Customer Reviews

Now Wait for Last Year

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There's real sense of the arbitrary in the rating of Dick's books. Serious misfires like "Time Out of Joint" and "Ubik" receive high praise, while fine minor works like "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said" fall through the cracks. It'll take some effort to fix this. It hasn't happened yet.

"Now Wait for Last Year" is yet another example. As with most of Dick's later novels, it's difficult to state simply what it's "about". NWFLY is "about" a future Earth that, like Italy and Hungary in WW II, has made a hideously bad choice and is lined up on the wrong side against a very alien but far from ignoble species. It's also "about" a drug that allows people to slip from one alternate timeline to another. And about a man debating his responsibility to a wife suffering from progressive brain damage from abusing that very drug. And about another man (one of Dick's beloved simpletons) whose hobby is making little carts for rejected missile guidance systems out of no more than a sense of fairness.

The other reviewers are far from wrong in their view that very little happens. This is Dick writing SF in mainstream mode, where what occurs is less important than how people handle it, from Earth's military dictator (who is a lot better than he has to be--more of a MacArthur than a Mussolini) to the guy with the carts. There's no grand climax or slick SF "solution", just a minor epiphany as things finally fall into place for one character. The last scene, which in other hands would have been simply absurd (it does, after all, portray a character named "Sweetscent" having an emotional conversation with an automated cab) comprise some of the most hopeful pages in any recent novel in SF or out.

NWFLY is the book that most clearly reveals Dick's fundamental decency, his sweetness of spirit. John Gardner, the litcrit who was not a poststructuralist and suffered for it, once wrote that the novelist must never forget that some of his readers will be sick, some dying, and some in trouble. Dick never forgot. "Now Wait for Last Year" is a book for people in trouble. Which means, of course, just about everybody.

While Dick is no stranger to deconstructing conventional notions of time he does it threefold (at least) in this novel. It is one of his more action-packed endeavors (like his short story "The Variable Man") while dealing with temporal perception in an extremely thoughtful and playful way.

He also manages to place the earth in an incredible bind that begs the reader's compassion and stimulates the intellect: Which alien race can we trust when two appear, bringing their ancient fight to our planet? The humanoid aliens are manipulative and very powerful but their opponents are human-sized ants that speak in clicks, making it a comment on racism as well. Our only hope lies with an ailing UN super-general who isn't showing his cards, and his mild-mannered doctor who's ex-employer shows up again and again to re-hire and re-fire him.

An extremely entertaining and rewarding read that is an essential part of anyone's P K Dick library. One of his big, bright, shining stars; right next to _Flow_My_Tears,_The_Policeman_Said_!

This novel has been published in 1966 and belongs to the best books of Philip K. Dick. The themes treated in NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR are not a surprise for those of us who have read the precedent books of the american writer. But, in this book, Philip K. Dick succeeds perfectly in the alchemy of the plot.

An alien invasion that is never happening, a commander in chief of the Earth population who could be a simulacra, a dangerous drug that is altering time and reality, an average character who has to act as an hero in order to save the humanity : all these themes have already been treated by Philip K. Dick. But not with so much empathy - a fundamental word in PKD vocabulary - in the description of the feelings of his characters.

In my opinion, the relation between Eric and Katharine Sweetscent, the doctor and his drug-addicted wife, marks a turning point in the evolution of Dick's literary skills. Hate, Love, Regrets and Empathy hadn't been until then so masterfully painted under Dick's pen.

NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR is one of PKD's books that could let you enter the unique imaginary world of this american writer. Don't hesitate to open the door.

A book for your library.

This is a very engaging novel typically for Philip Dick being centred on a character not quite at the hub of the action - an observer, one who can reflect and speculate. And isn't that all of us as our everyday lives infringe on the events of the world - infringe rather than impact?

As in many Philip Dick novels there are logical challenges which may compromise the story for people who are unable/unwilling to accept a basic premise of the novel. In this case it is the power of a drug to actually move people temporarily in time - forwards or backwards - or across parallel worlds. Not make it appear that they move, but actually move them. The descriptions of characters in the influence of the drug are so fascinating - for me anyway - that the logical discontinuities disappeared into the far recesses of my mind. And now I realise that there are many logical problems for me in the REAL world that I have trundled away in the back of my mind so that I can get on with life.

Philip Dick's graphic and extending speculations on the natureof reality certainly push hard into my reality and how I understand it. And here's a quote: '..... you've only got one tiny life and that lies ahead of you, not sideways or back.'

Although Now Wait for Last Year is usually grouped with the novels of Dick's late 1960s period, it was completed by late 1963. It as the first of several novels in which drugs are a major element, the others being The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Lies Inc., and A Scanner Darkly. In Now Wait for Last Year the drug in question, JJ-180, supposedly hallucinogenic, does more than alter consciousness: it takes the user backwards or forwards in time. It alters not just subjective reality, but also objective reality, and allows concourse between the parallel universes of different time tracks. Of the novel's main characters, Gino Molinari, the world leader, attempts to use the drug to break out of the fatality of history and linear time and borrow from other possible universes for the benefit of his own. His physician, Eric Sweetscent, for his part, tries to create a desirable future by communicating with future versions of himself. His love/hate relationship with his wife becomes a major element of his desire to escape the present. In a well-known scene, he gets psychological counseling from a talking taxicab. This is a brilliant and fascinating novel that tends to get overlooked among Dick's better known works.

