This has all the marks of a typical Philip K Dick novel and will make you laugh out loud in places, however the plot structure is slightly inconsistent and the novel is left rather open ended, but the ideas and concepts are as intriguing and interesting as in all his novels.
Chuck Rittersdorf, a 21st century CIA robot programmer, decides to kill his wife by remote control. He enlists the aid of telepathic Ganymedean slime mould called Lord Running Clam, an attractive female police officer and various others, witting or unwitting. But when Chuck finds himself in the midst of an interplanetary spy ring on an Alphane moon inhabited entirely by certified maniacs, his personal revenge plans begin to go awry in this brilliantly inventive tale of interstellar madness, murder and violence.
Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) was born in Chicago but lived in California for most of his life. His edgy, dark future visions are even more relevant now. His novels have inspired many other writers and been used as the basis for films such as the classic Blade Runner the blockbuster Minority Report and the indie 'cartoon' A Scanner Darkly.
Since his untimely death at age 53, there has been an extraordinary growth of interest in his writings, which during his lifetime were largely ignored by serious mainstream critics and readers. Such is no longer the case, and the novels of Philip K. Dick frequently appear on university curricula devoted to modern American literature.
From age fifteen to his early twenties, Dick was employed in two Berkeley shops, University Radio and Art Music, owned by Herb Hollis, a salt-of-the-earth American small businessman who became a kind of father-figure for Dick and served as an inspiration for a number of his later fictional characters, most notably Leo Bulero in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. In the early 1950s, with the helpful mentorship of SF editor and Berkeley resident Anthony Boucher, Dick began to publish stories in the SF pulps of the era at an astonishing rate - seven of his stories appeared in June 1953 alone. He soon gave up his employment in the Hollis shops to pursue the economically insecure career of an SF writer.
