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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
FAILED SEANCE, January 29, 2005
This review is from: Philip K. Dick is dead, alas (Paperback)
Alas, Bishop climbed aboard the PKD Express without a destination in mind. His attempt to contact the ghost of PKD only produced some raps on the ceiling. Using bumper sticker brevity, there was too much of this and not enough of that. Alas, too many of his characters had nothing to do but fester in their boring world. Dick, himself, usually gave his quirky characters an alternate world to escape into. This story's tacked on Brave New World ending, the "redemptive shift," a gift from super aliens, didn't quiet work.
Admittedly, it is difficult to develop character for a ghost. But giving him a craving for strong coffee doesn't quite do it. And it was hard for the other characters to react to the command, "Don't touch me." There were some interesting characters drawn. Cal Pickford, who idolized PKD much as the author Bishop must have, was very well developed. But most of the others were but wheels to keep the story moving, that alas, kept falling off. Still, not a bad read when you're snowed in for the winter.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
If you like PKD, Do Not Read this book, September 12, 2006
This review is from: Philip K. Dick is dead, alas (Paperback)
Although the author's heart is in the right place, the book is sorely disappointing. Bishop captures none of the depth, anxiety, or mental displacement common to a Dick novel. Even Dick's characters, who aren't often noted for psychological breadth are superior to the ones in this book. I wanted to like this book, I really did, but it's failure really makes clear how unique an author PKD really was.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Being dead is just the start when there's no time, July 30, 2007
This review is from: Philip K. Dick is dead, alas (Paperback)
The original title of this book was "The Secret Ascension" and I'm not really sure which one works better, in all honesty. The current title is probably a little more evocative but a little misleading as well, since the book isn't really about Philip K Dick, not in the strict sense. Sure, he's in it and the book works in a few of his recurring themes, but in the end it comes perilously close to Bishop attempting to emulate a style that he doesn't have the mindset for. The setup for the book is great, taking place in a then-contemporary early eighties America where Richard Nixon is entering his fourth term and has turned the country into a near-fascist police state. We've won Vietnam and are currently engaged in "reorienting" the natives into our wonderful American way of life. Meanwhile dissent is actively crushed and matters are way closer to what everyone imagines Communist Russia was like. And in the midst of this, a faded writer named Philip Dick decides to have a stroke and die. Thus our story begins. Even though his name appears in the title, the author rarely appears in the book itself, after a bit in the beginning where he starts to interact with the characters, he sort of vanishes, maintaining a presence, although not an active one. The story focuses more on Cal Pickford, a Colorado native transplanted into Georgia with his wife. A big fan of PKD, he's trying to make a living in the new oppressive America, and finds himself actively engaged in trying to change it, almost against his will. Bishop's vision of a repressed America is actually quite well done and does feel real, which is something that Philip Dick was good at, circa "Man in the High Castle", for all the splits from known history, it does feel like ordinary people going about their lives. Cal and his wife come across as real characters, although the rest don't quite succeed as much, since they seem to exist more to push the plot along to wherever it needs to go. It seems at points that Bishop is trying to play with Dick's themes of different reality and rewriting our way into a better one. The thing is that Dick was able to convey the sheer weirdness of this in near psychedelic fashion, while letting the story remain somehow grounded. Bishop isn't quite up to that task and so the weirdness starts to feel way out of place, especially as the story reaches its climax and things start to make less sense. Dick was never big on explaining in his novels, preferring to let you make your own judgements, while here enough is laid out for us that we can get the scope of it, and it just doesn't resonate. Still, when he focuses on the ins and outs of this new wrong America, the book works pretty well, showing what happens when you let one person get too much power. More a homage than a recreation, Bishop does a credible job but at the same time only reinforces that the only person who could do Philip K Dick was, well, Philip K Dick. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
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