Customer Reviews

Martian Time-Slip

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Philip Dick, like most science fiction writers, wrote enough action-oriented novels and stories to satisfy die hard genre fans, but anyone who has read Dick's work carefully knows that he came to be less concerned with action-adventure and more with very human issues. In Martian Time Slip, teaching androids are used in schools, one character is suspected of being able to see into the future, and, of course, the backdrop is Mars. Dick, though, uses this science fiction setting to explore aspects of the human condition, such as isolation, suffering, greed, hopelessness and cruelty, through the eyes of a number of characters who are all rendered with compassion despite their obvious shortcomings.

The basic plot revolves around the efforts of Arnie Kott, a bullish big fish in a small pond, to determine if an autistic child named Manfred Steiner can see the future. It is then Kott's intention to use that knowledge to further his own self interests. Drawn into this story are several others that Kott needs to carry out his plan, and it is through their perspectives, their personal struggles that may not even peripherally relate to Kott's scheme, that the novel derives its impact. One section of the book, in fact, recounts a single evening from four different points of view. It's an amazing display of technique that seems a natural development in the telling of the story and manages to challenge the reader's own opinions about the characters involved.

The novel's background detail is convincing as well, from the way Mars' relatively few surviving aboriginal inhabitants are portrayed as a race doomed long before humanity arrived, now lingering until probable eventual extinction, to the desolate nature of Mars itself and the attitudes and practices that have been transplanted from Earth. Much like the excellent Dr. Bloodmoney, which would appear the following year (1965), Martian Time-Slip is an ensemble story in a landscape that offers little hope aside from the comfort and love of other living beings which, I would like to believe, is what Dick is saying is the only hope of any consequence.

Martian Time-Slip takes place on a Mars which has been rather poorly colonized by a desperate race of humans. Water is scarce on mars, and what few settlements exist are very close to one of the few canals. Plumbers, waterworkers, and repairmen are very valuable and in demand, since getting replacement equipment from Earth is very expensive.

Jack Bohlen is a repairman, and a "recovered" schizophrenic. Jack is contacted by Arnie Kott, a businessman who is involved in land speculation. He seems to believe that a schizophrenic boy can somehow see into the future (slip in and out of TIME) on Mars, and Jack can help Arnie communicate with the boy, by building a machine that will translate the boy's gibberish speech into something Arnie can understand. Arnie would like to make a killing in land speculation, with Jack's help.

Add to this: there is an aboriginal race of humans on Mars called the Bleekmen, who resemble Africans of very materially primitive societies. They wander the vast deserts of Mars, impoverished and disenfranchised, but hold the mystical keys to this time travel.

It's a strange and beautiful novel. Action Sci-Fi fans beware. This novel takes a long time to get going. The first 80 or 100 pages are taken up with that stuffy writing goal called "character development," and you won't get many shoot-em-up scenes with spaceships etc. This novel is pretty typical of Philip K. Dick in that it's more cerebral than it is visceral. I found the first half of the novel fascinating but slow going, myself. After I was halfway through, I spent all of my spare time reading it until I was done.

If you like Philip K. Dick, you ought to read Martian Time-Slip.

Dick is the only author whose works literally force me to put the book down from time to time, for fear that reading one more sentence will send me to the insane asylum forever. Not Stephen King, Clive Barker, or even H.P. Lovecraft can approach the depth of cosmic horror which Dick so modestly invites us to stare into. And yet, there is no pretension here; Dick sympathizes with his innocent protagonists, giving us a straightforward account of their daily struggles to lead normal lives. This is one of the most heartbreakingly hilarious SF novels ever written, with plenty of mind grenades that will detonate in your head long after you've finished the book.

Ok, it's a PKDick book, so it's full of ideas and nice touches but it's not nearly as good as some of his others. The plot is weak, (as PKD himself admitted) the characters aren't great and some of the dialogue is absolutely cringe-worthy.

