re:mote voices

Title: The Penultimate Truth
Author: Philip K. Dick
Publisher: Gollancz

When World War Three broke out on Mars it was clear that it would quickly spread back to Earth. So in the East and West the two sides retreated underground. The human race living in tanks, building robots for their side to fight the other. They have been down their for 15 years now. but, after only a couple of years both East and West agreed that mutually assured destruction was not the way forward. Since then those in command set up their own estates, staffed by the robots built by those in the tanks.

The novel follows a cusp moment, working between key characters from above and below. Joseph Adams is a scriptwriter, composing the propaganda shown in the tanks to keep them convinced the war is still being fought. Adams feels a certain loneliness, and an undercurrent of guilt for the way things are run. Nicholas St. James is the elected president of one of the Western tank communities, who is forced to make a bid for the surface when the tank experiences a crisis. Both discover the truth in The Penultimate Truth, and the levels of conspiracy involved - those trying to keep a grip on power versus those who would like to see it all come tumbling down.

Written in 1964 The Penultimate Truth is like many of Philip K. Dick's novels in that while it looks to the future it covers the kind of tensions that were building with the Cold War. As such it is dated to some degree, and the clash of things predicted that never came to be, are clear. But the themes of maintained tensions through misleading propaganda, and the propensity of governments to lie to their people is something that would seem to be consistently relevant.

Thematically The Penultimate Truth has many of those things that Philip K. Dick covered in other novels. In particular there are clear parallels to novels like The Zap Gun and Time Out Of Joint - the faux-arms race and the central conspiracies. The Penultimate Truth is published as part of Gollancz's SF Masterworks series, the 58th volume in the series, and keeps Dick in their as the author with the highest number of books included in this series of classic science fiction novels.