The ZAP GUN. [Hardcover]

Philip K. Dick (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Pyramid Books, (1967)
• ASIN: B000NYCL0A
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Cold War Follies, March 9, 2001

By 

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

This review is from: The Zap Gun (Paperback)

PKD once described this novel as a "turkey". It's not his best piece, but that judgment is a little harsh - he wrote far worse things during his career. Don't pass over this one.

Granted, it's a little outdated. In the post-Cold War world, we might find an arms race allegory somewhat unnecessary. On the other hand, in our age, we're still dealing with megalomaniacal fascism, international espionage for sale to the highest bidder, and the possibility that empathy might yet save the world. I don't know about you, but I'm not so picky that I want to ignore all that.

Just what, I ask myself, got PKD down about this story? My guess is that he was embarrassed by the heavily parodistic elements he threw in. That is, at a time when East and West struggled to build terrifying weapons with (we hoped) no desire to use them, PKD wrote a novel in which East and West actually make an agreement to build terrifying weapons with no *intention* of using them. At a time when the national police spied on its own citizenry, PKD described a world police without so much as a pretense of loyalty to any nation. The most important citizen of the West, its chief weapons designer, is at least as self-absorbed as any fashion star of today, laboring under the constant knowledge that he's a fake.

In fact, the value of knowledge may be The Zap Gun's central theme. Knowledge of the facts is at a premium all through the novel, but those who have it don't want it, those who lack it don't know it, and at the climax those who need it can't get it because the one who has it can't give it without jeopardizing the truth of it. Rather than explaining that statement, I'll let you read the book - suffice to say that just about every character here is so accustomed to lying that they forget how to do anything else, and the only character who does tell the unvarnished truth is some kind of nut. Puts me in mind of the last few presidential elections.

In short, many people of the 1970's suspected that government was in the business of putting one over on us, so PKD provided a vision of a future where government consciously pacifies the people with elaborate fictional war games. Which actually works pretty well until aliens begin putting entire cities into stasis and everyone's forgotten how to wage an actual war. Uh-oh.

I did find one serious logical flaw - the various weapons supposedly don't work, being produced just to keep a civilian review board busy finding uses for their components in kitschy consumer goods, but toward the end someone puts those components together and produces a workable laser weapon. This kind of mistake isn't unusual in PKD, who often wrote so fast that I wonder if he remembered page 1 by the time he wrote page 200. On the other hand, by the time he wrote The Zap Gun he could, and did, handle suspense very well. His characters, while not as good as those in some of his other work, are sympathetic and touching. Maybe most importantly, he found a way in this book to humanize the political and scientific struggles of the day. Not many authors, or many people, can do that.

The Zap Gun is often a parody, and sometimes a cheesy one. Like most of PKD's better work, it's also intensely moving and very funny.

Benshlomo says, If this is a turkey, bring on the cranberry sauce.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Science-fiction satire with outrageous premise, June 7, 2004

By 

Doug Mackey (Fairfield, IA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Zap Gun (Paperback)

Written in 1964 more or less concurrently with The Penultimate Truth, this is one of several of Dick's good second-rank novels of the 1960s that tends to be overlooked. The book actually has practically nothing to do with its title, which was bestowed upon it because the publisher just wanted to publish a novel called The Zap Gun. But this is no science fiction spoof. It's highly humorous, but it's a serious satire on the arms race and techniques of political manipulation. Dick challenges the very notion of consensual reality, which is a product of mass consciousness, a lowest common denominator of belief that the media, moneyed interests, and the government conspire to perpetuate. Lars Powderdry is a "weapons fashion designer" who goes into drug-induced mediumistic trances to meet the consumer demand for new weapons concepts. None of his weapons actually works, but they don't need to in this society of "pursaps" (pure saps) who are unaware that all the new wonder weapons are nonfunctional and work only in filmed simulations. This is a terrifically clever work of trenchant irony.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars When Marketing Runs the Military, December 21, 2005

By 

Sarah Sammis "Avid BookCrosser" (Hayward, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Zap Gun (Paperback)

I liked the concept of mass marketing taking over everything, even the military and the problem of what would happen if real weapons were needed but the story didn't move at the compelling pace that Ubik did.