If you haven't read them I would suggest: Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch or Maze of Death instead, they follow similar themes (with less emphasis on the study of schizophrenia) as Martian Time Slip but are much better, more interesting works.

This is a difficult book to discuss without revealing spoilers, but I'd like to say it's quite a bit more than what some of the reviewers here suggest.

This is more than just a book about Mars colonies and inventive ways of understanding schizophrenia. As usual, Dick is creating a world where so many layers intertwine and interconnect, that at the end, one might feel a little confused, wondering what the point was.

I don't know if I have it all "figured out" but in this book Dick creates a convincing and unnerving inner-portrait of schizophrenia, mixed in with themes of "history repeating itself" and a healthy dose of "predestination vs. freewill."

It's a brooding story, but clear, and bright like the Martian landscape he describes. It raises at least as many questions as it answers, but I think many questions can be filled in, such as where did the original Martians ("the Bleekmen") come from? Somehow they are both our present and our past, this much is clear, though its ominous and disconcerting that it is never entirely explained.

Like most PKD stories, this novel tends to dig in and live a bit in your psyche long after the initial reading.

So maybe Dick's vision of the future was wrong, and his grasp of Martian geography was weak. Well, Shakespeare gave a seacoast to Bohemia and Italian names to Danes, and it didn't hurt his reputation!

This is one of PKD's best novels, from the decade when he cranked out one mindbending book after another. His best traits are all here: the intensely human characters; the grounding of the fantastic plot in practical, real-world concerns; the questioning of our everyday concepts of time and space; the deft use of multiple perspectives and shifting time-schemes; and the abundant humor.

PKD disliked being stranded in the pulpy ghetto of "sci-fi," but I think it worked to the reader's gain. Although his work has something in common with the American techno-paranoid school (Pynchon, Vonnegut, DeLillo), its honesty and lack of deliberate cleverness render it superior in my view. His unnerving excursions into the human psyche bring to mind Georg Buechner's comment, "Man is an abyss, and I get dizzy when I look therein!"

Remember those swashbuckling Mars adventures by Edgar Rice Burroughs? Remember those terrifying, unconquerable Martians from War of the Worlds? We are not talking about those Martians here. The Martians and the humans in this novel are quite ordinary, often weak, and occasionally nuts. You want space opera, go watch Star Wars again.

On this Mars, our hero is a traveling repairman with a schizophrenic past. Our villain is the president of the plumber's union. Our damsel in distress is the villain's mistress, but she falls in love with the schizophrenic anyway. The prize everyone is after is an autistic adolescent so terrified of physical contact that he can't see one person touch another without seeing them both decay on the spot. And the character who triumphs at the end does so not because he's got a bigger gun, but just because he has compassion for a group of weak, dying Martian natives who can't possibly do him any good. Never mind your typical SF novel, this isn't your typical novel of any sort, or your typical anything.

That's PKD for you - he takes you on a seemingly normal science fiction trip and immediately turns everything inside out. That's part of what makes him brilliant. The other part is that he understands all his characters, which is to say all human types, including the greedy and self-serving ones. (This empathy for all types of people is all the more remarkable when you consider that his previous book, The Man in the High Castle, won a major award and he still couldn't get a hardcover book contract.) The schizophrenic, the union leader, the autistic kid, the mistress - all they want is to be loved, like you and me. Unfortunately, some of them (and some of us) learn that fact too late.

Of course, if one is living in a world where your choices are overpopulation and madness or emigration to Mars and endless struggle - a world in which mental illness is as frequent as the common cold, in which psychiatrists earn a living by replacing their patients at social functions instead of treating them - in a world like that, it's all too easy to overlook love and compassion. That any of these characters manage to find, feel and express love is little short of a miracle. You read Martian Time-Slip and, after you're finished saying "What a weird story," you feel better about being human.

