Time Out of Joint is one of Philip K. Dick’s earliest novels (1959). For a science fiction story of that period, it is quite unusual and ahead of its time. The first half of the book is a sort of picture of America’s “Golden Age”: the blissful, apparently harmless and relatively uneventful life in a middle-class suburb, somewhere in California. Apart from the everyday tittle-tattle and ordinary cuckoldry between neighbours, there is nothing much going on. Except for that weirdo whose day job is to take part in his local newspaper’s quirky competition, “Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next?”. Not only does this raise a few eyebrows, because isn’t it odd for an adult man to stay at home all day like a housewife, instead of going to the office or factory, like everyone else? (Which is probably a metaphor for living as a writer.) But also, isn’t it suspicious that this guy wins the cash prize again and again in that newspaper contest? Meanwhile, there is an ominous threat hanging over the heads of these common post-war middle-class men and women: the ever-present menace of a nuclear holocaust with the Communist Bloc. More disturbing still, as the story progresses, cracks and leaks start to appear on the polished and glossy veneer of that stereotypical American microcosm. The protagonist begins to experience mild anomalies, hallucinations, becomes obsessed with the metaphysical theories of George Berkeley and Immanuel Kant, notices that total strangers know him by name, and that he can’t seem to be able to leave his town despite his best efforts. As might be expected with Phil Dick, while keeping his writing style factual and unadorned, he twists events in a way that ultimately puts in doubt the very (deceptive) nature of reality: “The whole world, he thought, can be seen through. I am on the inside looking out. Peeking through a crack and seeing – emptiness.” (p. 162) The story irresistibly throws his protagonist (and the reader) down an uncanny, paranoid rabbit hole. In the last section of the novel, however, PKD suddenly puts the brakes, pulls back and reverses to a rational, tedious sf explanation that is supposed to help us make sense of the preceding plot. Of course, said “explanation” feels far-fetched and like a sort of storytelling coitus interruptus. I suppose the author could have made his book more intense and mysterious by trimming it down to the length of a novella, and leaving a few things unresolved. In literature, as in everything else, if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it. Be it as it may, Time Out of Joint is a seminal novel for the rest of PKD’s career and subsequent works of fiction involving conspiracies and simulated realities. Think, in TV series alone, of The Twilight Zone, The Invaders and, more recently, Dark Mirror.

Çığrından Çıkmış ZamanPhilip K. Dick · Altıkırkbeş Basın Yayın · 2007181 okunma

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