Customer Reviews

Dr. Futurity: A Novel

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Although it would have to be called one of Dick's weaker novels, Dr. Futurity, first published in 1960, is still a lot of fun. It concerns a present-day doctor who is plucked into the future by a tribe of Indians with time-travel technology. In their world the healing arts have been lost, since the ideal of dying to make room for an improved breed of humanity has displaced the value of living one's own life. The Indians, however, are inspired by a fanatical and paranoid leader, who is lying mortally wounded, on whom they wish the doctor to operate. In his effort to save the man, the doctor is thrust into a series of ingenious time paradoxes, which can be seen as a warm-up for the far richer novels Martian Time-Slip (1964) and Now Wait for Last Year (1966).

This is one of the last Dick novels to be reprinted, which should tell you something. It's one of Dick's weaker novels although probably not his worst (Vulcan's Hammer anyone?)

Basically, save your money and time and read something else by Dick like Ubik, Man in the High Castle, etc...

A rare and early foray into the subject of Time Travel from Dick, although the timeslip element is used initially merely as a device to move an objective viewpoint to a far future and therefore alien society.
Although one of the novels in which Dick was still finding his literary feet, it shows signs of the depths of his ideas and the themes which would come to dominate his work.
Dr Jim Parsons is snatched from the US of Nineteen Ninety Eight and deposited in the year Two Thousand, Four Hundred and Five. Interestingly, the US that Dick envisaged in his own near future is one in which large corporations have been nationalised and society seems to be run by the professional classes (Doctors, lawyers, etc). American politics and society is often something at which Dick takes a sideswipe, often as part of the background to the main narrative.
Parsons arrives in a post-nuclear world where the human race has become homogenised and the birth rate is strictly controlled (as is female rights).
Children are produced by a process of controlled natural selection whereby competitive `tribes' engage in various mental and physical challenges; the number of points they win determining who contributes their zygotes to `The Soul Cube', which is essentially a vast bank of reproductive material.
Death is welcomed, as when a tribe member dies, a replacement is automatically fertilised within the cube.
Being a Doctor, and somewhat politically liberal, Parsons is confused and appalled when he is arrested for saving the life of a young woman who subsequently makes a complaint against him for denying her the right to die.
Structurally, the novel follows the mythic structure in that the hero - unwillingly in this case - is taken from his world of familiarity and his happy marriage (unusually for Dick, whose heroes tend to suffer from broken or dysfunctional relationships) to an alien world of seemingly bizarre behaviour and barbaric cultural beliefs.
Dick was once quoted as having been influenced by AE Van Vogt, and if it shows anywhere, it shows in this novel which, if a little less obscure and rambling than some of Van Vogt's work, displays some of his trademarks such as `the dark city of spires', the super race, the peculiar machines, the convoluted plot and the trip to Mars. These are Van Vogt clichés which can be seen at their best in Slan (1940) and `The World of Null-A' (1948).
It's obviously hastily written, although the time-travel loops and paradoxes are well-thought out and all the ends neatly tied up, although Dick skimps on some areas where the motives of the characters are confusing. For instance, believing himself to have murdered someone by utilising time-travel equipment Parsons goes out of his way to try and ensure that he has actually done so. At that point, however, he has no motive for carrying out the murder, and has been shown earlier to be - he is a Doctor after all - someone who is dedicated to preserving life.
Not a major Dick novel, but interesting nonetheless.

This short PKD novel is not at the top of the list in execution but for Dick completists, it is an interesting time travel/paradox story. Many of us are now searching out more obscure stories by PKD, having read all his "classsics," and this novel certainly deserves a reading to compare it to his more fleshed-out novels.

Philip K. Dick novels are an acquired taste. He almost always has interesting things to say but often it is shrouded in some incomprehensible storyline. In one of his earlier and least known works, Dr. Futurity, we can both appreciate Philip K. Dick's imagination and not get bogged down with erroneous weirdness (albeit some would say it is this weirdness that makes his books so appealing).

