Our Friends from Frolix 8 (Paperback)

by Philip K. Dick (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review
?Dick was a sci-fi poet of paranoia.? ?The New York Times

?One of the last century?s real masters?and most unconventional practitioners?of science fiction.? ?Book Magazine

?What Franz Kafka was to the first half of the 20th century, Philip K. Dick is to the second half.? ?Art Spiegelman

?One of the most original writers of the 20th century. . . . Dick?s books are fun to read, full of action and humor and strong characters. They?re more than a little paranoid . . . but he keeps the pages turning and keeps readers guessing about what?s real and what isn?t.? ?The Oregonian

?Dick combines Franz Kafka?s pervasive sense of existential dread with George Orwell?s cautionary vision of the future.? ?Boston Herald

?Dick specialized in dystopian futures, altered realities, and the effect of technology on humanity. He was a visionary writing 40 years ago about issues that have only recently become significant.? ?USA Today -- Review

Review
“Dick was a sci-fi poet of paranoia.” —The New York Times

“One of the last century’s real masters–and most unconventional practitioners–of science fiction.” —Book Magazine

“What Franz Kafka was to the first half of the 20th century, Philip K. Dick is to the second half.” —Art Spiegelman

“One of the most original writers of the 20th century. . . . Dick’s books are fun to read, full of action and humor and strong characters. They’re more than a little paranoid . . . but he keeps the pages turning and keeps readers guessing about what’s real and what isn’t.” —The Oregonian

“Dick combines Franz Kafka’s pervasive sense of existential dread with George Orwell’s cautionary vision of the future.” —Boston Herald

“Dick specialized in dystopian futures, altered realities, and the effect of technology on humanity. He was a visionary writing 40 years ago about issues that have only recently become significant.” —USA Today

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (March 11, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375719342
• ISBN-13: 978-0375719349
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #294,022 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars PKD sparkles even in minor works, November 26, 2001

By	A. G. Plumb "Greg Plumb" (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Our Friends From Frolix 8 (Paperback)

In the body of PKD's works this is not a masterpiece, but neither is it insignificant. My review is based on rereading the Ace book edition of 1970, a paperback plagued by misprints. Mostly these don't matter but I struggle to make any sense of the third paragraph of page 140 - perhaps someone else can resolve it for me. I was also a bit confused about New Men - sometimes they seemed to be marked by huge heads, but at other times their identity as New Men was obscure as in the case of Thors Provoni, the returning astronaut bringing, well, was it God - our friend from Frolix 8. But then another character (it had to be Nick) was involved in this dialogue:
'God is dead,' Nick said. 'They found his carcass in 2019. Floating out in space near Alpha.'
'They found the remains of an organism advanced several thousand times over what we are,' Charley said. 'And it evidently could create habitable worlds and populate them with living organisms, derived from itself. But that doesn't prove it was God.'
'I think it was God.'

Of course Thors is the name of a god, albeit a Norse one and he is supposed to be bringing salvation for Old Men (and Under Men, the underground resistance) against New Men and Unusuals. But nothing is simple in the worlds of PKD. The ending is magical as characters entwine in unexpected interactions, the last few pages seem to go on forever - there is so much potential and I kept wondering how can I be so close to the end of the novel - so much could still happen, and what does happen is so unexpected - like Beethoven introducing a new theme to the last movement of the fifth just before the symphony ends - opening further possibilities. Of course, just like life, things are rarely resolved and even if one thread of life does resolve, it can only do so in the presence of an infinite variety of other ongoing threads.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The Last of the Old, October 11, 2008

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

Boy, this thing is a mess. Philip K. Dick never had much discipline in his writing; he churned out text at warp speed so he could keep himself in food and lodging, so some of his books are kind of junky, but really, now.

It's not going to be easy to summarize this plot, just because it's so all over the place, but let's see how we do. In Frolix 8, the world has fallen into a sort of two-party tyranny, alternately under the control of the New Men - mutant geniuses - and the Unusuals - telepaths, precogs and the like. No one lacking one talent or the other has any access to power whatsoever.

All this suppression has, of course, given rise to a rebellion calling itself the Under Men. One of the rebel leaders, Thors Provoni, has been traveling in space for some years looking for extraterrestrial help.

Into this circumstance comes Nick Appleton, one of PKD's plebian main characters. He begins his adventure as a law-abiding if unsatisfied citizen. He shortly finds himself involved with the Under Men, caught with forbidden rebel literature and on the run with a teenage girl named Charley.

