Customer Reviews

Eye in the Sky (Ace 22386)

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It is worth remembering that Phillip Dick was writing mind-boggling novels of profound ideas using speculative technologies as a canvas when most science fiction writers were writing at an intellectual level little removed from the contemporaneous Buck Rogers comic strips. As an adolescent consumer of such forgettable trash I stumbled across Eye in the Sky and was transformed. Not all at once, mind you, since most of the book was wasted on me. But the vivid quality of its bizarreness made it unforgettable. A dozen years later, reading the bible for a college class, and my most noteworthy discovery was that the Old Testament had been the inspiration of most wonderfully surreal parts of Eye in the Sky.

"Eye" is certainly not a religious book, and it seems much less a sci-fi book than an ingeniously outlandish (and very funny) Aesopian fable about the havoc that results when people project their internal illusions onto the real world. Here Dick's handful of 1950's protagonists are victims of a cyclotron disaster which leaves them serially capable of reordering the physical universe. As he passes the transforming world sequentially through the characters' peculiar mindsets, their screw-loose visions collide comically, and each sees the others' naked worldview unfiltered.

It's a profoundly shrewd and subversive way of portraying humanity, and it continues to color my vision of human nature to this day as much as it entertains the hell out me every time I decide to reread it.