Martian Time-Slip

"It is the stopping of time. The end of experience, of anything new. Once the person becomes psychotic, nothing ever happens to him again."

Still working my way through the essential PKD list George gave me a few weeks ago. Just finished "Martian Time-Slip" today. Very intriguing story on many levels. UN, co-ops, unions, colonization, human nature, schizophrenia, metaphysics, education, and race (the 'black' Bleekmen) figure prominently in this novel, and I appreciate how intertextual PKD's 1960s novels are (precogs). In a sense, Three Stigmata, Ubik and other works are hinted at by the early exploration of 'psionic' powers and human settlement elsewhere in the solar system. The description of schizophrenia here also brings to mind the destructiveness of Substance D on the protagonist of "A Scanner Darkly" or even the questionable sanity of Dick's fictionalized version of himself in "Valis."Furthermore, there is some insightful social commentary, particularly on mental illness, avarice, and the limitations of industrial models of education. I suspect PKD would be quite critical of the corporate education reform movement had he lived to see the rapid changes in public schools, although the public education system of his own lifetime was horrid enough. Class, greed, the need for human intimacy, all illustrated quite movingly in this novel. 

One should certainly not ignore the prominence of race and colonialism as themes of this work. By far the most race-conscious novel by Dick (the indigenous Bleekmen of Mars, who live bleak, nomadic lives as a dying race, are often referred to as niggers, blacks, and compared to the "Bushmen" of Africa), racism, anti-Semitism, fear, and how human societies "deal with" those on the margins or periphery are disturbingly demonstrated by the corrupt union boss, the casual anti-Semitism of a black market dealer in Earth luxuries, and the willingness of some colonists to support eradication of schizoid or mentally ill children, unsurprisingly kept at Camp Ben Gurion in New Israel, the Israeli settlement on Mars. Although one could ask why Dick did not use Earth-born people of African descent in a discussion about race, since one does not need to resort to fictional alien blacks to dissect society's racial "issues," the "dark" race of indigenes broadens the discussion of race to become analogous with European expansion in the Americas as well as anti-black racism. Indeed, when reading Arnie's harsh words for his "tame" Bleekman servant, Heliogabalus, one cannot help but think of the white working-class unionists who opposed blacks, against their own class interests, a similar fate for Arnie as Mars is on the brink of attracting massive land speculation and development from the co-ops and UN. 

One last point. As a recovering housing cooperative community member, the depiction of cooperatives in Dick's future world is fascinating yet never elucidated. Clearly, Earth is crowded and the cooperative apartments have become exclusive underworlds with shopping centers, supermarkets, or, in short, mini-cities in themselves. This future of cooperatives in which the wealthy can afford to invest in their own, separate reality, apart from the "real" world, as experienced in the schizophrenic episodes of Jack Bohlen, depicts a dystopia none of the cooperative housing proponents I have met would ever imagine. Alas, sometimes I think the housing cooperative umbrella I joined was too similar to this science fiction construct...