Customer Reviews

Eye in the Sky

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The 1957 EYE IN THE SKY is one of the first Philip K. Dick's books you should read if you still don't know this american writer. If I'm not mistaken, it was the first time that Philip K. Dick, in a novel, was treating the theme of the virtual realities.

Eight persons, while visiting the Bevatron, the only pure science-fiction element of the novel, are trapped in a time hole after having accidentally been hit by the Bevatron ray. They wake up in a world that at first is pretty much the same than the one they have just left but they soon realize that they are caught in a world entirely created by the phantasms of one of them.

One can like THE EYE OF THE SKY for numerous good reasons such, for instance, as the slight favour of Agatha Christie's " and then they were none " in it, the reader waiting anxiously for the next imaginary world to appear and the clues that will lead him to the identity of the new dreamer's name. One can also appreciate this book for its critique of the late fifties's american society : The Mc Carthy syndrome, the anti-communism paranoļa or the wave of the evangelism don't have the slightest chance under Philip K. Dick's cruel pen.

With this book, PKD revealed himself as the first class writer he will be during the sixties.

A book for a future PKD fan.

What more could you expect from Philip K. Dick? Even the title "Eye in the Sky" holds different meanings depending upon how you look at it. In this story where religion and reality mutate from one person's mind to the next, we are confronted with the question of what is real. Is the world around us just in our minds? or is it in someone else's mind? A God-fearing zealot? A paranoiac?

And, of course, religion comes into it, as the question of God vs. Ego rises all the way to the top. All the way to the title, in fact. "Eye in the Sky", as a title, is visualized in the book when two characters ascend (Marry Poppins-like, on an umbrella) to heaven to find themselves floating before a giant eye. That alone, to me, opens up a barrel full of questions about how our desire to look into the sky and find God shapes what we see. But then, being Philip K. Dick, the twist goes further, and we then discover that the eye is not in the protagonists' mind, but in someone else's...

There isn't enough room to ask (or attempt to answer) all the questions that book will raise, which is why it is an absolute marvel of fiction.

One thing that I like about Dick in general is that his books are shorter than most that fall into the genre of science fiction. They are easy to read, are finished quickly, but they raise questions that will leave you thinking long after you've put the book down.

In "Eye in the Sky" my original criticism was that the end came a bit abruptly and was non-conclusive. But then I figured it out, and now I cant stop thinking about how clever and appropriate the conclusion of the story really is.

It starts innocently enough: A group of tourists are marveling at the invention of a machine called the Bevatron. Suddenly the machine goes haywire (for you gamers out there, imagine the first scene of Half-Life), destroys the walkway high above the machine (where the tourists are) and gravity does the rest.

The next part is weird, which in any PKD book world be normal, I guess. The tourists, having been zapped by the Bevatron are now stuck in a fantasy world that is being generated by one of the members of the tour group--they have no idea who. In that regard there is a slight mystery element to this novel.

In each world the tourists are now tourists yet again, although this time they are tourists within the worlds that someone else has created. One lady is extremely paranoid in real life, resulting in her fantasy world where everything is out to get you (the house scene is wonderful!). Then there is another lady that abhorrs everything bad in real life. In her fantasy world there are no ants, there are no speed bumps. If it annoys or bothers her she won't allow it to exist.

It was an eye-opener reading about how others view the world and what the world would be like if they could have their way. It makes me glad that I live in a world where I can walk into my house and not be afraid of it trying to literally eat me.

'Eye in the Sky', written years before Philip K. Dick's golden era (late 1960s/early 1970s), is a forgotten jewel. And it is one of the few novels by the author that might appeal to folks who don't care for science fiction since the story doesn't involve space travel, time travel or aliens.

The clever story involves an accident at a scientific lab where several unconscious folks are absorbed into the minds of another victim who is conscious. So in effect they live in the world of how another person sees it - distorted, bizarre, and often dangerous. Yes, it all sounds a bit daft. And in the beginning I wasn't sure if this story line would hold. But actually the story gets more and more engaging. I think 'Eye in the Sky' should be viewed as one of Philip K. Dick's best works, along with 'Ubik' and 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?".