Dr. Futurity has a fundamental theme of the 'Back to the Future' film series - namely, folks travelling forward/backward in time with hopes of altering the course of history. In repeated time travelling episodes they actually see themselves from their previous journeys. In Dr. Futurity the purpose of the time travel is to prevent the white supremacy era, as the author describes, which began when explorers conquered the New World. In Philip K. Dick's twenty-fifth century all the human races are blended and babies are produced through careful selection. Physically defective individuals are encouraged to get euthanised. Now how this all relates to earlier centuries of white supremacy is unclear, but Philip K. Dick certainly takes us on a fun (if rather contrived) ride.

Bottom line: readable and enjoyable. Recommended for Philip K. Dick neophytes.

Authors, like all other humans, need some time to develop their own styles. That was certainly true of Philip K. Dick. "Dr. Futurity" was only the second novel he ever wrote, although it wasn't published until seven years later, and he seems to have tried to stuff everything he wanted to communicate into its 150 pages, all before he had grown into his own man. You have to admire his ambition, but with all due respect he should have called this book "Dr. Futility".

Leaving aside for the moment the novel's place in PKD's body of work, though, it just isn't very good. Its flaws are those of a lot of writers' early work - much of the dialogue is way too expository to seem realistic, the plot jumps around beyond any possibility of coherence, and the characters are either heroes or villains of the deepest stripe. Not to mention that the whole thing lacks any sort of humor or subtext; it's a Twilight Zone temporal puzzle and leaves little emotional impact. Good thing it's so short.

The cover of my edition refers to this as a "chilling time travel classic". It's got time travel in it, to be sure. Dr. Jim Parsons, driving to work, finds himself abruptly yanked into a far future where humans belong to totemic tribes and look forward to death as their greatest opportunity to contribute to the advancement of both humanity and their own tribes. Just why Dr. Parsons has been thus kidnapped and what he's supposed to do relates to this societal attitude, but it takes his arrest, exile to a prison colony on Mars, rescue, association with a highly sensual tribal mother and travel to sixteenth-century California to prevent the assassination of Sir Francis Drake.

Got all that? Well, if you read this novel, don't fret, you'll come to understand. The writing is clear enough. Unfortunately, it's got so much to do in conveying the incidents of the plot that it hasn't got time to do anything else.

Now, in all fairness, "Dr. Futurity" asks some interesting questions about the efficacy of time travel. Even more unusual, it asks whether time travel is a moral activity. The first question has been asked before, but I'm not sure about the second. In fact, it's that last question that gives this novel some relationship to PKD's later work - he was always considering new aspects of old science fictional notions.

The old question asks us to suppose that we went back in time to right an old wrong - could we do it? Or, in changing the past, would we perhaps change things so as to prevent our own existence? And if we did that, since we would not be around to make the change, would the change be made? Writers have been pointing that out for eighty years or so.

The new question asks us to suppose that we went back in time to right an old wrong - have we the right to do it? Suppose that in doing so, we endangered ourselves. If we defended ourselves, what might the consequences be? What about those we left back in our own time? What consequences would they have to endure if we changed the past, even in a way they might approve of? Something tells me that PKD was the first, and maybe the only, writer to ask his readers to consider anything of that sort.

It's just too bad that he wasn't skillful enough as yet to work those ideas into a fictional context. His characters actually ask them, in so many words, and sometimes out loud. Surely I need not tell you that people don't actually talk like that to each other. They may talk like that to themselves, of course, but not in well-crafted sentences, and usually with some overlay of emotional turmoil included.

Ironically, in the year that "Dr. Futurity" was published, PKD had recently completed the classic "Time Out of Joint", and would shortly produce his Hugo-Award winner "The Man in the High Castle". In those works, he showed conclusively that his lack of craft in "Dr. Futurity" was a thing of the past.

Benshlomo says, There's a time to reach back into the past and a time to leave it alone.

This 1960 effort starts with Dr. Parsons being swept up from his home time, something in the near future, to a strange culture of the farther future. His life-saving skills turn out not to be needed in that distant day. In fact, those who suffer day to day injuries (lots of them, they're a careless bunch) are much more likely to call for a "euthanor" than for a medic. He's convicted of saving someone's life, with charge filed by the one he saved. All of which makes the question even more impenetrable? Who, in that death-crazed era, would go through such effort to hire a doctor? Well, we find out, and then the time-hopping begins. Remember those time-travel stories where one guy could be a heck of a crowd, and where future events impose a duty on some guy to make them happen? One of them.

