Customer Reviews

Our Friends from Frolix 8

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

 

 

Boy, this thing is a mess. Philip K. Dick never had much discipline in his writing; he churned out text at warp speed so he could keep himself in food and lodging, so some of his books are kind of junky, but really, now.

It's not going to be easy to summarize this plot, just because it's so all over the place, but let's see how we do. In Frolix 8, the world has fallen into a sort of two-party tyranny, alternately under the control of the New Men - mutant geniuses - and the Unusuals - telepaths, precogs and the like. No one lacking one talent or the other has any access to power whatsoever.

All this suppression has, of course, given rise to a rebellion calling itself the Under Men. One of the rebel leaders, Thors Provoni, has been traveling in space for some years looking for extraterrestrial help.

Into this circumstance comes Nick Appleton, one of PKD's plebian main characters. He begins his adventure as a law-abiding if unsatisfied citizen. He shortly finds himself involved with the Under Men, caught with forbidden rebel literature and on the run with a teenage girl named Charley.

Pretty soon you, the reader, have to keep in mind Nick Appleton's battle with the planet's telepathic ruler for Charley's attention; the disintegration of his marriage and his flight from Charley's alcoholic boyfriend; Provoni's philosophical dialogues with the mammoth alien enveloping his ship as he heads back to Earth; and a partridge in a pear tree, presumably. PKD could barely juggle that much material when his Ace Books editors only permitted him 180 pages. Stretched over at least a third again that much space, it can't help but disintegrate. And his conclusion makes it all too plain that the man simply didn't know what to do next - it's the worst kind of last-minute twitch. He really should have set this one aside for a few months and let it settle, but he probably couldn't afford it.

Indeed, the whole book seems tired. It's got a lot of PKD's great themes, plot points and characters, but in a worn out state.

Nick Appleton, for instance, is a solid PKD working class hero, like the television salesmen and electricians and grocers and such who people his earlier books. Appleton, however, is a tire regroover. He likes to think of this task as a form of art, but in truth it's a cheat and possibly deadly, as he himself comes to realize.

PKD had also dealt before with world dictators, some cruel, some ill, some alien. Willis Gram is maybe the worst of the bunch, a man who uses his enormous power for his own petty ends. This might even add some spice to the story, but Gram emerges as a flabby arrested adolescent who conducts pretty nearly all the planet's affairs from his bed.

In his middle period, PKD loved to set several plot strands going at once and bounce around amongst them. Most of the strands in Frolix 8 simply fizzle out - we never learn what happens to Appleton's wife and son, the gigantic alien leaves off philosophy the minute it lands on Earth and starts behaving like a mindless weapon, and all the threats disappear without another thought.

PKD's gift for sympathetic characters seemed to almost desert him in this piece. There's a lot of talk among these characters about saving the world from the purest of motives, but the actual desires on view seem uniformly petty - sexual gratification, alcohol dependence, the will to power. These people are unattractive even in a physical way, let alone in any other.

He missed a couple of his most fertile themes this time round, too, especially the unsteady nature of reality and the effect of drugs on one's perception of that reality. What little there is in Frolix 8 on those topics feels like an afterthought. Could have been removed without any impact, and maybe should have been.

And finally, he evidently couldn't even bring himself to remember his details from page to page. Provoni has been traveling anywhere from ten to fifteen years, for instance - the number changes periodically. There's anywhere from 10,000 to several million New Men and Unusuals on Earth - that changes, too. And other examples abound.

Now, this is PKD, and even his failures provide more food for thought than many another author's successes, but taken as a whole Our Friends from Frolix 8 is for PKD completists only. If it wasn't for one thing I'd be tempted to dismiss it as an utter waste of time, but wait until you see what ultimately happens to the New Men and Unusuals. Not only does it redeem the exhausted, washed-out feel of the rest of the book, it looks ahead to what PKD was about to become.