Bottom line: a must read for Philip K. Dick fans (present and future). Recommended.

My favorite PKD book was Time Out of Joint--not any more! This is a tremendous effort and isn't dated in the least. The ideas expressed in here seem to have been written for the US social situation of 1997, not 1957. I think PKD was looking into the future.

Writers are always borrowing from each other, twisting classic literary styles, playing ruthless games with plot and character and logic. This, however, may be the first time I've run across a novel that gets its opening setup from a comic book.

That's not to say that Philip K. Dick intended to ring changes on a comic book, or even that he realized he was doing so - his readers know by now that he got inspiration and ideas anywhere he could find them, consciously or otherwise. I only suggest that readers of classic Marvel comics might find more here to identify with than they suspect.

Anyone who reads those comics, or has seen the movies, knows that the heroes often fall victim to industrial or lab accidents and emerge with super powers. The eight major characters of "Eye in the Sky" literally fall into a linear accelerator, and emerge with powers beyond anything that the Incredible Hulk ever dreamed of. They only get those powers one at a time, though. There goes PKD again, taking a standard story idea and showing us that maybe it wouldn't be such a good deal after all.

Lest some non-reader of comics stop there, however, let me assure you that you won't find any costumed oddballs here and almost no lines of dialogue end with exclamation points, so you're quite safe. Aside from the peculiar originating incident at the atomic energy plant, then, this is mostly a sort of scientific/ontological puzzle. Interesting as a brain teaser, but you have to dig for the human content. Happily, it's there.

Unfortunately, it's also a little dry. Jack Hamilton (the author had not yet developed his gift for interesting character names) loses his job at a missile plant because his wife goes to progressive political meetings and signs peace petitions. By the twisted logic of the age, this makes him a security risk. He and his wife, five other characters and a guide go to tour the accelerator, arriving just in time for that accident. The eight of them gradually realize that the world they have awakened in is not quite the one they fell out of. As I said, they also realize that, one by one, they are gaining Godlike powers, or so it seems. They spend the rest of the story in a straightforward attempt to learn what's going on and to get home.

Now, "Eye in the Sky" came out in 1957 and takes place in 1959, so there's plenty of other stuff going on here. The security man responsible for getting Hamilton fired over his wife's activities is part of the group that falls, so we get some commentary on the Red Scare of the 1950s and its effects. The group's guide is a student of advanced physics, but he's black and has to take relatively menial jobs, so we get some commentary on the early civil rights movement. Some of the characters have psychological disorders to deal with, and because of the nature of the crisis they fall into, everyone else has to deal with those disorders as well.

In other words, this novel is somewhat more than just a hard science romp. It turns out that this accident and its aftermath give Jack Hamilton the chance to confront his latent racism, to uncover his paternalistic attitude toward his wife and the buried cracks in his marriage, to consider just how he feels about his country and what's happened to it, and I think I'm not giving anything away by saying that he emerges as a stronger and better man. All of this is touching in its own way, and well worth the ride.

Maybe it's just the industrial setting, or the Cold War politics, or the episodic nature of the storyline, but for all the emotional upheavals, "Eye in the Sky" is sort of plain vanilla. The ideas and environments are typically more interesting than the characters, which can be a dangerous state of affairs - in clumsier hands, it can leave the reader nothing to care about, and even here it makes the book drag in spots. This is the last thing one expects from Philip K. Dick, as is the hard science content. Still, even leaving that aside, the book is a trifle drab. It's also frustrating that we don't get a very clear sense of anyone's inner life other than Jack Hamilton's (and when you read the book, you'll know how ironic that statement is). At least there's a genuine eye in the sky, even if it disappears about halfway through.

Nevertheless, "Eye in the Sky" is a good read, with enough spice along the way to keep the interest level going. And for those who take an interest in Philip K. Dick's work, this novel shows us some good early promise. You can see the author working out his interest in paranoia and obsession, his distrust of political systems, his concern for working people and for married couples, and his obvious love for his characters, even the horrible ones. He was also clever enough, this early in his career, to end on a slightly ambiguous note, letting us wonder if all will be well. That he got his mass-market pulp SF publisher to put it out with that kind of conclusion is an accomplishment in itself.

