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THE� ‌GREAT� ‌COMPLETIST� ‌CHALLENGE:� ‌In� ‌which� ‌I� ‌revisit� ‌older� ‌authors� ‌and� ‌attempt� ‌to� ‌read� every� ‌book� ‌they� ‌ever� ‌wrote�

Currently� ‌in� ‌the� ‌challenge:� ‌Isaac� ‌Asimov's� ‌Robot/Empire/Foundation� |� Margaret� Atwood� |� JG� ‌Ballard� |� Clive� ‌Barker� |� Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip� ‌K� ‌Dick� |� Daphne� ‌du� ‌Maurier� |� Ian Fleming | William� ‌Gibson� |� Michel� Houellebecq� |� John� ‌Irving� |� Kazuo� ‌Ishiguro� |� John� ‌Le� ‌Carre� |� Bernard� ‌Malamud� |� China� ‌Mieville� |� Toni Morrison | VS� Naipaul� |� Chuck� ‌Palahniuk� |� Tim� ‌Powers� |� Terry� ‌Pratchett's� ‌Discworld� |� Philip� ‌Roth� |� Neal� Stephenson� |� Jim� ‌Thompson� |� John� ‌Updike� |� Kurt� ‌Vonnegut� |� PG� ‌Wodehouse� �
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Finished:� �Christopher� Buckley� |� Shirley� Jackson�

Figuring out where to start with my completist read of Philip K. Dick turned out to be more complicated than with many of the other authors in this challenge; for while with most you can simply start with the first book they published and move forward chronologically from there, that's complicated in PKD's case because he started his career as basically a hack writer of quickie Silver-Age-style Mid-Century-Modernist sci-fi, while the main reason to read him now is for the trippy mind-bending classics of his 1970s late career, and especially the ones he wrote after his drug-complicated hallucinatory schizophrenic breakdown in February and March of 1974. But the whole point of doing a completist challenge is to search back and start before an author got to their mature classics, to see whether you can spot telling signs in the early books of the masters they would become; but I'm aware that the earliest of his books is not much more than mediocre pay-per-word space-opera kiddie stuff, and I don't want to actively torture myself just for the sake of saying that I did a truly complete read of his entire oeuvre.

So I thought a good compromise would be to start with his 1962 The Man in the High Castle, which won PKD his first and only Hugo Award for Best Novel, and was also the first book that made many in the industry say, "Oh, okay, this isn't just a hacky writer of quickie pulp stuff, he's capable of greatness too." But I've already read High Castle, albeit almost 30 years ago; and I also just recently watched the Amazon Prime adaptation of the book as well, and wasn't feeling like going through such a well-known project again as my first PKD read. So instead I chose the first book after that, 1964's Martian Time-Slip, and now at this point am promising to stick chronologically to the rest, until we finally reach the final book he wrote before his premature death, 1982's The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. At that point, then, I'll decide whether to go back and read all those early space operas from the 1950s, or the string of '50s titles that only got published in the '80s after his death in order to further cash in on his name. Whew!

As I was expecting, Martian Time-Slip reads through a lot of its page count like the kind of normal mid-'60s Silver Age sci-fi story that was so in vogue at the time, combining the "Long and Grand Terraforming of Mars" trope with the "Libertarians in SPAAAACE!!!" trope to tell a tale of political intrigue between the various factions (private institutions, national governments, the UN) who have formed the first settlements on a barely livable Mars, with PKD in this case envisioning a red planet that already had life when Earthlings first visited, essentially distant cousins of African aboriginals who have now suffered essentially the same colonial, oppressive fate as those Earth cousins did hundreds of years ago. But we know we're in for something different when PKD suddenly takes a detour in our Mars tour to examine the fate of the small number of autistic children who have now been born on the planet, who are all basically removed and housed in a special institution walled off from the rest of society, and with there being a hot debate over whether autistic children shouldn't instead be quietly euthanized upon diagnosis, because there's so much to be gained right now by convincing Earth's overly crowded population to emigrate to Mars en masse, and that's going to be even harder if everyone's convinced that their children will come out as deranged freaks.

In fact, echoing common actual medical theory at the time, PKD posits here that autism and schizophrenia are actually the same thing, only one being a form you're born with and the other a condition you specifically develop (and hence is the one form that can eventually be "cured"); and as the page count continues, the story becomes more and more focused on this particular aspect of Martian society, as our main menagerie of characters slowly become convinced that autism/schizophrenia is actually a case of select humans having the ability to time travel using only their brains, much like how others are apparently born with the gift of ESP, and that they're experiencing the space-time continuum in such a profoundly different way than us that it renders them virtually incapable of normal communication with non-affected people.

Mind you, this is all in service of a convoluted plot about Martian politics and a coming secret land grab, and the story never really transcends the mid-'60s boundaries that PKD was forced to work within at the time in order to have any kind of viable commercial career. But in this case, you really can see him yearning to add the trippy stuff he was genuinely interested in exploring within what's essentially a Robert A. Heinlein pastiche (just from the standpoint of the political plot, this could easily be a sequel to The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress), and is a nice portent of the truly weird, truly brilliant novels that would start coming out of him in just another ten years. It's not perfect, which is why it's not getting five stars from me; but if I was a contemporary sci-fi reader back in the mid-'60s, I would've finished this and thought, "Hmm, yeah, that was quite clever and good. I bet this guy's going to have even better stuff down the line." That's always a great thing to catch in the early volumes of any author in this Completist Challenge, and makes me excited to dive into the next PKD book, The Game-Players of Titan which was basically published at the same exact time as this one but by a different publisher. See you again then!

Philip K. Dick books now read: Martian Time-Slip