Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick
255 pages
Published 1959
Read from October 29 to October 30
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
What is reality? How do we perceive what is real? How do we know whether what we perceive has any external reality? Dick has rather the specific métier: novelizations of freshman philosophy. Even The Man in the High Castle, an otherwise straightforward (and excellent) alternate history novel, ended with the titular man revealing that their universe is not the universe that should exist (and, for that matter, neither is ours). Dick was good at his schtick, as good as Tolkien was at writing elves simultaneously neighborly and otherworldly. Time Out of Joint is a solid entry in the Dick canon, a satisfying and occasionally brilliant unraveling of one man's reality, this time based in classic paranoid ideation. But after only five books and one short story, I'm starting to bump up against the limitations of Dick's thematic reach. And this novel in particular falls somewhat flat at the end, resorting to the stale Western European race myth of restless movement and colonization as an eternal motivator for human (read: white American) yearnings and behavior, reading more like an entry-level Heinlein than a Dick.
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