Perhaps that's what I respond to in "Eye in the Sky" - you can feel Phil Dick revving his engines here. A couple of years later he published "Time Out of Joint," using a lot of the same thematic materials to astoundingly better effect, and he was well on his way. So were we.

Benshlomo says, One man's trashy read is another man's practice swing.

Eye in the Sky was written by the eponymous Philip K. Dick, he of Blade Runner ("Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") and The Running Man, among other seemingly made for the big screen novels. Dick's meditations on consciousness are a running theme throughout all of his works, and Eye in the Sky is no different. In this tale, our hero Jack Hamilton and has just been given a choice at his military contractor job, where he works at a facility that contains the particle accelerator known as the Bevatron. Jack's wife, Marsha, is suspected of being a Communist sympathizer, and as a result Jack's job is at risk. Adding to the betrayal, Jack's friend Charles McFeyffe is head of security and leads the prosecution against them.

With Jack questioning his own wife's loyalty and choosing between his marriage and his career, Jack, Marsha, Charles, and a few other folks take a tour of the newly operating Bevatron. Then disaster strikes.

The Bevatron's particle beam tears through the visitor catwalk above, dumping eight people into it, including Jack, Marsha, and Charles, along with Bill Laws, an African-American scientist reduced to giving tours of the Bevatron; Arthur Silvester, a fundamentalist World War II veteran; Joan Reiss, a neurotic secretary; and Edith Pritchert and her son, a prim-and-proper patron of the arts. While their bodies lay crumpled on rubble of the broken Bevatron, their consciousnesses are whisked away to alternate universes created by each of the visitors.

In some ways, Dick was light years ahead of his time. Although the novel is obviously dated by references to McCarthyism, the challenges posed by each world couldn't be more apt for our modern times. The first world, created by Silvester, is a fundamentalist's dream, combining geocentric Christian and Islamic beliefs. Dick skewers both religions with one deft chapter, and the reference to Eye in the Sky has (among other parallels) a literal manifestation in Silvester's God. That's right, he's a big Eye of Sauron, so big that it looks like a gigantic lake.

Silvestri's world is either terrifying or hilarious, depending on your perspective. With the divine so intimately real, prayers manifest (one simply prays for money), God's wrath is always around the corner (transforming straying believers into hunchbacked damned souls), and science is a cult that nobody seriously practices. Dick shows just how capricious and dangerous an old Testament God would be, and the difficulty of navigating a modern world with such an omniscient presence.

And yet, Silvester's world has laws. Subsequent worlds range from the bizarre to the outright terrifying. Pritchet's world is one of absolute tranquility, a super-filter that causes anything offending Edith to disappear from existence. Again, Dick hits the mark: in the world of Tivo, the Internet, and politicized news channels, the ability to filter out dissenting opinions has become all too common. If it were literally true, Dick demonstrates how what might on the surface seem ideal rapidly descends into a very personal hell.

The next world is by far the most terrifying; If Mrs. Pritchet found everything offensive, Reiss is afraid of it all. The water is poisoned, houses literally try to eat you, and lurking inside every one of us is a cold, calculating insect just dying to burst free...

The final world brings us back to the crux of the conflict for Jack and Marsha - a Communist's view of what America must be like. The identity of the creator will ultimately determine if Marsha is guilty of being a Communist.

The book is not without its flaws. Dick comes off very much a political author who doesn't necessarily know the targets he skewers. A fight with angels devolves into a peculiar human-like brawl, with angels being kicked in the groin, skewered in the spleen with a hatpin (seriously), and otherwise being beaten up as if they were common thugs. No fundamentalist worth his bible would ever believe angels could be so easily defeated, much less beaten up.

Bill Laws, the African-American, is cast in a sympathetic light, but he has little to do. Laws never gets his own world and thus he seems more of a caricature, content only to chastise Jack on his own hypocrisy. Marsha comes off as whiny and self-centered, and her supposed interest in political causes makes her seem more like a suburban socialite with too much time on her hands than a believable advocate of human rights. And then there's Jack, who just comes off as an arrogant jerk most of the time.

