Sunday, May 23, 2021


 


THE ZAP GUN


Phillip K. Dick.  (1928-1982)


Lars Powderdry works for the government as a hypnogogic weapons designer.  This takes place in 2005 although the book was written in 1965, so an alternative future is predicated.  The idea is that the Wes-bloc and Peep-East (Russia, China, etc.)  are at continual odds with each other.  After a series of world wars, neither side is willing to initiate physical aggression, so, as a substitute, they both resort to designing weapons which are mocked up in a prototype, but never actually created.  The designer for Eastbloc is Lilo Topchev.  With the aid of specialized drugs, the two psychically sensitive operators enter a kind of drug-induced trance, in which they envision the proposed weapons and simultaneously draw the blueprints of said weapons on paper.  In the West, the plans are shipped to the Lanferman productions site which underlies all of California from San Francisco to Los Angeles.  It's buried, for secrecy and safety.  The Peep-East bloc has a similar facility.  

In addition the government of both sides is controlled by the Military.  In Washington D.C., below the Military "Festung" (fortress), lies the Kremlin, a secret chamber in which the civilian "concomody" meets to oversee the functions of the government.  There are six concomody members who hold the position for life and are only replaced upon the decease of one of them.  The collective members of the government as a whole are referred to as "cogs", after "cognoscenti" (experts);  cog is also another term for a cheat or a liar, as in dice play or the cup and pea game.

Anyway, the story opens with Lars complaining about not being able to go to Paris to see his girl friend. As well, he is trying to cope with his sense of guilt over his meaningless job whose sole purpose involves keeping the public misinformed about the country's armament status.  Some of the weapons he has dreamed up are the Garbage Can Banger, the Sheep Dip Isolator (very stinky), the Civic Notification Distorter (changes people into rugs) and the Evolution Gun, intended to displace the human race two billion years into the past.

Other characters are Surley G. Febbs, a library researcher from the middle west with an eidetic memory who has spent his life studying and remembering all conceivable data as regards military history and the operations of government.  He receives a notice in the mail informing him that he has been appointed a concomody replacement.  He spends the bulk of the novel trying to gain entrance to the Kremlin but is kept out by bureaucratic busy-bodies.  Also there is Vincent Klug, an itinerant toy maker who does manage to gain access to Lars' office.  He plays a significant role in the resolution of the upcoming quandary, which is:

The news travels across the globe:  a new satellite has appeared orbiting the earth.  A certain amount of hysteria occurs in the top levels of government, but things only come to a head when it's discovered that part of New Orleans has vanished.  According to reports, a dense mist was seen hovering around the city and soon after all the inhabitants disappeared.  And then another satellite arrives and more cities around the globe lose their populations.  Governmental Officialdom is in hysterics and they decide to hold a joint conference in Iceland, including Lars and Lilo in hopes that the two designers can discover a weapon that will handle the alien invasion.  It has become known that the satellites are from Riga and that they are turning Earth's citizens into slaves.  There's a lot of arm-waving and mutual accusations flung about with the end result being no solution to the problem.  

Back in D.C.,  an attempt is made to kidnap Lars, during which his girl-friend is killed.  But he's already fallen in love with Lilo, the sequel being that he feels even more guilty than he did earlier.  Meanwhile, Surley has managed to gain access to the Kremlin, but not much is achieved until Vincent Klug magically appears on the scene, with what turns out to be an unusual toy, that proves to be the key component in the resolution of the alien problem.

At this point, i'm going to quit describing the action and leave the balance of the novel and its truly inventive disentanglement of the alien problem to the pleasure of the book's readers.  

Dick was not a normal person.  He took a lot of drugs and they enhanced the instability of his already unstable personality.  But he was a genius at writing science fiction that included and dealt with some of the  philosophical difficulties common in the modern world:  what is reality, how do we cope with time, are there more than one universe, is there a God,  can we be in more than one place at a time, etc...  Although i'd read a lot of Dick's work in my early years, i hadn't read this book, and i was surprised at how cogent and rational and ingenious it was as compared with what i'd learned about his work in the past.  Dr. Bloodmoney or How We Lived After the Bomb was the first one i read and i recall being floored by it, although i don't even remember much about it now.  Dick's reputation has died in the ensuing years, and his books might be a bit recherche today, but he still has the ability to make the reader think outside his usual comfort zone.  I'd recommend his more popular novels to anyone interested in science fiction...

