The Penultimate Truth

PKD's The Penultimate Truth involves time travel, post-World War III apocalypse, world government propaganda, quasi-feudal relations on the Earth's surface of the elite ideas men who supply the government propaganda (plus their armies of robots from World War III and newer models), and the vast majority of humanity living in subsurface tanks because of the surface government's lies. However, due to the numerous internal power struggles and conflicts between different power-hungry individuals on the surface, the Agency which, uniting the former USSR and US, thereby ruling the world and rewriting history in the process, creating some rather bleak associations between Nazi Germany and the Fuhrer Prinzip and the current regime), the strength of the regime is waning and no one knows how the subsurface population will react to the news. Like other PKD novels, the Cold War fears and dystopian themes abound, but there is a fundamental moral ambiguity about resolving the conflict and the what path society will take. As one can see in Counter-Clock World or The Simulacrum, the very forces against the major antagonist possess questionable motives, since Lantano, Brose, Runcible, Foote and Adams are not heroic in any sense of the term. Nicholas, the unlucky schmuck character type common in PKD's work, comes closest to being the protagonist, but the aura of moral ambiguity lingers for him, too. Perhaps, when compared to his numerous similar novels, The Penultimate Truth lacks the tighter writing and religious themes of his better known novels, but this is another thought-provoking read that tackles some of the same fundamental problems as his more illustrious novels.