Not too much of this story has aged. In fact, only the doctor with black bag would seem anachronistic to today's reader, nearly half a century after the book was written. The fact that the bag contains things like a cardiac bypass pump, which can be installed under field conditions with just an hour's work, leaves one wondering: just what kind of house call was he making? "It's OK Mrs. Hausfrau, I gave little Johnny two aspirin and a cardiac bypass. He'll be fin in the morning - just don't forget to change his batteries."

I don't see this as one of Dick's finest efforts. Parts of the story seem bolted together, and individuals' motivations in the second half get murky. Lots of SF stories get off the ground using reversal of some social assumption, but the death cult seems a bit ham-handed. "Dr. Futurity" is a fun ride, but not part of the ouvre that earned Dick his reputation as master.

-- wiredweird

Well, as you can probably tell, this is not a very well-known much less well-read PKD novel. It was published in 1960, hardly the height of his career. Other reviewers made this book sound as if it wasn't all that good, so I was surprised that the first third of the book was actually pretty good. Basically, there's this doctor named Jim Parsons driving down Hwy 101 when suddenly his car runs off the side of the road. And then he finds himself in the future. I like how PKD described the future: a rather primitive Bladerunner world is the closest I can compare it to. In the future, you're not supposed to heal people--i.e. doctors are bad--you just let them die. There are no elderly people and little or no disease. In a way this book is very prophetic, since the elderly are increasingly losing their status. But shortly after the doctor's arrival, the plot takes a nosedive. It reads really quickly, much more so than the Penultimate Truth, which I think is PKD at his worst. My problem with this book is this: A mystery-type book is confusing enough. Add in the element of time-travel going both ways and it's VERY easy to get confused. Stupid paradoxes. As a rule of thumb, I try and steer clear of time-travel subjects, the exceptions being the Terminator movies. Anyway, this book is okay. I'm glad that I have it in my PKD library, but if you want to read a better story with a little mystery and science fiction intertwined, read A Maze of Death by PKD instead.

DR. FUTURITY was published in 1960 and concerns a medical doctor from 2012 pulled from his normal timeline and abruptly deposited in the dystopic future of 2405. You can tell right from the opening bell that this story is going to be fairly heavy in time travel paradoxes and it certainly delivers on that initial promise. Despite all the obvious effort that Philip K Dick put into his twisted plot, I felt that the complexity and the convoluted nature of his story-line ultimately ended up hurting his book.

The world that PKD creates is a triumph of genetic engineering horror. His protagonist, Dr Jim Parsons, is dumbfounded to learn that his own profession is outlawed and that the sick and disabled immediately choose death in order to keep their society and race pure. While the story has its usual science fiction gang of rebels who wish to upset the apple cart, this crowd of malcontents are aiming a little higher than the usual kill-the-leaders-and-install-a-democracy cliché. Instead, they want to unravel eight centuries of history and rid the world of even the memory of white European dominance.

The meat of the plot revolves around the various timelines and the way in which the rebels try multiple times to alter history. The mystery around why certain events cannot be changed and how the various time-streams fit together is all very clever. However, at times it can be a bit too clever which gives the book an almost clinical feel. This is a pity because the motivations, the plans and the schemes of the various characters are given a lot of time to mature during the course of the story, yet the conclusion seems more mechanical than organic in its unveiling. It's a logical puzzle to be solved, not a discovery to be made. And this feels very much at odds with the flow of the beginning and the middle of the story.

Still, while DR. FUTURITY to me felt less than the sum of its parts, the parts that are good definitely make it an interesting read. The horrorshow of a future gone over to the dark side is classic PKD. It's certainly much more ambitious in its scope than the average science fiction novel. It doesn't really hold together as well as it could, but that shouldn't be a surprise given how early on this appeared in PKD's career.