Martian Time-Slip is without question one of PKD's best works. It has an entertaining and exciting story, it's full of intriguing ideas handled well, there's a nice balance of humor and intensity, and I promise you've never met characters like these before unless you've been reading PKD for a while. Which isn't a bad idea, by the way. He's a good tonic for the modern man and woman, beset from all sides by forces they don't understand but somehow able to stand up and take care of their friends at the same time, like these characters do.

Benshlomo says, The greatest triumphs are the small ones.

While dealing with the common, indeed one might even say overworked and mundane, concept of a human colony on Mars, "Martian Time-Slip" also delves into the realm of mental illness, including schizophrenia and autism. Philip K Dick raises the interesting speculation that mental illness may arise because those afflicted somehow interact (or, in the case of autism, are unable to interact) with the world through an entirely altered perception of the flow of time.

Many sci-fi readers (and this comment probably includes myself) are used to a somewhat more action-oriented story. From this rather limited perspective, one can say that "Martian Time-Slip" is built around an exceptionally imaginative and rather exciting plot idea.

Arnie Kott, one of the upper crust of the fairly recently established Martian colony, has heard a rumour that the United Nations is planning to build an enormous apartment complex in the hitherto worthless Franklin D Roosevelt mountain range on Mars. Part of the rumour is Kott's understanding that Leo Bohlen, a wealthy entrepreneur from earth, has already arrived on Mars and is well on his way to establishing a claim to the land in the mountain range that will supercede all others.

Other events in the story lead Kott to the belief that Manfred Steiner, a severely autistic child, suffers from this debilitating mental illness as a result of an altered perception of the flow of time. When he also learns that the Bleekmen, the local aboriginal population, believe that "Dirty Knobby", one of their holy places, may be a portal into time that is accessible to the likes of Manfred Steiner, Kott seeks to use Steiner to go back in time to ensure he places a claim on the contested land in the FDR Range before Bohlen arrives.

However, instead of focusing on this tremendously innovative plot-line as a story, Dick has used the plot merely as a background against which he has chosen to explore the themes of mental illness, loneliness, greed, isolation, lust, racism, hopelessness and prejudice. The same events are repeated in the story on several occasions but are shown as they might be observed through the perceptions of different participants in the story. I'm more than willing to admit that this may be my own shortcoming as a reader but, frankly, I found the multiple points of view exceedingly difficult to follow to the point where I was unable to determine exactly what was happening. Was I reading about events moving forward or was this a recapitulation of something that had already taken place but looked at through somebody else's eyes?

I was also dismayed by the fact that the science involved with life in a Martian colony seemed virtually non-existent. With very little alteration, Dick's story could have taken place in an arbitrary 1950's earth location that involved previously undeveloped land and a local aboriginal population. Mars, in effect, became entirely irrelevant!

Many readers might suggest that it is Dick's rather novel exploration of the human condition that makes "Martian Time-Slip" a revered classic of the genre. For my money, I just found it tedious and a difficult novel to finish. Not recommended.

Paul Weiss

For me, the questions the novel asks (and leaves for readers to answer) are: what is archetypal memory? Does the world have its own memory? We are the aboriginal people of Earth, do we therefore have a memory of it encoded into our souls? Did the Native Americans have a memory/dream/spirit-connection to North America that we somehow psychically grafted onto our own souls when our ancestors migrated here? (why IS America so different from other counties?--all of the collective archetypal memories augmenting our individual selves?) The dream-time/touchstone of this incredible novel are the native Martians, to whom Dick continually returns as a narrative device, after describing the strange autistic children. The Martians are the indigenous people, the first inhabitants, who have such strange, distant ways. The autistic children, then, are the first generation of "martians", they are being "assimilated" into the spirit-connection, the soul, the archetypal memory of the planet. (Much as we say we want immigrants to "assimilate" and learn English.) The children literally experience time and space differently than Earth-born humans! They are not "autistic", they are "becoming Martians"! That is why the last chapters are so extraordianry.

