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A Maze of Death

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This is definitely in my top ten list of PKD's best. Here's the basic storyline: An odd group of people find themselves on a planet called Delmak-O. Just as they're about find out what they're there for, the satellite that's supposed to tell them does something strange, leaving them in the dark. Now, clueless as to their reason for being here, they try and find a way to regain communication. But then something else happens. Slowly, they start dying off, and no one knows who is killing who. It sorta reminded me of the movie CLUE. At first you might think that this is just a murder-mystery in space. WRONG. The ending was EXTREMELY unpredictable, but EXTREMELY brilliant. This story could only have come from one of SF's masters, PKD. There are a lot of characters to keep track of, but his character development is good enough that you can tell who's who most of the time. I can't believe that this book didn't win an award or something, it's really great. If you find it, read it and enjoy!

See where Hollywood got the idea for "The 13th Floor." This book, and "Ubik" more or less created the genre of psychedelic science fiction. It is one of his most cohesive books, among the most genuinely paranoid, and very much predates Jack Chalker's recent (good) Wonderland trilogy. These are some of his better characters, all trapped on a pathetic planet and trying to figure out what is going on before they die. Now, with all the Hollywood copycats, the ending might seem clichéd. But remember, that he was in that genre first and "Maze of Death" is still champion. Personally, Dick inspired me. I know of no one else who so masterfully writes of that strange domain where psychology, philosophy, theology, and mythology intersect.

Maze presents the common PKD theme of one ersatz reality, the one in which we believe we live, giving way to another. Invariably this is traumatic, such as in Ubik. In this case, however, all hope is lost as to a solution. Dick's metaphor of the doomed spaceship (being Earth) is gloomy indeed, and it is no surprise that this book was written at a time in Phil's life where he had no hope. The only hope is the mystical removal of Morley at the end, but this could be interpreted as an escape into death. This is not a happy novel.

Nevertheless, as others have said, Maze is possibly the fastest PKD read you will encounter. I have read this book but once, and I was astounded at the time. I rate this extremely highly as a work of fiction, although I suspect that further reading will confirm what others have said - that is that the soul is not there, Dick no longer believes in what he is writing.

Realistic characters (all human this time), genuine suspense, a strange and oddly familiar view of religion and a really well handled twist at the end - for those reasons A Maze of Death is one of my favorite Philip K. Dick novels. It's a short book, but packs in a lot of insight about perceptions, the shifting nature of reality (of course), human interactions, paranoia and hopeless cases. I notice that the tone here is more dismal than Philip K. Dick usually offers, but (as always with his stories) reading it is an eye-opening and memorable experience.

While many authors have expanded on themes in this story, written in 1970, I don't think that anyone's improved on his presentation of them. Read it with your mind open to all possibilities.

First off, Dick is the unsung hero of postmodern literature. If there is a sense of failure in any of his works it can only be attributed to his effort to take on too much of reality, to put complete portraits of men and women in an environment fully realized and even more complex than that in which we live presently. Call him Icarus or Ishmael, for his task is greater than the breadth of any of his novels is capable, which is to say that nothing seems to end satisfactorily, that Dick is more than ready to leave loose ends and frayed edges, not because of oversight or inability, but because he rejects conventionality. Simply put, if the universe were really in order, why would one be compelled to write? Like other novels, A Maze of Death ends ambiguously, but in a much different manner...
A Maze of Death is sheer mastery, and yet to characerize this mastery is at once to applaud its unconventionality and to give away the plot. This I cannot do, but I will say this: nothing ends so sweetly as this work. Unlike other works, this one is the epitome of postmodernism--it will wrap you in its folds, stretching your imagination and forcing you to carry out endless deductions, and then it will give you nothing to walk away with. It is a purely reflexive experience: this book connects to nothing in the world and is yet a world unto itself, a maze that can only be appreciated by getting through it.

I drew on to PKD from his reputation. After reading a few of his works with bemused admiration, this was the first of his books I really enjoyed.

SPOILERS

A Maze of Death is genuinely readable; most PKD is a little shoddily put together, but this one is perfect. It is a wonderful allegory of loss of faith in God. These people create a world with a virtual reality machine. A world where God exists. The trouble is, when they get out, they can't face reality any more... This is indicative of Dick's own religious confusion at the time - this was prior to his "revelation" of 1974. I can sympathise with him.

This probably has to be the easiest novel about everyone being doomed I've ever read.

It occurs to me, reading Dick's novels sporadically over the past few years, that the man wasn't so much out of his mind (well, maybe in his last years, but his last novel is surprisingly coherent and touching considering it was written by a man who was "nuts") as constantly aware of the questions we sometimes ask about existence. Questions such as "what is life?", "what is death?", "what is the nature of God and reality and how do they relate?" . . . most of the time if we consider these things it's only for a second because the potential answers are so harrowing that nobody really wants to deal with them. Dick looked those questions straight in the face and didn't flinch, for better or for worse, because sometimes when you ask the hard questions, you may find that the answers aren't very pleasant.

