Customer Reviews

The Zap Gun

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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Granted, it's a little outdated.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.

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.

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.

I had heard some not too good things about this book before I read it but I was pleasantly suprised.I admit that it's not one of his masterpiece's but it is a good read.Zap Gun won't convert anyone who doesn't already like PKD but most of his fans will probally love it!!

Much as I love PKD, I have to penalize him on this one for brazenly ripping himself off. While reading this, I recognized elements from (at least) two of his short stories I've read previously. One of them is "War Veteran," and the title of the other (about a toy that teaches empathy) escapes me for the moment; tellingly, I did a quick Google in preperation for this review to try to find it, and while unsuccessfull, I did see a reference to another story of his called "Project Plowshare" which I'm willing to bet is related to Zap Gun, too.

Even if you are not familiar with his vast corpus of works -- and thus are less likely to be bothered by recycled ideas -- I'd recommend skipping this one. The few interesting concepts that come up, such as 'why a pulp comic book writer is telepathically picking up classified blueprints' are hinted at but never explored. Even if I weren't put off by the short-story rehashes, I'd have been frustrated by the unexplored avenues that often were more interesting that the "real" plot.

This book is for PKD completionists only, who cold probably make a game out of recognizing the earlier ideas.

Cult author Philip K. Dick's 20th published sci-fi novel, "The Zap Gun," was first released in book form (Pyramid paperback R-1569, with a cover price of 50 cents) in 1967, after having been serialized in the November '65 and January '66 issues of "Worlds of Tomorrow" magazine under the title "Project Plowshare." Phil's previously published book had been "The Unteleported Man," later expanded as the largely incomprehensible "Lies, Inc.," but "The Zap Gun" is a completely understandable, reader-friendly novel that, as it turns out, is quite a winning satire on the arms race that was indeed so frightening back then. In Phil's book, it is the year 2004 (OK, maybe he should have made it 2104!), and the two major world powers have reached a detente of sorts in this game of armament one-upmanship. Rather than actually creating weapons, the two sides (Wes-bloc and Peep-East) now simply fake it, using "weapons fashion designers" to create convincing designs of the real thing, and then showing realistic but ersatz videos to their populations. Society, hence, is divided between the "pursaps" (the pure saps making up the bulk of society) and the "cogs" (the governmental cognoscenti who are in on the deception). But when the insectlike slavers from the Sirius system arrive and start dropping satellites into Earth orbit, things really DO get serious, and Lars Powderdry and the beautiful Lilo Topchev (the West's and the East's top "wep-fash" designers) must join forces to somehow construct a REAL weapon to save all of humankind....

Although Phil originally wrote "The Zap Gun" on commission for a Pyramid editor who wanted a novel written for that preset title, the result is anything but standard space opera fare (indeed, the alien invasion plot is dealt with so offhandedly, at the end, as to be almost an afterthought), and all of Dick's regular obsessions are on full display. As in "The Penultimate Truth" (written at the same time as this novel) and "The Simulacra," a duplicitous government manages to hoodwink the mass of mankind. Dick's fascination with drugs is evident here, too, and both Lars and Lilo not only depend on cerebral stimulants to effect the trance state that leads to their weapons visions, but also discuss LSD, peyote, mescaline and "magic mushrooms" with great apparent knowledge. The novel features several suicidal characters (seems like every Dick book I read has some such poor soul), one of whom actually succeeds in the sad act, and another who chooses to stick around in a wonderfully life-affirming scene. For some strange reason, the localities of Cheyenne, Wyoming and St. George, Utah are highlighted yet again, as they had been in "The Penultimate Truth" and "Now Wait For Last Year." As in "Now Wait" and "Lies, Inc.," female public toplessness is seen to be the fashion in "The Zap Gun," but whereas in those earlier books a woman's nipples were covered with a sentient Martian life form and flashlight/music-making pasties, respectively, HERE, they are merely described as being "silver-tipped." (These futuristic innovations don't seem half bad to me!) As in so many of Phil's other novels, several of the characters throw out German words and expressions, smoke cigars and talk about opera. And again, we have a character who is hoping to obtain a divorce from his mate; well, technically, Powderdry is here attempting to ditch his mistress.

As I said, lots of Dick's pet topics get another workout in this consistently amusing tale. And the book really is often very funny; indeed, Dick biographer Lawrence Sutin has called the novel's Surley G. Febbs "the funniest character Phil created." The author throws in a few surprising plot twists toward his finale, amuses us with some bizarre character names (such as Lucky Bagman, Oral Giocomini, Vincent Klug and General Nitz), keeps the pace of the story moving nicely, and even presents a time travel angle in a manner that for once didn't give this reader a headache. Sci-fi critic David Pringle has called the novel "one of Dick's most clotted narratives," but I still found it highly readable, and a lot of fun. (I'm not even sure I know precisely what he means by a "clotted narrative"!) Oh...I guarantee that you will chuckle when you read about Febbs' organization, with its catchy acronym BOCFDUTCRBASEBFIN....

In the afterword to the edition of The Zap Gun that I read, there is a quote from an interview with Philip K. Dick in which he calls it a terrible novel and says that, "[he] can't even understand the entire first half of it." This would be a surprising statement from almost any author, but it's especially illuminating coming from Dick, considering how confusing his fiction tends to be in general.