The basic question: If we went to another planet, or moon, or galaxy, and stayed, what would happen to our minds?

I have read most of Dick's work; I mourn his passing and that we will never see his like again.

This is a near-masterpiece about schizophrenia and society in the US in the 1950s, although it takes place on a sparsely populated Mars run by the UN, a desert world traversed by helicopters and inhabited most successfuly by indigenous blacks and the Arabs and the Jews of New Israel. Jack Bohlen, like the younger P.K.Dick, is a repairman of audio devices such as the anachronistically reel-to-reel tape-based encoding machine used by his eventual boss, the irrepressible but irresponsible Arnie Kott, the leader--the Supereme Goodmember--of the Water Worker's Union on Mars. Kott is a big fish in a small pond, and his beautiful red-headed girlfriend is easily as interested in Jack, who is married, with a normal child, as she is in her big spender boss. There are at least two main problems: 1) they live on Mars, an essentially lonely red desert of frontier survival, despite its indigenous population of Aborigine-like "Bleekmen" and 2) schizophrenia is beginning to transmit laterally, like a contagion rather than a genetic disease. This second problem is compounded by the potential usefulness of the afflicted, especially a boy named Manfred Steiner, whose father commits suicide early on, leaving Jack's wife, the phenobarbital-popping Silvia, to care for the healthy children. Hard-drinking cut throat businessman Kott, who likes to waste water in steam baths on a planet where scotch is cheaper than beer because it contains less water, realizes that the mentally ill on this small planet have real clairvoyant powers. Without going into too much plot detail, there is much of interest here. It has been said that the greatest windfall of the space program is that it allowed us to look back and really see ourselves for the first time. Dick's Mars here is a transported microcosm, with Bleekman as the indigenous people whose valuable civilizations have been temporarily trampled, their human reservoirs of knowledge insulted and enslaved. The sexism, suburban isolation, and prescribed drug use of the fifties has also landed undamaged on the red planet. The faith in American psychiatry is subtly spoofed as for example when the red planet's most highly regarded therapist (therapists on Mars stand in for agoraphobics, accomplishing their worldly affairs), the essentially petty Milton Glaub, diagnoses Kott as someone with an "oral, sucking problem." More to the point, schizophrenia itself, of which P.K.D. is thought to have had a (pharmaceutically enhanced) touch, is wonderfully described, both "internally" via the points of view of Jack and Manfred (and later, Arnie, the last one you would expect to be afflicted) and "externally" with reference to Swiss theorists who analyze it as essentially a disturbance in the time sense. In this connection there is much talk of "gub" and "gubbish"-stand-in words for the schizophrenic's sense of dissolution, of a lack of meaning and the eventual entropic deconstruction of all presently held valuable. The gub words, which emanate at one point even from the mechanical teaching robots (e.g., Mark Twain) at the local public school, alert us that clairvoyant Steiner's schizophrenia is potentiating Bohlen's latent affliction. When Bohlen's father comes to the UN planet to put a down payment on land that will be used for emigrants, Arnie Kott is angry and scooped because he can see that his mafia-like control is coming to an end. Yet Jack's realtor father is also upset because the Steiner boy can look still further to see the demise of the housing complex that will contain the emigrants and enrich the land developers. Indeed, the Steiner boy, along with we ourselves, can eventually project into a future that "jubs" us all. Here jub joins with "kipple" in Dick's special lexicon of entropy-related words: jub is a mental version, in a way, of kipple, Dick's term for household clutter, gum wrappers and old newspapers and the like. "Ich liebe die Unwissenheit um die Zukunft" wrote Nietzsche: "I love not knowing the future." Dick's schizophrenic seers here are afflicted by the weight of knowing too much, one of the great themes of human introspection-even in the Bible where it is a weight which makes the first couple plummet to Earth after Eve eats the forbidden apple. This is not "hard science fiction"--the origins of the Bleekmen and the breathability of the atmosphere are never addressed--but it is emotionally rivetting.