarcely developed.

Later in the 21st century, the world population can decide to be cryogenized in order to quit for a while a society dealing with an endemic unemployment. Those who choose this solution are stocked in piles waiting for a better day. In the meantime, Jim Briskin, the black candidate to the U.S. presidential election, needs desperately new political ideas to gather votes. Incidentally, a little hole that has appeared in a translator seems to lead into a new world and could be the long-awaited solution to the cryogenized people problem.

Well, one recognizes in CRACK IN SPACE some of Dick's themes as the emergence of an unknown world that defies the intelligence of politicians and scientists. But don't forget that a "new world" in Philip K. Dick's terminology is not a world that suddenly appears light years away from the Earth, it's rather a world that is close to us, so close in fact that this world often exists in the mind of the characters only.

In short, if you want to make an agreeable trip through Philip K. Dick's main obsessions, you may enjoy CRACK IN SPACE but if you still don't know this writer , try UBIK or BLADE RUNNER first.

A book for Dick's fans only.

Although he displayed remarkable prescience in many of his books, cult author Philip K. Dick was a good 72 years off the mark in his 18th sci-fi novel, "The Crack in Space." Originally released as a 40-cent Ace paperback in 1966 (F-377, for all you collectors out there), the novel takes place against the backdrop of the 2080 U.S. presidential election, in which a black man, Jim Briskin, of the Republican-Liberal party, is poised to become the country's first black president. (Dick must have liked the name "Jim Briskin"; in his then-unpublished, non-sci-fi, mainstream novel from the mid-'50s, "The Broken Bubble," Jim Briskin is the name of a DJ in San Francisco!) Unlike Barack Obama, whose campaigning centered around the issues of war, economic crisis and health care, Briskin's talking points are a staggering overpopulation problem, the issue of what to do with the "bibs" (100 million frozen citizens awaiting their thaw in a better day), and the shutting down of the Golden Door Moments of Bliss satellite, an orbiting brothel housing no less than 5,000 women. When a door to a parallel Earth is discovered in the wall of a defective Jiffi-scuttler (a tubular device for instantaneous transportation from place to place), Briskin feels confident that he finally has a solution as to where to dump all those bibs. But problems loom, when an exploration team discovers that this parallel Earth is not vacant, but rather peopled by...well, perhaps I'd better not say.

Filled with a typically large Dickian cast of characters (38 named characters are featured...15 of them in just the first 10 pages!), "The Crack in Space" is a very swift-moving vision of the future. With the use of jetcabs, men and women in this book flit from city to city like you might commute to work; indeed, one potential assassin flies from Reno to Chicago while Briskin is delivering a speech! As in many other Dick novels, divorce is featured (Dick himself was married five times) and some truly outre characters are presented. Most memorable here is George Walt, the owner of the Golden Door satellite: a one-headed, two-bodied mutant who constantly bickers with himself. Dick presents a future here in which abortions are legal and paid for by the government (and this was written a good seven years before Roe v. Wade was settled); the only coffee that is consumed (except by the lowest classes) is the "nontoxic," synthetic kind; and political parties, under the ruling of the Tompkins Act, are allowed to jam the transmissions of the opposing party. It is a typically nutty Dick world, for the most part, in which Briskin's campaign manager voices some very PC words on Dick's behalf. Thinking about the people found on the parallel Earth, Sal Heim ponders "the difference between say myself and the average Negro is so damn slight, by every truly meaningful criterion, that for all intents and purposes it doesn't exist." Again, a pretty right-on sentiment for 1966, and one which makes the book praiseworthy in its own right.

"The Crack in Space" is hardly a perfect work. Fast paced and entertaining as it is, and filled with colorful characters, bursts of humor and remarkable situations, there are some problems that crop up. Several main characters (such as Myra Sands, a renowned abortionist) just kinda disappear, and the exploration of the alternate Earth (for this reader, the most fascinating and exciting segment of the book) is a bit too brief. Still, these are mere quibbles. Though this book has been pooh-poohed by some (the British critic David Pringle, in his "Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction," inexplicably calls it "a clotted Dick narrative"), I really did enjoy it very much. Let's just hope that President Obama has an easier time with his wars, economic woes and health care reforms than Jim Briskin will have with his problem of the bibs!

