The World Jones Made (The Gregg Press Science Fiction Series) [Hardcover]

Philip K. Dick (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1979 | Series: The Gregg Press Science Fiction Series

Floyd Jones is sullen, ungainly and quite possibly mad, but he really can see exactly one year into the future. And this talent means that in a very short time he rises from being a disgruntled carnival fortune-teller to convulse an entire planet. For Jones becomes a demagogue, whipping up the ideal-starved population into a frenzy against the threat of the 'drifters' , enormous single-cell protoplasms that may be landing on Earth soon. But, in a world of engineered mutants, hermaphrodite sex performers in drug-fuelled nightclubs, Jones is a tragic messiah. His limited precognition renders him helpless because he cannot bring himself to fight against what he knows will happen ...

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The fact that what Dick is entertaining us about is reality and madness, time and death, sin and salvation -- this has escaped most critics. Nobody notices that we have our own homegrown Borges."

-- Ursula K. LeGuin, New Republic --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Inside Flap

Floyd Jones is sullen, ungainly, and quite possibly mad, but in a very short time he will rise from telling fortunes at a mutant carnival to convulsing an entire planet. For although Jones has the power to see the future -- a power that makes his life a torment -- his real gift lies elsewhere: in his ability to make people dream again in a world where dreaming has been made illegal, even when the dream is indistinguishable from a nightmare.

In Philip K. Dick's unsettling chronicle of the rise and fall of a postnuclear messiah, readers will find a novel that is as minutely realistic as it is prophetic. For along with its engineered mutants, hermaphroditic sex performers, and protoplasmic drifters from the stars, The World Jones Made gives us nothing less than a deadly accurate reading of our own hunger for belief. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: G K Hall & Co (April 1979)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0839824831
• ISBN-13: 978-0839824831
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,968,640 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Deserves more credit., February 8, 2000

By 

Guy Salvidge - See all my reviews

This review is from: The World Jones Made (Paperback)

People are generally harsh in consigning 'The World Jones Made' to stand beside truly awful novels like 'Dr. Futurity' and 'Vulcan's Hammer.' This novel is better than that. WJM is an early novel, and it is, as Patricia Warrick says, 'rough in parts.' Despite this it is full of excellent ideas, like the genetically engineered Venusians (no one knew what Venus was really like in 1956), the 'drifters' and the use of relativism for a world government. There are some pulpy ideas, like Jones' ability to see one year into the future, but PKD even manages to put a new spin on this, showing Jones' agony at experiencing the first year of his death in the last year of his life.

All right, so the plot is hollow, the characters brittle, and the writing style pedestrian. But the essence of things to come in PKD's career is here. WJM is vastly superior to earlier works like Solar Lottery and The Cosmic Puppets. It is still in print, even after 40+ years.

WJM doesn't really deserve 4 stars, maybe 3.5. I like it partially because most people hate it, and I think it deserves more credit than it is afforded.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Compelling in spite of a mushy middle, April 22, 2005

By 

E. VONROTHKIRCH (Garland, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The World Jones Made (Paperback)

The World Jones Made has a wonderful Twilight Zone vibe to it--Jones can see the future, but for him it's like living in the past. He also suffers from the Cassandra Complex; Nobody will believe his predictions until the future comes to pass. An array of interesting characters struggle in a world that swings from extreme to another. Philip K. Dick does a wonderful job (philosophically at least) demonstrating how ideologies come full circle. The plot is compelling until the middle, where it sidetracks into the mushy terrain of romantic drama with the leading guy & lady. This is not to say sci-fi couldn't better represent human relationships--it certainly could, a point Philip K. Dick made himself in an interview featured in The Shifted Realities of Philip K. Dick. The problem in The World Jones Made is that much of the dramatic tension between the protagonist and his wife is saved until the dead middle of the story, at which point Philip unfortunately slows down the pacing by making the foray into romantic drama. However, the story picks up the pace again towards the end, hammering a tense climax with an ironic twist. Pacing issues aside, an excellent story filled with interesting ideas.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Author and Character Try for Greatness, December 31, 2000

By 

benshlomo "benshlomo" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The World Jones Made (Paperback)

This was one of PKD's first novels, and it shows - although the plot has some strong original elements in it, the language and manner of telling are pretty standard-issue for postwar SF. The man hadn't found his style yet. In fact, in some ways he resembled his title character, certain that the future held great things but only able to see ahead towards more struggle.

Fortunately for us, PKD was a much better man than the Floyd Jones of this story. Jones, unlike PKD, is a fascist, a xenophobe, and a weasel. He is precognitive, sees the future, but only one year ahead. He must relive even the most vile and unpleasant incidents twice over, and he can still be - and often is - wrong and wrongheaded. All the more remarkable that the author should invent a character like that in the early days of science fiction, when those with mental powers were generally heroic. Or at any rate oppressed and misunderstood, sympathetic characters for readers to identify with (think X-Men). Once again, PKD takes a standard SF device and turns it inside out.

So much for the villain - in this case as in many others, the most interesting character in the story. The heroes, a dedicated policeman and his radically-inclined wife, are by comparison a couple of marshmallows. Unlike many fictional married couples, however, these two at least have an interesting relationship - bound by a great love but separated by clashing political beliefs. Take the scene where the policeman learns that his wife has been working for a revolutionary underground behind his back for many months. The moment is enormously moving, and would bring a reader to tears if the characters themselves had more than two dimensions each.

While all of this is going on, you have to consider a group of mutated humans, the most benign alien invasion in literature, and a desperate attempt to colonize Venus. Why did PKD throw in all this extra material? The temptation is strong to say it was because all science fiction of the 1950's had to have mutants, aliens, and space travel. The later PKD had more confidence in the products of his imagination than in such clichés.

That, in a nutshell, is the problem with this book - in far too many places it reads like a sort of technical schematic for a PKD novel, not the novel itself. If you took any second-class genre piece of its day and read it through a slightly warped pair of glasses, you'd get stuff like this - enough mutation to call attention to itself, not enough to really intrigue. It's an adequate piece of experimentation and not much more. PKD just hadn't given himself permission to really cut loose yet.

The World Jones Made has all the flaws of its time and its genre - there's too much incident for a 180-page novel, the action leaps from place to place and time to time until you get seasick, and the whole thing has that deadly aura of seriousness about it that we all remember from Twilight Zone. Definitely not the place to start for the aspiring PKD reader - the author had a lot of growing to do after finishing this piece. Happily, he did it in pretty short order and gave us greater work.

Benshlomo says, Everybody needs a little practice starting out.