Seeing the rave reviews concerning Philip K. Dick's multidinous collection of books, I was immediately intrigued by an author who dared to challenge the mind. In reading most books, one is interested but not ferverent, engaged but never truly touched. Now Wait for Last Year will breach the walls of that special compartment of your mind that strives to remain isolated. The challenge of comprehending Dick's reckless plot is substantial indeed but the rewards are great. Energizing the reader's curiosity, Dick makes impossible promises but always fufills. In the end, the reader is not distressed or confused, he/she is unburdened. The ending is particularly ingenious. In a unique twist, Dick leaves the reader with a feeling of crushing inevitability that differs from other books in that it also hides a certain optimism, an enlivening hope for the future. The main character is oppressed by the yoke of an alien invasion and an unhappy marriage, but there is redemption for him, an end in sight, but distant enough to drive and enthuse us to our destiny. Dick is truly among the greatest authors of all time, and if anyone out there was still pondering as to the literary merit of science fiction, here it is. With Dick's gem as sf's spokesman, one can't help but be utterly convinced.

PKD's "Now Wait for Last Year" features the author's unparalleled inventiveness at less than its peak form. The novel's action unfolds on a mid 21st century Earth in which Terrans have allied with alien ancestors from the Alpha Centaurus world Lilistar to levy war against insectoid extraterrestrials called reegs. The war is waged partially through use of the drug JJ-180, which allows its ingestors to travel through time at the cost of unbreakable addiction and irreversible brain damage. While fighting in this conflict, the novel's protagonist, Dr. Eric Sweetscent, engages in a personal struggle against his self-destructive tendencies.

Like a precocious toddler who completely devours one toy and impatiently grabs another, PKD introduces and discards ideas on nearly every page of the opening chapters of this book. A race of alien mimics supporting a synthetic fur industry, an apparently telepathic politician who communes through physical contact, "babylands," exact replicas of a person's birthplace, a fad among the moneyed class, all ideas that might independently feature in their own novels but are abandoned after minimal treatment in "Now Wait for Last Year." The plot deteriorates halfway through the book, and the latter chapters consist largely of Dr. Sweetscent traveling forward in time to query future selves about the outcome of his external and internal struggles.

Although not as focused as his better novels, PKD's "Now Wait for Last Year" presents a vivid and detailed future that should interest most SF fans. As with all of his work, this book contains PKD's remarkable insight into human character and hopeful view of mankind's future, a view rendered quite powerful by his intimate familiarity with all of man's flaws and wrinkles, and his optimism despite these defects.

This book belongs very much in the mainstream of Dick's work. It has his typical emphasis on drugs, power structures, artificial people, alternate realities, and time discontinuities. What distinguishes it from many of his other works is the portrayed relationship between Dr. Sweetscent and his wife Kathy, one of conflicted love/hate and dominance games, a portrayal that is much more realistic than many such within the SF field, and which provides an underlying tension to the book well beyond its ostensible main plot of trying to save the Earth from the war between the `Starlings and the reeqs.

The drug in question is JJ-80, which not only is highly addictive after just one use, but makes the user actually travel in time. Regardless of the scientific implausibility of this, Dick handles the problem of time travel well, postulating that most such travelers end up causing parallel time tracks/universes, and neatly tying this concept in with using people from one universe as replacements for some in the viewpoint universe. Then Dick adds `robants', artificial people, to the mix, which leads to his typical confusion of just who is who (or what), along with questions about the ultimate nature of reality.

Dick's prose is quite utilitarian here, but it does get the job done. There are some odd lapses in both portrayals of some characters (mainly the Mole, ruler of the Earth) and in the underlying motives for some of the `Starlings actions. And it suffers from a typical failing of SF books of this period, that of the single average man as world saver, which makes the already difficult suspension of disbelief even harder. Still, it's more coherent than many of his books, though it's certainly not up to the level of excellence of his Man In The High Castle.

A must for Dick fans, worth reading by the casual SF fan.

-- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)

This one seldom gets a mention among Philip K. Dick's greats, like "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," "Ubik," "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and "The Man in the High Castle". With all due respect to those classics, it's a sin and a shame. This novel should be welcomed into that august company, and without delay.

On the other hand, perhaps "Now Wait for Last Year" flew under the radar because the story is really so ordinary. You can wrap up the basic plot in a very few words; a doctor, in a bad marriage made worse by addiction, grows into a genuinely good man by means of the hardship thrown in his way by a high-pressure government job during wartime. Sort of a combination of "The Days of Wine and Roses" and "Dr. Zhivago". With poisonous addictive drugs and time travel thrown in.