"Maze of Death" feels like the extrapolation of one of those questions, a gently brutal way of leading you to the conclusion that the Universe is very much not on your side and if God does exist the best you can hope for is that he just doesn't care, because otherwise it means he really dislikes you. It's not a book that delivers a grand shock that will rock you to the core as much as instill a quietly creeping unsettling feeling that maybe the book is right: we're all living in a reality we've created and unfortunately we've created a reality in which we're all doomed and there's nothing anyone can do about it, as the only options are suffering until you die or just getting it over with fast. And neither option is all that good. So we take the easy, cowardly option and hope that maybe God will blink or maybe our assumptions were wrong and someone will come to rescue us and make this all better. But chances are, it's probably not going to happen.

Yeah, this isn't a typical SF book.

Fourteen colonists wind up on Delmak-O, one by prayer, because in this universe all the gods are real and they answer prayers and there's whole methods to it . . . God's accessable. The wish for most people in the world, that they could have a hotline to God and even better, that he listens to it, is fulfilled here. But as with most wishes, it goes wrong at the core because sure, God is listening and granting prayers. But he's still doing whatever the heck he wants and there's nothing you can do about it. So it turns out that not before long terrible things are happening to the colonists, one by one. Someone is killing them, they're killing each other, they're killing themselves. One by one. It's a weird, depressing paranoid world with everyone dying and nothing makes any sense, with the rules changing by the second. There's a Building inside, but everyone sees it differently. Weird gelantious blocks answer questions in the form of the I Ching. All the colonists seemed mentally messed up in some way, engaging in subplots that go nowhere, or just mock them because no matter what they do, they are going to get killed. One by one.

It's an odd experience reading a book where everyone is truly and royally screwed, and the book is so matter of fact about it. These aren't special circumstances, the universe isn't out to get just these people. It's out to get everyone and we just have a front row seat for it here. Dick manages to sketch the characters deftly, so the chapters zip by swiftly and everyone feels like a real, if wildly imperfect person, so that the general tone of the book remains alarming, but quietly so, and while the situation is certainly surreal, it comes across as grounded. You can believe this is happening because the book believes it so clearly. It's going to watch these people burn without a hint of emotion. Just another day's work.

But as with most Dick novels, what we are presented with generally isn't the actual reality and it's not until nearly the end that we find out what's going on. Except while typically those are presented as a kind of escape valve, a way of making the reader feel that some room to breathe can occur, here we don't get that. Things go from hopeless to more hopeless and what we thought was the worst case scenario is actually a font of optimism. Because the reality is, you're not important. As terrible and awful as the universe is, you can vanish from the face of it entirely and nobody will care. Nobody will miss you. And things will go on staying terrible. Because that's just how it is, and will always be, until everyone is snuffed out.

For SF (and fiction in general), this is kind of extreme, and feels like Dick taken out to the nth degree, not to the point of self-parody but to a logical conclusion. Where reality is the fresh-smelling cover we throw over the rotting truth that every terrible thing that ever happened to us was meant to happen, was deliberately done and it's really nothing personal, that's just how the universe operates. Dick was probably at the height of his powers here, as nothing but his best could make this even remotely readable without causing the reader to want to fling themselves in front of a bus. His skill at characterizations and ability to move the shifting plot constantly gives it the feel of a page-turner and helps you identify and even feel bad for these people, even as you can't shake the sinking feeling that this will end well for no one.

It's a necessary book, in its way, because it asks all those scary paranoid questions that we spend a split-second asking ourselves before coming up with a nifty comforting answer. This postulates that the frightening answers are true and then manages to make it entertaining. If Dick hadn't done this I don't know who would have, anyone else would have dodged at the last second, or hammered the point home too hard, done it all gloomy and serious and made sure that everyone was paying attention to the important things being said. Even Dick at an earlier or later stage of his life might have not been capable of this . . . too early and he wouldn't have the skill to delineate as well as he does here, too late and he would be wrapped too much in his own questions and seeing his own realities everywhere he turned.

So, no, it needed to be here and by him and even if it doesn't have the stature of his other novels it's just as vital for taking his other work dealing with the nature of reality and bringing it straight back to us by calling forth our deepest fear and saying, no matter which reality you think you're in or you think is real, it doesn't matter. You're doomed regardless. But at least you can ask "Okay, so now what?" and maybe come up with a better answer.