Reading this book today is even more surreal than it must have been in 1966. It concerns the first serious black presidential candidate and what he has to do to have any hope of being elected. Will he maintain his ethical standards, or will he follow his staff's advice and compromise?

Everyone's got a different opinion of how President Obama answered that question, but one thing's for sure; during the elections of 2008, neither Barack Obama nor John McCain had to consider what to do with several million proletarian workers in suspended animation, preserved thus for lack of any work or other means of survival for them. Nor did the real-life presidential candidates have to consider how to relate to a highly public and popular house of prostitution on an orbiting satellite. Most importantly, although overpopulation continues to be a concern in the modern world, Obama and McCain did not have to face an apparently underpopulated alternate Earth, reached through the titular crack in space, and inhabited by a small but possibly dangerous civilization of Peking Man. Black presidential hopeful Jim Briskin and incumbent Bill Schwarz, the fictional candidates in "The Crack in Space", must consider all of this.

That's a lot of stuff for a short novel - probably should have been a good two or three times as long. It's still worth reading, though, if only because it's one of the comparatively few science fiction novels of the time (or any time, for that matter) to consider the political implications of scientific discovery, especially during an election year. That setting allowed Philip K. Dick to get around one of his real weaknesses - his tendency to throw all kinds of unconnected plot points into his work and let the reader sort them out. By contrast, the candidates in this novel draw the connections for you.

Look at it this way - frozen workers, orbiting bawdy houses and alternate Earths don't have much to do with each other unless you're running for President. In that case, you might consider defrosting the workers and sending them to colonize the alternate Earth if doing so prevented the powerful bawdy-house owner from coming down on your opponent's side, and scored a number of other political points for you. See how it works? Of course you do. Unfortunately for Briskin and Schwarz, this is a PKD novel, and so the plan does not, in fact, work as designed.

Whatever happens next, you would think that this would be more than enough plot. Not for PKD. He also decided to include an explanation of how this crack in space turns up - it has to do with a famous transplant surgeon's urgent need to hide his mistress from his equally famous counselor wife as she looks for something unsavory she can use in their divorce proceeding. In addition to that, PKD decided to make that bawdy-house owner a set of conjoined twins, joined not at the hip or chest, but at the head - two bodies with one cranium and a shared brain. And, as implied above, there's the implicit conflict going on between the races, about to boil over in the rumble-tumble of a presidential election.

Then the Peking Man culture shows up and all of this detail vanishes in a puff of smoke - the surgeon, his wife and his mistress disappear around page 80, the double-bodied being loses all its impact on the story a few chapters after that, and as for the racial issue, that fizzles out in the face of an alien threat, as clichéd a science-fictional theme as ever emerged from the civil rights movement. Kind of disappointing, really.

PKD might have produced better work here if he had cut all the extraneous stuff and concentrated on the political back-and-forth over the scientific breakthroughs. But then, that wouldn't be much like PKD. I'm kind of torn, to be perfectly honest. Trying to tame a wild man like this author is rarely advisable - you end up with either a run-of-the-mill tamed beast or a really irritated wild one.

Come to think of it, that may be what "The Crack in Space" is really about. The story takes a while to rev up, but eventually it turns into a pretty intense examination of what we can do when confronted with the craziness of our deeper nature, represented here by the earlier evolutionary form of humankind. After all, even the morally courageous Jim Briskin has to move in a rather unorthodox fashion if he's to win the election, and no other characters in the book have even that much hesitation about using incomplete, possibly dangerous knowledge to their own ends.

The extraneous detail, crammed into the minimal space, distracts from the book's emotional power. When you consider that PKD wrote "The Crack in Space" in 1963 along with four other novels, this isn't terribly surprising - that much production leaves room for a lot of junk to get past the authorial filter. The surprise is that he turned out any good work at all that year. Actually, he did more than that - 1963 produced "Dr. Bloodmoney," an acknowledged classic, and "Now Wait for Last Year," an unacknowledged one. What's more, PKD wrote that last title immediately after "The Crack in Space", so it's not like he had lost it or anything. He was just playing his usual game - he wrote what came to mind and didn't bother with any rules of structure, for better or worse.

With PKD as with his character Jim Briskin, that kind of personal dedication looks positively heroic from a distance; from close up it can be mighty damaging.