PKD wrote Our Friends from Frolix 8 in 1970, at the tail end of a time when he could complete up to five or six novels per year. No wonder he was burned out. Clearly, he realized that something needed to change, and it sure did. Tired and messy as this book is, the compassion at its close leads directly to the conclusion of his next novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, maybe the most touching evocation of human despair since the novel was invented. Out of this transformation of his creative process, he produced A Scanner Darkly and the VALIS trilogy. Now, that's the way to conclude a career.

In 1970, PKD had only a few years to live, but he used them well. If he needed to plow through Our Friends from Frolix 8 in order to do that, I say it was worth it. Suppose we look on this novel as his way of clearing the decks and let it go at that.

Benshlomo says, Every so often you have to throw the past overboard.

In the body of PKD's works this is not a masterpiece, but neither is it insignificant. My review is based on rereading the Ace book edition of 1970, a paperback plagued by misprints. Mostly these don't matter but I struggle to make any sense of the third paragraph of page 140 - perhaps someone else can resolve it for me. I was also a bit confused about New Men - sometimes they seemed to be marked by huge heads, but at other times their identity as New Men was obscure as in the case of Thors Provoni, the returning astronaut bringing, well, was it God - our friend from Frolix 8. But then another character (it had to be Nick) was involved in this dialogue:
'God is dead,' Nick said. 'They found his carcass in 2019. Floating out in space near Alpha.'
'They found the remains of an organism advanced several thousand times over what we are,' Charley said. 'And it evidently could create habitable worlds and populate them with living organisms, derived from itself. But that doesn't prove it was God.'
'I think it was God.'

Of course Thors is the name of a god, albeit a Norse one and he is supposed to be bringing salvation for Old Men (and Under Men, the underground resistance) against New Men and Unusuals. But nothing is simple in the worlds of PKD. The ending is magical as characters entwine in unexpected interactions, the last few pages seem to go on forever - there is so much potential and I kept wondering how can I be so close to the end of the novel - so much could still happen, and what does happen is so unexpected - like Beethoven introducing a new theme to the last movement of the fifth just before the symphony ends - opening further possibilities. Of course, just like life, things are rarely resolved and even if one thread of life does resolve, it can only do so in the presence of an infinite variety of other ongoing threads.

Unlike Philip K. Dick's previous two novels, 1969's "Ubik" and 1970's "A Maze of Death," his 27th full-length sci-fi book, "Our Friends From Frolix 8," was not released in a hardcover first edition. Rather, it first saw the light of day, later in 1970, as a 60-cent Ace paperback (no. 64400, for all you collectors out there). And whereas those two previous novels had showcased the author giving his favorite theme--the chimeralike nature of reality--a pretty thorough workout, "Our Friends" impresses the reader as a more "normal" piece of science fiction...although glints of Dickian strangeness do, of course, crop up.

Of all the Dick novels that I have read, "Our Friends" seems most reminiscent of 1964's "The Simulacra." Both books feature the downfall of entrenched, duplicitous governments and sport an extremely large cast of characters (56 named characters in the earlier book, 48 in the latter). In "Our Friends," the Earth of the 22nd century is ruled by an oligarchy of two ruling groups: the New Men, bubble-headed mutants with tremendous IQs, and the Unusuals, who command various telepathic, telekinetic and precognitive abilities. The overwhelming ruck of Earth's billions, the Old Men, are precluded from any sort of government/civil service employment and must make do with their menial-labor positions. In the book, we meet Nick Appleton ("the name a character in a book would have," he is told), a "tire regroover," who is shaken out of his mundane existence when his young son "fails" a rigged civil service exam. Swiftly becoming politicized, he drinks illegal alcohol, buys anti-government tracts from a feisty 16-year-old tomboy, and is soon embroiled in the thick of things in this Big Brotherish, dystopian world. A good thing, then, that Thors Provoni, a space wanderer who had left Earth a decade earlier to seek help for mankind's lot, is about to return...with a "90-ton, gelatinous mass of protoplasmic slime"; the telepathic, titular friend from Frolix 8.

