Customer Reviews

The World Jones Made

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I must disagree with those who say this is an immature creation of PKD. Although a disjointed read in places (and his better stuff tends to be), conceptually it is one of his best. Structurally, it is fantastic: there are at least 4 microcosms in this book (including our solar system), each of which is planned out by someone or something, each recapitulating the other levels of the novel. And despite the planning, and in Jones' case, the actual foreknowing of events, one of the major premises of the story is the same as in other PKD novels: the inherent meaningfulness of human striving, for good or for ill.

Okay, this isn't later PKD. There is no twist and fold of reality, no astral trip. But that doesn't make it any less worthwhile for reading. Behind all of PKD's themes and devices stands a unique and reflective view of HUMANITY - The World Jones Made is no different.

1956 - PKD predicts Political Correctness, named Relativism. This is right on the heels of WWII and Hitler, whom the characters in the novel are prone to refer to. After another 'Great War', the citizens of Earth aim to prevent further genocides by installing a government with strict adherence to relativist principles. Enter Floyd Jones, Hitler-alike in vision, only he can see one year into the future as well. PKD generates great ambiguity over which is the lesser of evils - there is no clearcut utopia here.

Floyd Jones isn't quite as well developed or grand in scope as Palmer Eldritch, PKD's later manipulative antagonist, but he is interesting and his vision is nicely done. I don't think his futuresight amounts to 'hogwash' - it is very Oedipal and grounded in the idea of fate.

Recommended.

This is an early PKD and as such isn't up to the mad brilliance of his later writing... but it's got its moments. Like all PKD it makes you think, hard. Paradoxes abound.

However, it shouldn't be too high on your PKD priority list.

One of Dick's early novels, The World Jones Made (1956) has well-realized characters and psychological complexity, but lacks a coherent plot focus. Without the reality breakdowns, multi-focal viewpoints, robots, and time paradoxes of Dick's later pyrotechnic creations, it ranks as a minor work in the PKD canon but is interesting for what it tries to do, showing a blackly ironic rise and fall of a man called Jones. Jones, whose character is based on Hitler, is a "precog" who can see the future, and builds up a mass movement to oppose the prevailing state ideology of Relativism. The Jews' role here is played by the Drifters, a harmless race of amoeba-like aliens, who represent the universe Jones wants to conquer. Jones is opposed by Cussick, the policeman, who is the voice of conventional, commonsense reality. But Jones is like Cussick's alter ego, and the two men's lives are entwined in complex and surprising ways. The psychology of the policeman and the unhappy marriage of the protagonist are elements to be found in a number of Dick's later books. Here there is a somewhat contrived positive ending, but what impresses is Dick's precognitive vision, which has been shown time and again in the years since the 50s to be right on the mark politically, sociologically, and philosophically.

Writing reviews on Philip Dick's works is unsettling and leaves one open for all sorts of criticism - it is hard to encapsulate all the ideas he floated in each novel. He was a master of conceptual thinking and a great writer of science fiction and futuristic thought. He considered notions and concepts that most authors would kill to be able to have as original thought let alone be able to put them into the public thought pool as worthwhile and interesting fiction.

'The World Jones Made' is a story based around a simple and fascinating premise. A human is born who can live a year ahead of the rest of us mere mortals. In other words, what we experience today he already knows. There is a catch, of course. A year is not necessarily all that predictive of outcomes that take many years to develop. So you can get it wrong though with interesting consequences, as our character discovers.

The central character is Floyd Jones. We are taken along his life's journey and the impact his future sense has on society and the future. Dick weaves this journey into a future society with notions of an Orwellian 'big brother' gone politically correct or as Dick calls it 'Relativism'.

This is not a book for space opera fans but one for the long suffering traditionalist who wants to ponder some concepts that will leave him wondering 'why didn't I think of that?'

Somehow Dick gets to include in the story - themes of space travel, alien cultures, genetic modification and a raft of other traditional sci-fi concepts. There is no doubt that Dick is a true speculative genius and many a reader will sit quietly contemplating his words and ideas long after the book is finished. Dick just does that to people!

This book is early Dick, not the shaggy-dog's-tale, brilliantly-crazy 60's Dick, not as searing or sad as 70's Dick. As close to mainstream sci-fi as Dick gets, and if you've read much Phil K. Dick, less enjoyable. Parts are like Flannery O'Connor on real bad acid, which sounds better than "The World Jones Made" reads

I guess it is only because it is a book by Philip that we get these not-so-raving reviews, his standards are set high,yet it is a book to rave about. The story of Jones has made a profound impression on me. Just imagine seeing the future as your past.