19 comments:

  1. I remember this one as being pretty good. Not top tier, but good. "Cogent," yes, that's a good description.

    Dick's reputation is very high right now. Died! He probably gets more academic attention than any science fiction writer but Ursula LeGuin, and he has gotten more Hollywood attention.

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    1. i know the video versions are pretty popular, but i've gotten the impression that the sci fi world is more interested in vampire books and the like nowadays... no? tx for the comment. i'm surprised. i usually think that my posts are not very much read except for a few old duffers like myself...

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  2. This is one I haven't read of his, though I did see it was reissued a couple of years ago. It sounds-?-medium wacky by his standards? Anyway, I've been curious. It reminds me a bit of his short story 'The Defenders' which also involves a cold war plot with a twist--Russians and American devising ever-smarter war robots.

    But yes, like Tom says, I think he is pretty well-known these days, what with Blade Runner & Amazon's The Man In The High Castle & such. When somebody first told me I had to read him--'79 or '80, he was pretty obscure. The Man in The High Castle was the first I read.

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    1. my "sphere of influence" re sci fi was in the sixties and i haven't really kept up with the trends... it seemed like the Star Wars and Star Trek bonanza turned the genre into a sort of spaghetti western type of novel, which got sort of boring...

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    2. I've never been a serious reader of sci-fi, yet I've made an exception for Dick. (And Lem.) Agree that Star Wars & Star Trek both got dull after a while. But the movies made from Dick's books have been better than average on the whole (& have been popular--though I didn't see the one with Tom Cruise or the one with Schwarzenegger either). If you haven't seen A Scanner Darkly, the movie, I highly recommend it. (As well as the book.)

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  3. I get the feeling that this is not the best Dick novel to start with. I have plans to read his "Androids .... Sheep" one at some point. This reminds me that I'd also like to read The Gormenghast Trilogy; have you read it? So many books, so little ..... you know .... ;-)

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    1. agree it's not Dick's best, although i thought it was pretty good, and it was pretty easy to follow unlike some of his more popular works. i think i read "Martian Time-Slip" 3 or 4 times and liked it a lot, but "Policeman..." is his most controversial i gather... but "Androids..." is good too... i started the first volume of the Gormenghast and didn't finish it. there was an episode part way through that i found pretty upsetting so i quit; no rule that i had to read it, i said to myself, so i didn't...

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    2. I liked the first two of the Gormenghast trilogy, though I could see being put off. Androids or Martian Time-Slip would be a good start to Dick. I'd say Ubik, though I noticed Ruthiella didn't much like it--she read it recently, but I think it's fairly straightforward & gives a good idea of Dick's themes.

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  4. The sci fi world today is not particularly interested in vampires. There is a zombie and a mermaid down in the short stories.

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    1. oh? haven't read those... maybe sometime if i happen to run across them. we missed the local library book sale because they had used herbicide all around the outdoor venue, so i wasn't able to acquire my usual stash...

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    2. I haven't read them either! Yet they exist.

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  5. Hmm...I had never heard of this book. Dick had such a fantastical imagination. He was really able to bring his strange apocalyptic worlds to life. He's one of my younger daughter's favorite writers. I'll have to point her toward this review.

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    1. well, as i've mentioned, i don't actually consider these posts as "reviews"... more like book reports. i've not the education for the former, but i love books, so... there has been a lot of critical work done on Dick, most of which i haven't read; i should do some of that, tx for the reminder... i hope your daughter enjoys it!

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  6. I"m not surprised to find out Dick took a lot of drugs. The last story I read by him, it seemed the characters took a lot of drugs as well. I can't remember the title, but it was about a detective and it takes place in the 70s. That's not a favorite decade of mine, even though I was a kid. At least I mean the movies and TV shows were a little too drug oriented or psychedelic. I remember one movie starring Sean Connery where he spent the whole movie wearing nothing but a speedo.

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    1. i don't recall that, altho i've noticed my memory is definitely not what it used to be. you're right about the 70's, it was a period of turmoil, come to think of it, and much like the 60's...

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  7. Holy guacamole, what a trip. Even though sci-fi is not my thing, I love reading about how creative these writers were in their ideas for what could happen in the future. It kind of makes me feel like we failed to live up to a lot of writers' expectations, lol

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  8. haha, Sarah! that's a very interesting viewpoint! i think Isaac Asimov might agree with you!

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    1. I think he would too, lol. And anyone expecting flying cars will be so bitterly disappointed.

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  9. I went through a phase in my late teens where I read a lot of science fiction. I've never read any of his but I did notice that the Folio Society published 'The Man in the High Castle' as well as some of his short stories so maybe he's had a resurgence of late??

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