Customer Reviews

Unteleported Man

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

 

 

Phillip K. Dick's novel deals with the dueling theme of the perils of the modern media society and the psychedelic experience in this must read novel for science fiction fans. The novel is most likely unpublished today because of a few pages missing from the final manuscript; however the overall plot line remains intact. The story is set on a future Earth where one corporation controls the technology which can teleport people to a far away planet, billed as an ultimate paradise. The only problem is no one can ever teleport back. The story begins when someone discovers the films of happy crowds cheering their newfound existence sent back from the planet are faked -- the cheering and applause are "canned". The "unteleported" man and others decide to investigate, and invent a list of the various possible worlds that might await them at their destination. The psychedelic side of thing comes in later, and I don't want to ruin it for you, (although you quantum physics buffs might be able to make a guess), let's just say the twists and turns, from the author behind "Total Recall", are very original. This novel is not to be missed if you can find a tattered copy of the unabridged version at a used book store.

There are books with surprise twists and turns, that make for enjoyable reading. This is one of those books. Then there are books that seem to actually change genres mid-stream. It might remain science fiction but be of such a different sort that a reader who enjoys the first half of the book would be repulsed by the second half. This is one of those books.

I really enjoyed the first half. People are being teleported to a planet that has an ominous feel to it, and their return broadcasts are being digitally altered. Our hero steps in to save the day by taking an eighteen-year journey in a spaceship, to find out what's really going on. Written in 1966, Dick makes some very prescient predictions for life in 2014, at the same time, understandably, unable to predict elements like the world wide web or the the lack of need for paper.

Then, our hero gets his by an LSD dart, and honestly, I have no idea what happened in the second half of the book. It's not just because of the three missing pages, that Dick didn't get to correct before his death. It's because he writes as if the hero is *in* a drug trip. Maybe this was exciting reading in '66. It's not in '07. I don't like reading about what it's like to be on a drug trip. If I did, I'd do LSD. And this goes on for page after page- so long, that altered reality merges with the possibility of alternate reality, and it's never fully explained which is true. Indeed, all of the answers never get explained, and the bulk of the second half of the book is this drug trip. Or something else. Who knows.

I don't like books that start off one way and their whole approach to the reality of the book. The reader feels robbed of the investment they made into the author's world. And this approach rarely actually answer the questions that were initially raised. It is as if Lost broadcast eight episodes and then stopped because of a Writer's Strike. If I know that's happening ahead of time, I'll wait for the DVD. If I know the writer's strike will go on forever, and the book ends without answering- I'll choose a different book.

It's described as a "world famous classic" and it may be, but I found it almost impossible to read. The plot involves teleportation (but only one-way) to a distant planet, that's being promoted as a utopia, but may be a giant slave labor camp. The universe is controlled by a few very powerful groups in constant warfare. Nothing is as it seems, and perception itself is constantly changing, revealing a universe of parallel worlds.

I would have given the book two stars, but I did manage to finish it, hence the third star. Reading it was torture. Author PKD is brilliant and clever, writes in devilishly complex puns, symbols, allusions and made up words, has uncanny unsight into the nature of consciousness, but--he is simply unreadable.

The Unteleported Man is out of print and would never be published today. The author could have said it all in half the pages. Sorry, I don't recommend this one. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

I'd been wanting to read this for about two decades but never got around it (a couple of my friends read it in high school and pronounced it "deep, dude"). Well, first big achievement of the new year: I finally read it. In fact I read it twice, sympathetically and attentively.

Wanted to like it, but wasn't so impressed.

Actually, the first 2/3rds or so is quite good: everybody's being teleported some place and there's this one guy who's suspicious of the whole thing, so he intends to get to where everybody's been going, but without using teleportation just to see what he can see. Kind of a sci-fi thriller. Why couldn't the author have just continued this until the end?

Oh, no. Not Phillip K. About mid-way through the book the protagonist gets gratuitously hit with a dart containing LSD and for the rest of the book completely trips out. By the end of the book, there's no real satisfying conclusion.

Not sure what this was intended to accomplish: the author had more than a serviceable story and seemed to throw it away just for the sake of getting trippy. It seemed like the whole drugged-out sequence (which constitutes pretty much the entire second half of the book!) sabotaged the story, but not in exchange for any insights.

