re:mote voices

Title: Time Out Of Joint
Author: Philip K. Dick
Publisher: Gollancz

Time Out Of Joint is Philip K Dick at his paranoid best. Ragle Gumm is a fairly regular guy, though he makes his living in an unusual manner. The daily "spot-the-little-green-man" competition in the national paper has taken over his life, Gumm being the only person in 1950's America to have as high a success rate.

However Gumm is spotting an increasing number of oddities, not least the amount of attention he receives from the newspaper and how his neighbours always seem to be just popping in for no reason. Thing aren't adding up, and Gumm is gathering clues that don't fit in with how things should be at all. Increasingly Gumm becomes paranoid, convinced that he is the target of some conspiracy. Of course, as the saying goes, just because you are paranoid, doesn't mean that They aren't out to get you.

Time Out Of Joint is published as part of Gollancz's SF Masterworks series, with which it includes an essay on the life of Dick and how works like Time Out Of Joint fit into his career. The essays conclusion is that Time Out Of Joint is a flawed work, which builds a weirdness only to deliver a more mundane punch line. The irony of which is that, for me, this is the kind of thinking that the essayist complained about plaguing Philip K. Dick's career. An old fashioned thinking, which particularly in the wake of the likes of Chuck Palahniuk and M. Night Shyamalan, should be regarded as redundant. Reading Philip K. Dick it is always interesting to spot the tendrils of his influence, to realise the grounds that he broke. For me there are clear echoes from the likes of Time Out Of Joint in the work of both Palahniuk and Shyamalan. Though the most obvious influence is perhaps the clear parallels one can see between The Truman Show and Time Out Of Joint.

Regardless, Time Out Of Joint is brilliantly mad, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.