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.

Last year I've attended a seminar on "Philosophy & Sci-Fi" and was delighted when PKD was chosen the first author to discuss. I plunge into reading and re-reading his works.
Obviously the second step of my renewed PKD-mania is to produce new reviews!

"The World Jones Made" (1956) is the second novel in PKD's huge production. In its frame there are resonances from Sartre and Kerouac. From the first, the deep and frightful knowledge of human acts futility: everything is written and immutable whatsoever. From Kerouac and his circle the angst that pursues many intellectuals in the late Fifties.

This book, as each of PKD's novels, is unique, captivating and full of action, moral and ethical issues. Characters are not heroes, just human beings doing their best to survive in a hostile environment. They may be selfish and even despicable but within them there is always a spark of altruism trying to emerge.

PKD constructs a disheveled post apocalyptic world that imposes its fearful traits upon the reader.
On this background the story of Jones, a foreseer who evolves from a fortuneteller to a religious messianic leader, is seen from the eyes of Cussick, a security agent that tries to stop him. Cussick represents the new establishment: the Relativists. They are trying to create a new utopia, but as many other real utopist they are creating a world without freedom and creativity. The answer that PKD gives to this is nihilism.

As usual with PKD writings, an unfathomable melancholic undercurrent traverses the whole story, forcing every character to wonder "why am I here?"

This is a dark yet captivating novel from a great writer that is beginning to show his mettle.

Reviewed by Max Yofre.

This is an early novel by PKD.

I have heard many negative things about this book, but I think they were unfair for the most part. It is not perfect, but still pretty good and well worth reading.

The story basically goes like this. There is a world war and much destruction. A new government takes over based on Relativism - you can believe what you like, but you can't try to foist it on others. Sort of the polar opposite of the Absolutism that is blamed for the war by some of the characters in the story. But in practice, the two may not seem all that different.

A member of the secret police happens upon this guy Jones who can see one year into the future. One thing leads to another, and after the secret police fail to assassinate Jones, he soon becomes supreme leader. His rise to power has something to do with amoeba like creatures from outer space called the drifters. It might spoil the book for people who have not read it if I explained much more on how that goes and turns out, but later, there is a sort of super Tholian web involved which will mean something to fans of the original Star Trek series. In any case, things under Jones don't seem to go so well.

Also in the story are some human like creatures adapted for life on Venus. Well, not the actual Venus as it is, but as I guess it was imagined by the author when this book was written in the 1950's and apparently before any probes went there. Well, it made for good storytelling nonetheless. These characters as presented in the story should also give readers some things to think about - I'll keep my conclusions here to myself.

The book is quite thought provoking in many other aspects as well. Things go from one extreme to another, and one can ask what really changed. The implications of being able to see the future were also explored and done quite well I think. There is much more besides this.

The book has a decent ending even if things are not tied up completely - but this lends a hopeful aspect.

I think it would have been a better book if it had been a little longer to allow for a deeper presentation of the many things it considered. In any case, it is very good as is, and I recommend it.

I'm nearing the end of my endeavor to read everything by Philip K. Dick that is still in print.
My unconditional fandom hasn't blinded me to the fact that occasionally, one novel out of the long series turns out to be a disappointment. Whilst exclusively reading Dick, the reader rapidly becomes so spoilt, that it is a letdown to come across a story that is _not_ scintillating from the first page to the last. So I'm open to the notion that an occasional Dick book can be as dull as a 300-page excerpt out of a 2000-page Russian tome.

Yet, such disappointment is profoundly absent from this read. On a purely subjective basis, I don't care whether this book belongs to his early period, or that his writing style hadn't fully matured yet - I just know that I enjoyed the ride immensely. The traditional post-apocalyptic setting; the neverending schemes of bureaucrats; the mind-boggling fantasies about mutants, precogs and extraterrestrials; the battle of the sexes; the wry situational humor; the larger-than-life metaphysical issues raised; a storyline that sets you pondering for weeks after ... all the true Dick genius that so captivates his audience, is here.

It's obviously a matter of personal preference, but I recommend this one among his best.

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.