In Philip K. Dick's 25th science fiction novel, "Ubik," a group of a dozen people is trapped in an increasingly bizarre world, in which objects revert to their previous forms, reality itself is suspect, and the 12 bewildered people slowly crumble to dust, murderously done in, "Ten Little Indians" style, by an unknown assailant. In his next published novel, "A Maze of Death," Dick upped the ante a bit. Here, we find a group of 14 people, seemingly marooned on a very strange planet, while a murderous force picks them off one by one, driving them to madness and homicide. But while the two novels have those elements in common, they are otherwise as different as can be, with different themes and tones. "Maze" has been called one of Dick's "darkest" books, whereas "Ubik," despite the outre happenings, maintains a comparatively humorous tone throughout.

Released as a Doubleday hardcover in 1970, with a selling price of $4.95 (!), "Maze" was the author's attempt to construct "an abstract, logical system of religious thought." God exists, in this novel, and can be petitioned (despite Jim Morrison's cry to the contrary) by mechanical means: by attaching conduits to the permanent electrodes in one's pineal gland. Indeed, of the 14 hapless colonists who find themselves on the mysterious world of Delmak-O (in what we must infer is several years after 2105), one arrived due to a prayer that he had sent out, and another couple, Seth and Mary Morley, only survive the trip through space with the help of the Christ-like figure known as The Walker on Earth. Delmak-O is one of the more macabre of Dick's worlds. Its only life-forms seem to be mechanical insects (with miniature cameras built in) and the "tenches": mounds of protoplasmic gelatin capable of reproducing any object placed before them. And then there is the mysterious structure known as The Building, the signs on which read differently for anyone who looks at them. I would be hard put to describe the eerie mood that Dick manages to engender in this work, or the strangeness of the many deaths that ensue. Ultimately, it all comes together in another one of the author's mind-bending finales, which goes far in explaining away much of the mishegas that had come before, even as it reduces the bulk of the novel to a barrelful of several dozen red herrings. Still, what a memorable experience, and what food for thought the author leaves us with!

"Maze" is not a perfect book, and shows signs of being hastily written. The author can be accused of using the word "said" too often (as in this small section: "Give me a few minutes," Maggie Walsh said... "I'll say it," Belsnor said... Seth Morley said, "I'd like permission to go on an exploratory trip..." "Why?" Belsnor said), and makes the terrible mistake of giving Seth and another of the colonists, Bert Kosler, the same occupation at the novel's end (I'm trying to be coy here and avoid spoilers). Still, the book is compulsively readable and endlessly fascinating, and is filled with interesting and well-drawn characters. The many death scenes are unfailingly shocking, and the afterlife experiences of Maggie Walsh--which the author tells us in his foreword were based "in exact detail" on one of his LSD trips--are both psychedelic and revealing. From what I have read online, the two elements of the book that have most confused readers, stirring up debate and bull sessions without number, are the Walker's appearance near the novel's end (an actual manifestation, sez me) and the chapter headings (such as "The rabbit which Ben Tallchief won develops the mange") that have absolutely nothing to do with the chapters themselves (the only Dick novel with such chapter headings, to my knowledge)! While I do have my theory as to this latter conundrum, I really cannot go into it without giving away the novel's surprise twists, which is something that I would never dream of doing. Suffice it to say that "A Maze of Death" finds Dick near the top of his game, providing intelligent sci-fi thrills as well as brow-furrowing speculation for the generations to come....

A Maze of Death is a strange mixture of science fiction, mystery, and theology. Fourteen people are assigned to colonize an uninhabited planet, Delmak-O. One by one, they meet mysterious deaths. It is unclear whether the malevolent agent is a military conspiracy, evil aliens, or each other. The solution to this puzzle is, however, in the end less important than the mystery of Delmak-O itself. This world gives indications of being a false reality; some of its life forms are organic, others are mechanical contraptions of unknown origin. Its central mystery is a monolithic Building that each member of the group sees in a different light. The lettering above the entrance changes according to the psychology of the viewer. The Building is the ultimate symbol, an irreducible core reality that cannot be entered and whose nature can only be inferred. Dick invented a completely original theology for this novel; it gives quite a fascinating dimension of meaning to the plot, but that religious system ultimately proves as unreal as any of the experiences of any of the characters. This is an essential novel for anyone interested in the "higher Dick" novels such as VALIS.

This was the first PKD book I read, and it still remains my favorite, even above such incredible contenders as 3 Stigmata and Ubik. It is his most cohesive piece of work, and the ending, which may at first seem like a cop-out, in retrospect is actually an ingenious twist on an old gimmick - without giving it away, endings with this gimmick usually are "uplifting" and give you a "whew!" feeling. In A Maze of Death, however, it propels you into a place that is even worse than the previous "place." An updated "...And Then There Were None (ten little indians)" (by Agatha Christie).