And yet, Eye in the Sky is so far ahead of its time. Dick has set up a perfect series of foibles to demonstrate his own beliefs, and in doing so shows how we all barter our individual freedoms for religion (Silvester), peace (Pritchet), security (Reiss), and democracy.

In the 1950s, America was troubled with an identity crisis...the struggles between paranoia and socialism and communism and the fear of the different or seemingly un-American were gripping the nation. From the Beavers' sterile vision of America to the youth yearning to throw off the yoke of societies norms through figures like Elvis Presley to McCarthy, we were defending our society from every angle - both the overly conservative who wanted us all to act and behave the "right" way and those who embraced the false hope of socialism or communism and the belief that we can make an "equal" society and everything in between.

During a tour of the new Bevatron facility, eight people from different walks of life are bathed in the Bevatron beam when something goes terribly wrong with the Bevatron experiment. After the accident, these eight people think that they have escaped any effects of the accident until they realize that they are trapped in a time hole and dropped into an alternate reality - kind of a quantum virtual reality - where one of the eight are secretly creating the rules and manipulating the laws of physics through their dreams. And these dreams are definitely specific about how they think the world should be and how people should live in it.

From here, this book also becomes a whodunit of sorts as some the eight begin to understand what is going on; they must learn who their new companions are and what they believe if they are to determine who is controlling their reality so they can stop the madness before things get out of control. But they also figure out that the only way to stop the person is to kill them...something that isn't too easy to do when that person controls the nature of reality.

Oh yeah...and killing this person is just the beginning of their journey back to reality.

In one of his most lucid novels, Philip K. Dick's *Eye in the Sky* takes a critical look at the America where one group or another thinks they have all the answers and know exactly how everyone else should live. If ever someone wanted to truly understand the importance of keeping society out of the bedroom and the like, this would be the book to start with. And, for anyone just wanted to get started in reading Philip K. Dick, *Eye in the Sky* is one of the five to start with.

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A Guide to my Book Rating System:

1 star = The wood pulp would have been better utilized as toilet paper.

2 stars = Don't bother, clean your bathroom instead.

3 stars = Wasn't a waste of time, but it was time wasted.

4 stars = Good book, but not life altering.

5 stars = This book changed my world in at least some small way.

By Chance I found this book in a used book store, and i feel blessed... As far as i know it's been out of print forever.... but get them to reprint it, it's worth it. This is a stunning novel, by far Dick's Best..... far better than any of the popular ones (Valis, Do Androids..., A Scanner Darkly,etc.)

If you see it, get it......

The first few pages of the book set the tone: since Marsha Hamilton challenges the 'reality' as considered by the official authorities (she seems to have ties with communists), she is deemed 'dangerous'. Meanwhile, the main ideas behind the plot clearly make 'Eye in the Sky' a variation on Plato's allegory of the cave: after an explosion at the Belmont bevatron, eight people are knocked uncounscious; as each person slowly regains consciousness, they all experience his/her world of opinions and preconceptions. The first is the fanatical, manichean world of an old soldier. The eight characters are akin to Plato's prisoners, both physically (they lie down in the bevatron, numb and motionless) and mentally (they go through successive worlds of unstable appearances). But most of them are prisoners who hope to free themselves from their chains: although some don't mind these subjective worlds at first, they frequently acknowledge the urgent need to wake up and escape this unpredictable cycle. Reading the book, some might come to the conclusion that Dick's point of view is relativist, and that `reality' seems to take the form of our varying perceptions and thus can't be pinpointed in absolute terms, but I'd argue that he's not satisfied with such an easy way out. Some of the characters certainly aren't: after escaping these subjective worlds of fantasms, they aren't perfectly comfortable with the physical world either and want to change it. In the end, Dick doesn't provide definitive answers as to what reality is, but by challenging preconceived - and mainly physical - notions of reality, this book acts as a detoxifying antidote; the exact same way he described his own work in his Exegesis.