More of what we have come to expect from Philip K Dick, destructive male characters, weird, trippy hallucinations and a good bit of story telling. Perhaps not one of his best but still worth a read.
Roaming the pristine landscape of Earth, cared for by machines and aliens, the few remaining humans alive since the war with Titan play Bluff. The game allows them to win or loose property, and also to form new marriages in order to maximise the remote chance that some pairings will produce a child. When Pete Garden, a particularly suicidal member of the Pretty Blue Fox game-playing group, loses his current wife and his deed to Berkeley, he stumbles upon a far bigger, more sinister version of the game. The telepathic, slug-like Vugs of Titan are the players and at stake is the Earth itself.
The Game-Players of Titan is a brilliantly conceived vision of a future dystopia, full of wildly imaginative detail, moments of exquisite humour and mind-distorting musings on the nature of perception. The seemingly straightforward narrative quickly turns into a tumultuous nightmare of delusion, precognition and conspiracy in inimitable Philip K. Dick style.
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.