Swiftly moving and filled with humorous touches, simply written yet complexly plotted, alternating furious action sequences with thought-provoking discourse, "Our Friends" is yet another delightful Dick confection. It finds the author dealing with some of his pet topics, such as divorce (Appleton leaves his wife during the course of the book; Council Chairman Willis Gram plots to kill his), Carl Jung ("A Maze of Death" was replete with Jungian subtext; he is referred to by Provoni as "the greatest of the human thinkers"), drug use (drugbars are ubiquitous in the novel, and every citizen seems to possess the knowledge of a Walgreens pharmacist) and 20th century fighter planes (this pet subject of Dick's had received especial attention in previous works such as 1967's "The Ganymede Takeover" and "Ubik"). Nick is an especially well-drawn everyman-type character, and the reader's sympathy for him never wavers, not even when he strikes his wife, Kleo (named after Dick's second wife out of five). No dummy, he recognizes the music of Victor Herbert and has a Yeats poem, "The Song of the Happy Shepherd," committed to memory. Charley, the young tomboy "gutter rat" with whom Nick has a rather icky love affair, is also memorable; in one sweet scene, the two make love in the one acre left of Central Park, and she spins around in circles, arms out, when Nick tells her that he loves her.

The book, however, good as it is, has its share of problems. As in "The Simulacra," several plot threads and characters simply peter out, never to be mentioned again. Worse, the author seems to be guilty here of a good deal of inconsistencies over the course of his story. For example, there is the matter of dates. We are told that the New Men have been in power for 50 years, since 2085. So the book takes place in 2135, right? But wait...Provoni later tells us that he was 18 years old in 2103, and now he's 105. So it's 2190, right? But hold on...his 10-year-old spaceship is a model from 2198. So it's 2208, right? See what I mean? Elsewhere, Dick mentions that there are 10,000 New Men and Unusuals on Earth; later, that figure changes to 10 million! He mentions that the army commands 64 different types of missiles; that figure is later said to be 70! He says that the government maintains detention camps in southwest Utah; later, they are said to be in southeast Utah! Provoni lands on Earth 1 1/2 hours earlier than expected; later, he is said to have landed eight hours earlier than expected! And perhaps most surprising, history buff Dick mentions that the name "Ashurbanipal" was Egyptian, whereas it is fairly common knowledge that the dude was Assyrian! (Granted, that last COULD be a bit of ignorance on Provoni's part.) Anyway, you get my point. Dick and his editors surely would have benefited from another rereading of their manuscript before publication. But despite all these many gaffs (very uncommon for this author, to my experience), the book is still as fun as can be. And really, how can you dislike any book with a 90-ton mass of telepathic slime?

One of Dick's less ambitious novels, this story is a bit thin compared to the density and dazzling complexity of his books of the early 1960s, and perhaps a bit of weariness with the standard conventions of science fiction is showing. The author seems very casual about controlling the plot and characters; both seem pretty random much of the time. We may not prize this novel as a masterpiece of structure, but it is typical Dick, involving and entertaining. The story is set in a world controlled by superintelligent "New Men" and telepathic "Unusuals," who reign despotically together over the "Old Men," or ordinary unevolved humans. In due course Thors Provini returns to Earth with a "friend" for the Old Men in the form of a telepathic, protoplasmic alien with extraordinary powers. This semi-divine intervention overturns the predictable order of the world and replaces it with a vision of the evolution of consciousness of every living thing on the planet toward some unimaginable fulfillment. In this preoccupation, it is congruent with Dick's other interesting novels of the late 60s such as A Maze of Death and Galactic Pot-Healer.

In my continuing effort to read all of Dick's work, I picked up the finally-reprinted Our Friends from Frolix 8 this week. What a disappointment!

I really like Dick's writing, and I have even enjoyed some of his less than stellar novels, like The Zap Gun or Clans of the Alphane Moon. This one, though, just doesn't do much for me. It's got a decent premise and some decent (but predictably Dickian) characters, but it just doesn't pull it all together and produce.

The climax was too long in coming and, once it came, was a let down. For the most part, I'm just glad to have finished it.