I suppose this is not surprising: the book was first published in 1966 and I guess major trip-outs were fascinating to the reading public back then.

I'm also not surprised that nobody's ever tried to make a movie of this.

If you're going to read this, though, you probably should click away from this page and instead to the "Lies, Inc." page: that's the same novel, but with a whole bunch of deleted stuff included. When they included it, they changed the title, and that's the one everyone reads these days. Achtung, though: that one's got EVEN MORE tripped-out sequences.

I should also note that this is an UNFINISHED book, despite the convoluted publishing history. Which is a shame, since the second half deserves a reading more careful than you're willing to give it since you know there are, even now, several pages missing.

An explanation is necessary. As far as I can tell, there are no fewer than four versions of this book:

1) The first publication was one half of an Ace Two-in-one paperback (paired with Howard L. Cory's The Mind Monsters). This version is about 40,000 words in length. Originally, it appeared in the December 1964 issue of the magazine Fantastic. Ace Books originally requested additional material to extend the story to standard paperback novel length, but they didn't like what Philip K. Dick sent them.

2) Berkley Books published the entire book, including the additional material (which was written in 1965), in 1983. However, there was a catch: when Dick was reviewing this additional material, he saw that some pages were missing from the manuscript. To be exact, there were three brief gaps near the end of the work; the Berkley Books version (which is the one I read) included all of the additional information, noting where the gaps occur in the text.

3) Philip K. Dick did make an effort to make the two parts fit together a little better. In 1979, he rewrote Chapter 1, and made other minor changes, in an attempt to provide more continuity. However, he did not complete the three "gaps" near the end of the novel before his death in 1982. Dick's UK publisher, Gollancz, published a third version of the novel, hiring s/f writer John Sladek to write material to "bridge the gaps" in the novel's last pages. Gollancz published this book with the title Lies, Inc. in 1984.

4) The American version of Lies, Inc. was published after Dick's literary executor, Paul Williams, found the missing pages of The Unteleported Man / Lies, Inc. in 1985, while perusing some of Dick's other manuscripts. These missing sections are included in the 2003 edition of the book, published by Vintage. As Williams says, this is the book "as the author intended it in 1979, but necessarily without any further revisions he may have thought about making but never got around to."

But are any of these versions of the book any good? Well, as I said, I read the Berkley Books version, and, being a big fan of Philip K. Dick, did enjoy it enough to finish it. However, any reviewer should emphasize that the only version of this book that was ever in any sense "finished" was the first one. All of the longer versions of The Unteleported Man / Lies, Inc. are unfinished works and should be approached as such. Why? Well, the novel proceeds briskly through the first half or so, until the protagonist, Rachmael ben Applebaum, is attacked with a weaponized form of LSD. The prose style changes abruptly, the pacing of the novel changes, and reality itself is in flux for the remainder of the book. While I have no doubt that part of this is intentional on Dick's part (the man could do amazing things blurring the lines between reality, hallucination, and schizophrenia), the unfinished nature of the book makes it very difficult to follow. When Dick decides to add time travel to the plot for good measure, the book almost cries out for additional rewriting.

I give the book 3 stars, but only with the understanding that it is a fragment, with about half of the material published posthumously. A lot of the themes here were dealt with much better in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which is arguably Philip K. Dick's best book. If you're looking to read everything the man wrote, you might want to start there. While The Unteleported Man / Lies, Inc. has Dick shedding new light on his favorite themes of What is Reality? and What is Human?, it makes a poor first choice by this author.

I have to agree with others here who lost track of the book in the second half. Seriously, he gets hit by the dart and suddenly I'm reading a new, very strange book. Can't recommend it.

This is an excellent hard scifi novel, with a cynical view on how man will continue to be self-serving in spite of the technological changes that are sure to come. PKD really knows how to tell a story, with imagined details that make for believability and relate well to the narrative. The characters are quite strong and the language elegant.

The plot is about a fallen heir, who is coping with his creditors and wondering what to do next. The context is one of economic morass, with Europe split up - Germany is ascendant with a teleportation device that allows colonization of distant planets, which are portrayed as the promised land. Of course, the heir finds unexplained things and sets out to understand them. The results are wonderfully unexpected.

REcommended.