2010 books

[peteryoung]

7) Philip K. Dick, Clans of the Alphane Moon, 1964
Chuck Rittersdorf, a CIA robot programmer, plans to kill his ex-wife on a colony of certified maniacs three light years away by means of a simulacrum operated from San Francisco. Assorted aliens get involved (including one of PKD's best known, Lord Running Clam) and another interplanetary war is averted. I've also read the short story 'Shell Game' on which this was based; the novel is a good expansion on the idea of how paranoids could measure their paranoia, and I liked his postulation that a society composed entirely of mentally ill people might function in the same stratified way as a normal human society does. Dick threw out an enormous amount of more straightforward (and yes, scientific) thinking to get this book to make its own kind of bizarre, manic sense, and several scenes such as the shoot-out between husband and wife felt completely overdone, but as usual with PKD we have to dig beneath a couple of layers of erratic nonsense to get at the nub of his ideas. What works best here is how Rittersdorf is forced to second guess himself when plans for a TV comedy script he is asked to write somehow match his plans for the murder, and Dick always did this sort of double-take on reality very well. I get the feeling he wrote this as a comedy although it rarely worked as such for me (perhaps it's that nonsense that's meant to generate the laughs, because some people still find Clans incredibly funny), plus, like the majority of his writing it would be another complete failure of the Bechdel Test. Like I say, even today we forgive PKD a great amount for him to remain in print in the UK, and probably only Heinlein has fared less well in that respect.