Another fine work from my favorite guy that's got great action, pacing and, above all, characterizations. The people in this story were very real to me and the society in which they live seemed very plausible. The meandering and intersection of the characters' fates is set against an impending climax that we know is coming from the beginning of the story and when it arrives, it's thrilling and very moving. I loved this one.

This book has the typical PKD characterizations and plot devices. The 'feel' is similar to The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, with a world that is falling apart waiting for a savior. The savior is indeed returning from space--with mysterious entities from Frolix 8. This in turn is very threatening to the authorities--the social establishment that fears loss of control and power if humanity finds something better than what is offered. The usual drug usage, interpersonal relationships, and bizarre plot twists that make PKD so unique in the science fiction genre are all present in this highly underrated work. Worth the money if you can find it.

In a way this book seems quite different from the other Phillip K. Dick books I have read. Most of his books start with a plot you can (mostly) follow, but, as the story goes on, it gets weirder and weirder. With most of his other books, I am usually left scratching my head, trying to figure out what was going on in the last quarter or so of the book. With "Friends from Frolix 8," however, PKD seems to have made an exception -- his customary, incomprehensible weirdness doesn't get started until the very last several pages, and even then you can still figure out what's going on!

The story is set in earth's future. The world government is divided between two types of superior human beings: the new men and the unusuals. Each type runs a political party, and the world electorate alternates between the two for government office. Exams determine who can receive the good civil service jobs.

In reality, though, the elections and tests are pretty much rigged. The new men and the unusuals have divided up power and rule the world as overlords. The normal people (old men) live subservient lives under the control of the powers that be.

Nick Appleton, our hero, is a tire regroover. He (dishonestly, if not illegally) regrooves worn-out tires to make them appear still usable. His son has once again failed the civil service exam, and Thors Provoni, a famed, almost legendary, revolutionary has sent word from many light years away that he is returning with alien friends to end the tyranny.

While this book does contain many good ideas, some suspense and a few interesting twists, something about it just did not work for me. The characters were probably the main source of the problem. For example, PKD's main female character, Charlie, almost seemed like a caricature, and Nick's wife and child all but vanish halfway through the book for no discernable reason. In one of PKD's other books this may not have mattered, but as this book did not flirt with madness, it's easier to see such character problems.

For what it's worth, I did enjoy this book. If "Friends from Frolix 8" sounds interesting to you, by all means read it! It is certainly enjoyable. You should also be sure to read PKD's other and better books, such as "The Man from High Tower" or "Martian Time Slip."

Ok, so Frolix 8 isn't PKD's best book, but it has been criminally ignored nonetheless. The frequent references to the Yeats poem are good, and the plot itself is reasonable. I realise that this was a 'need money, must produce' book but that doesn't mean it isn't a good read.

This novel had some potential, but ultimately left me unsatisfied. The elements for a decent story are here: there are essentially three interwoven subplots, but even while reading it the connection between two of them felt especially forced, contrived, and unrealistic. I was able to suspend disbelief, but just barely.

On the bright side, there are a few amusing parodies peppered throughout, such as a satire of drug culture (substituting subversive literature for drugs) and an interesting characture of messianic expectations. I liked his dystopian setting, too.

On the down-beat, PKD's attempt to create "new" slang was very annoying, and since most of them were variations of '60s counterculture lingo, it ironically ended up coming across as dated. That can probably be overlooked/forgiven by most readers, but the ambiguity of the ending was much harder (for me) to swallow. Although I suspect PKD figured this ended on a "happy note" I'm not convinced that's actually the case... some sense of closure that "everything works out for the best" (or not!) would have helped. [explaining/justifying that, though, is a major spoiler, so sorry for the vagueness.]

Overall, if you're new to PKD, don't start with this one. If you're a PKD completionist (like I am) then give it a go, but keep your expectations reasonable. This isn't on the par of UBIK, High Castle, etc. but at least it's not as bad as Zap Gun or Cosmic Puppets. In all honesty, if anyone other than PKD had written this, I'd score it much lower.