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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Deserves more credit., February 8, 2000
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.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Compelling in spite of a mushy middle, April 22, 2005
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.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
a brief history of the world Jones made, December 29, 2002
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.
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