Eye in the Sky by Philip K. Dick
243 pages
Published 1957
Read from December 4 to December 5
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
An early, minor outing by Dick, exploring the usual PKD territory by hand-waving a group of eight survivors of a particle accelerator accident through a series of realities constructed from their perceptions and fantasies. It's at turns hilarious (especially in the reality constructed by the brain of the hard-line religious conservative) and unsettling (in the reality constructed by the brain of the paranoid schizophrenic). Unsurprisingly, given that this is PKD in the late '50s, there's an awful lot of misogyny, but that's offset somewhat by an unexpectedly enlightened attitude toward racial prejudice, including a description of white privilege, making this an interesting document of a time when white male authors were beginning to suspect that black people might be people, but still harbored few such suspicions toward women. Sealing the late '50s time capsule, the book ends with a warning about the dangers of international Communism.
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