Benshlomo says, A little chaos never hurt anyone, but a lot of chaos is another story.

In Philip K. Dick's The Crack in Space (1966), American technology and civilization has advanced so far that citizens can easily take a spaceship to make daily visits to an orbiting satellite whorehouse, personal Jifi-scuttlers are used to warp space/time so that people can quickly travel from home to work in a distant city, and overpopulation is such a public concern that millions of dispossessed Americans have chosen to be put in cryogenic storage until a habitable planet is discovered.

Yet, America has not advanced so far in other respects. It's 2080, racism is still rampant, and Jim Briskin is hoping to be elected as the first African-American President. He needs to convince both the "Caucs" and the "Cols" (oh, what horrible nicknames!) that he's the best man for the job. This isn't always easy to do for a principled man who isn't willing to abandon his conservative ideals just to get the endorsement of the powerful mutant who controls the satellite broadcasts. It gets even harder when his white campaign manager defects to the other side and Briskin is now the target of assassination attempts.

But when a repairman discovers an alternate universe in his client's broken Jifi-Scuttler, Jim Briskin sees a way that he can win the election -- by promising to send all the frozen people to inhabit the alternate Earth. Sure enough, in pure PKD style, the Americans quickly and unthinkingly embrace Briskin's crazy idea and off they go, heading for disaster!

The Crack in Space is related to one of my favorite PKD short stories: "Prominent Author," in which we're introduced to the Jifi-scuttler. Dick's stories are always bizarrely entertaining. They're usually fast-paced and full of weird people with weird ideas doing weird things. In The Crack in Space, which contains a more straight-forward plot than many of his novels, we have a famous organ transplant doctor who's divorcing his wife (an "abort-consultant") while hiding his mistress in a parallel universe. Where is Dr. Sands getting all the organs for his transplants? Then there's George Walt, the man with two bodies (but only one head) who runs the orbiting whorehouse and wants to get rid of Jim Briskin because Briskin wants to shut him down. As usual, all the characters talk on vid phones, drink synthetic coffee, avoid the automatic reporters, get divorced, and worry about overpopulation.

The Crack in Space is fun, but not up to par with the best PKD offers. I don't know if Dick really imagined that in 2080 American race relations wouldn't have progressed beyond 1960s levels, but this really makes the novel feel more dated than his other works do. Also, the way that Americans dealt with the parallel universe was so simplistic and naïve that this was hard to swallow, but yet it's so typical of PKD. Fans, who are used to his frenzied plots and other little writing quirks, are likely to just chuckle and let it go. In the end, though, there's a beautiful ironic message. As Americans are dealing with race warfare, PKD shows us that, really, we're all human after all.

Brilliance Audio, who is gradually producing all of Philip K. Dick's novels in audio format, did another wonderful job with this one. Eric Dawe performs it superbly.

PK out did him self with this one. He put all of his reality into just about 10 pages and then expanded it to make a well detailed novel with just the right amount of character development. This book reads like a suspense movie. You are left sitting on the edge of your seat while reading page after page. To put it mildly there really should be no ending. It leaves you like a drug leaves you and you go into withdrawls until you either pick up the book to re-read or start looking for a substitute for such a good story to fill the void. I would say that this book ranks high than any other Dick book out there with the exception of Scanner Darkly and even then they are still very close to each other. If I left your mouths watering, good. They should have been watering in the first place. Dick has proven to have out done him self on multiple occasions after his death now find the book and charish it. You may have to search for it in every used book store in every town you come to. It is worth it. I was lucky and stumbled across it with out knowing how much it was worth.

The recurrence of the theme of the discovery of living ancient ancestors in modern times, as in Dick's The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike and The Simulacra, suggests a symbolic incursion into modern consciousness of the buried, primitive self. But despite flashes of the author's characteristic humor, The Crack in Space is substandard PKD. It relies on routine political intrigue and a meandering plot without compelling characters. Except for Jim Briskin, the first black man ever to run for president, there seem to be none who are not mired down in petty, personal, materialistic concerns. This novel also lacks both the themes of the problematical marriage and the breakthrough to a higher reality that mark much of Dick's best work. Probably only those who have read just about everything else Dick wrote need seek this one out.