Pretty soon you, the reader, have to keep in mind Nick Appleton's battle with the planet's telepathic ruler for Charley's attention; the disintegration of his marriage and his flight from Charley's alcoholic boyfriend; Provoni's philosophical dialogues with the mammoth alien enveloping his ship as he heads back to Earth; and a partridge in a pear tree, presumably. PKD could barely juggle that much material when his Ace Books editors only permitted him 180 pages. Stretched over at least a third again that much space, it can't help but disintegrate. And his conclusion makes it all too plain that the man simply didn't know what to do next - it's the worst kind of last-minute twitch. He really should have set this one aside for a few months and let it settle, but he probably couldn't afford it.

Indeed, the whole book seems tired. It's got a lot of PKD's great themes, plot points and characters, but in a worn out state.

Nick Appleton, for instance, is a solid PKD working class hero, like the television salesmen and electricians and grocers and such who people his earlier books. Appleton, however, is a tire regroover. He likes to think of this task as a form of art, but in truth it's a cheat and possibly deadly, as he himself comes to realize.

PKD had also dealt before with world dictators, some cruel, some ill, some alien. Willis Gram is maybe the worst of the bunch, a man who uses his enormous power for his own petty ends. This might even add some spice to the story, but Gram emerges as a flabby arrested adolescent who conducts pretty nearly all the planet's affairs from his bed.

In his middle period, PKD loved to set several plot strands going at once and bounce around amongst them. Most of the strands in Frolix 8 simply fizzle out - we never learn what happens to Appleton's wife and son, the gigantic alien leaves off philosophy the minute it lands on Earth and starts behaving like a mindless weapon, and all the threats disappear without another thought.

PKD's gift for sympathetic characters seemed to almost desert him in this piece. There's a lot of talk among these characters about saving the world from the purest of motives, but the actual desires on view seem uniformly petty - sexual gratification, alcohol dependence, the will to power. These people are unattractive even in a physical way, let alone in any other.

He missed a couple of his most fertile themes this time round, too, especially the unsteady nature of reality and the effect of drugs on one's perception of that reality. What little there is in Frolix 8 on those topics feels like an afterthought. Could have been removed without any impact, and maybe should have been.

And finally, he evidently couldn't even bring himself to remember his details from page to page. Provoni has been traveling anywhere from ten to fifteen years, for instance - the number changes periodically. There's anywhere from 10,000 to several million New Men and Unusuals on Earth - that changes, too. And other examples abound.

Now, this is PKD, and even his failures provide more food for thought than many another author's successes, but taken as a whole Our Friends from Frolix 8 is for PKD completists only. If it wasn't for one thing I'd be tempted to dismiss it as an utter waste of time, but wait until you see what ultimately happens to the New Men and Unusuals. Not only does it redeem the exhausted, washed-out feel of the rest of the book, it looks ahead to what PKD was about to become.

PKD wrote Our Friends from Frolix 8 in 1970, at the tail end of a time when he could complete up to five or six novels per year. No wonder he was burned out. Clearly, he realized that something needed to change, and it sure did. Tired and messy as this book is, the compassion at its close leads directly to the conclusion of his next novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, maybe the most touching evocation of human despair since the novel was invented. Out of this transformation of his creative process, he produced A Scanner Darkly and the VALIS trilogy. Now, that's the way to conclude a career.

In 1970, PKD had only a few years to live, but he used them well. If he needed to plow through Our Friends from Frolix 8 in order to do that, I say it was worth it. Suppose we look on this novel as his way of clearing the decks and let it go at that.

Benshlomo says, Every so often you have to throw the past overboard.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Typical late-60s PKD with godlike alien, June 5, 2004

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

One of Dick's less ambitious novels, this story is a bit thin compared to the density and dazzling complexity of his books of the early 1960s, and perhaps a bit of weariness with the standard conventions of science fiction is showing. The author seems very casual about controlling the plot and characters; both seem pretty random much of the time. We may not prize this novel as a masterpiece of structure, but it is typical Dick, involving and entertaining. The story is set in a world controlled by superintelligent "New Men" and telepathic "Unusuals," who reign despotically together over the "Old Men," or ordinary unevolved humans. In due course Thors Provini returns to Earth with a "friend" for the Old Men in the form of a telepathic, protoplasmic alien with extraordinary powers. This semi-divine intervention overturns the predictable order of the world and replaces it with a vision of the evolution of consciousness of every living thing on the planet toward some unimaginable fulfillment. In this preoccupation, it is congruent with Dick's other interesting novels of the late 60s such as A Maze of Death and Galactic Pot-Healer.