I can't think of any other author who postulated time travel by chemical means - that is, the idea that certain drugs might affect actual reality, not just your sense of reality. Take JJ-180 in the world of "Last Year" and you find yourself in the actual past or future. Of course, then you come down, come back, and die in great pain a few months later if you don't take it again. If you do take it again, you die of irreversible neurological damage in a year or so.

Now, here's what makes this one of PKD's great novels; like the ones mentioned above and a few others, this time the author found a way to unite his multiple plot strands into a cohesive story. In this book, humanity develops JJ-180 as a weapon against the insectoid reegs. Our ostensible allies, the humanoids of the Lilistar Empire, make use of the drug against certain humans to keep Earth in the war on their side. One of their victims is Karen Sweetscent, who hooks her husband Eric to force his help in getting her off the stuff. (Or maybe just out of spite - PKD was a trifle peeved at women during these years.)

The Sweetscents are one of PKD's typical couples of this period in his work - they can't stand each other but can't let go, either - and the whole thing is complicated by the fact that Eric Sweetscent has recently become personal physician to the ruler of Earth, Gino Molinari. In short, here is a war between various galactic species and a war between a man and a woman; each conflict comments on the other, and JJ-180 emerges as a weapon in both.

Eric, the linchpin of all this hoo-ha, must decide where his loyalties lie. The question is all the more pressing because the fate of the Earth may depend upon his answer, by means of his relationship with Molinari, also known as "The Mole". And he doesn't have much time for necessary reflection, because the Mole is not normal either mentally or physically. He's desperately ill with any number of complaints, many of which ought to be fatal, but he keeps on surviving. This is obviously a man of enormous power even when sick.

And the most astonishing thing about him isn't even his ability to overcome cancer, renal failure, heart attack and God knows what. It's the way in which he uses his illness to avoid the destruction of Earth. The sicker he gets, the less he can administer his government, and the less he can subordinate humanity to the destructive Lilistar Empire. Like many of his people, he comes to realize that allying himself with the so-called 'Starmen was a serious error, and so his disease allows him to accept responsibility and pay for his mistakes both at the same time. This is not your typical Christ figure - he's a fat, middle aged, peevish, desperately sick, brilliant political strategist. The Moral Majority will burn this thing in a heartbeat if they ever bother to read it. Which they won't.

Anyway, whatever else may be true, this is a war story like none you've ever seen before, complete with chemical and biological weapons like none you've ever seen before, both of which operate best when turned upon ourselves, not the enemy. And we haven't even gone into the time travel aspects yet. Why, you may ask, would anyone come up with a weapon that literally sends the enemy back in time temporarily?

Oh, no you don't. You're going to have to read the book to learn that little detail. Suffice to say that the time-travel character of JJ-180 lies at the heart of the Mole's power, as well as his illness, and therefore at the heart of Eric Sweetscent's journey into his own character. And there you have the brilliance of PKD and of "Now Wait for Last Year" - everything connects and becomes richer by its contact with everything else. Sometimes this produces paranoia, in life and in PKD's work. At other times, again in both places, it produces some kind of spiritual breakthrough.

So I invite you to follow Eric Sweetscent as his life spirals out of control, first in his marriage, then in his employment, then in his ability to stay in one place at one time. The last chapter is particularly worthwhile, an early example of PKD's trademark emotional conclusions in which his protagonist wanders through the lonely city wondering whether it's even worth going on, and finds inspiration in watching a simple (and in this case artificial) form of life just doing the best it can. When someone blesses Sweetscent as a good man at the end, you know it's true.

Besides, what could be bad about a novel that starts off in a building shaped like an apteryx? No one but PKD would think of that.

Benshlomo says, The road to enlightenment has never been easy.

Dr. Eric Sweetscent's love/hate relationship with his wife is the focus of this bizarre tale of drugs, time travel, interplanetary war, and alternate realities. After a single exposure, Sweetscent's wife Katharine has become helplessly addicted to a little-known drug called JJ-180, which has time-warping properties. She purposely addicts the good doctor (her husband) in order to obtain his help. Eric's fight for survival leads him through a pharmaceutical company to the world government itself, where UN Secretary General Gino Molinari is using the reality-warping powers of JJ-180 to ward off an alien invasion. Can Eric conquer his addiction, save his wife, and fend off the alien overlords? Longtime readers of Dick's work can probably guess the answer.

Even with all the dangers and plot twists in this story, it's still basically an allegory about power. JJ-180 gives its users power over others, and the power to control events far beyond themselves. Katharine uses the drug's power to control her husband, even at the risk of killing him. Facing death, Eric uses his power to control others, but stops short of controlling his own wife. The moral is aptly summed up by the cabdriver at the book's conclusion: for Eric to take some critical step "would be to say, I can't endure reality as such. I have to have uniquely special easier conditions". A former drug addict himself, Dick is telling us that reality has to be enough for all of us, even when the going gets rough. We shouldn't need to have anything "uniquely special" just to make life worth living. A must for fans of PDK; for others who aren't put off by science fiction and Dick's quirky storytelling style, a sad and moving tale of love and reality.