And The Zap Gun is, indeed, a confusing mess of a novel. It takes place in a future where, despite humanity having colonized most of the solar system, the Cold War between the Western democracies and the Eastern communist dictatorships has continued to escalate until the alliances of NATO and the Warsaw Pact have coalesced into giant nations, with both sides employing what can only be described as psychic weapon designers who go into trances and pull weapon schematics out of thin air. But secretly, the two sides have signed an agreement to make sure all these weapons are actually useless for their stated purpose, and instead are "plowshared" into mass-manufactured consumer junk. The so-called "cogs" who run the governments and industries of the world know the truth, but the vast majority of people ("pursaps", or "poor saps") have been fooled into believing that there are hundreds of incredible weapons at their government's disposal, ready to lay waste to their enemies if war should come.

The plot in itself is fairly straightforward. Alien satellites suddenly appear in Earth's orbit, seemingly out of nowhere. This creates a panic in both governments as they suddenly realize that, with the very real threat of an alien invasion upon them, they have no weapons with which to resist such an incursion. (I guess nukes don't count. Or maybe they've all been dismantled. It isn't really touched on in the book.) Thus the "weapon" designers of each government -- they only have one at a time, for some reason -- are forced to work together to attempt to devise a real weapon that can destroy the alien probes.

The protagonist of the novel is the Western bloc's weapon designer, Roy Lederby, a man completely out of his depth. Throughout the book he is manipulated by virtually everybody else, including his mistress, his government contacts, the Eastern government, and Lilo Topchev, the East bloc's weapon designer, a woman who Roy is unaccountably fascinated by despite not knowing anything about her.

The weapon that ultimately defeats the aliens turns out to be one of psychology rather than brute force. Unfortunately, like much of the book, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

There is also a fairly pointless subplot about a conservative gun-nut stereotype who gets randomly selected to be one of the "concomodies", the citizens who decide what the various parts of the weapons Lederby designs will be made into for the plowsharing program. It's pretty much just there for padding, but it does provide the only humor in the novel, so it isn't a complete waste of time.

While The Zap Gun has some interesting ideas, a lot of them get thrown away almost as soon as they are introduced. Characters appear and are dropped only to appear again a hundred pages later, and many of them lack any real characterization. The climax of the book relies on possibly the stupidest concept for a weapon ever conceived, and the ending seems to serve no purpose except to pave the way for a sequel that never materialized.

Bottom line: This is not one of PKD's better works. If you're already a PKD fan and are just wondering if you should bother with The Zap Gun, I would advise you to give it a try, but not to expect too much. If you've never read a novel by Mr. Dick, however, this is not the place to start. I'd advise you to try Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or Time Out of Joint.

...although what pk dick novel isn't. This is written during PKD's peak period, and although the plot is not as convoluted as his best, the story is compelling, the main character is more sustained and complex than usual and the world is thoroughly PKD. The elite of earth's two superpowers have called a truce - which the general population doesn't know - and weapons 'fashion designers' make weapons that look and seem terrifying but don't really work. Into this peaceful counterfeit world enters a genuine alien enemy and the bogus fashion designers have to come up with a weapon that will actually do some harm. Hint: it's not really a weapon. Along with the usual darkness, PKD can't resist coming up with a takeoff of contemporary SF (early 60's) as a subplot, of which the title - I guess - is a sample.

I am generally a PKD fan. Most of his books have so many sub texts and paranoia that it takes a little neurosis to understand. This is one his few books where this is a little less intense. The plot and character interactions are straight forward. Themes are reitierated in a concise language. And the book has an unusual optimistic feel in the ending. Which, it being a PKD book, freaked me out.

One of the happy results of Philip K. Dick's posthumous, Hollywood-fed, popularity is that his work is very widely available. The Zap Gun is surely one of his less well-known novels, but here we see it in a brand new large-sized paperback edition. It's not one of his masterworks, but it is a fine, enjoyable, very funny, novel.

Dick's novels very often have a comic aspect, but this is one of the funniest. Curiously enough, it is set at almost the present time -- our present, that is: 2005. The US and allies (Wes-Bloc) and the Soviet Union and allies (Peep-East) have secretly come to an agreement: instead of continuing the ruinous arms race, they will pretend to be constantly developing new weapons, which are then "plowshared": turned into goofy consumer products. The weapon designers are psychics, who dream up their new designs in trance states. The Wes-Bloc designer, Lars Powderdry, or Mr. Lars of Mr. Lars Incorporated (the conceit being that weapons are basically fashion), is the main viewpoint character. He is tortured by the knowledge that he is essentially a fraud -- his designs are useless. He is also obsessed with his opposite number in Peep-East: Lilo Topchev, of whom he knows nothing. This despite his very sexy mistress, Maren Faine, head of the Paris branch of Mr. Lars, Incorporated.

Dick mines this central idea for some comic play, then introduces a slightish plot. Aliens from Sirius invade Earth, looking for slaves. Earth has a problem -- for decades nobody has developed new weapons. In desperation, the two blocs decide to have Lars and Lilo collaborate -- which satisfies Lars's desire to meet Lilo. But Lilo, instead of cooperating, immediately tries to kill Lars. And even when they work together, their designs, though unusual, seem hardly useful. There is a fairly pointless, though also funny, subplot about a paranoid conspiracy theorist and White Supremacist who is elected as an "average man" to the governing body of Wes-Bloc. The eventual solution involves a wild mix of time travel, androids, drugs, toys, and comic books. All of this hardly matters -- Dick was under less control of his plot than usual here -- I think his main concern was to be funny.

Lars is a fairly sympathetic main character. Dick's extrapolations of the future often seem quite prescient -- indeed, the book has hardly dated at all. And he succeeds in being funny, and very entertaining. The Zap Gun isn't a great work, but it is well worth reading.