TRP & PKD

Paul DiFilippo ac038 at osfn.rhilinet.gov
Sat Mar 8 10:20:10 CST 1997


Foax--this looks like a gen-yew-wine find to me.  But maybe
others hipper to TRP scholarship might know of a previous 
citation.  Anyhow:
One of the only Philip K. Dick books I had not yet read was his
TIME OUT OF JOINT from 1959.  So, needing a PKD fix, I splurge,
as if taking the last bottle of a vintage wine out of the cellar.
In TOOJ, I find the following scenario:  Our hero, Ragle Gumm,
is a fortyish neerdowell living with his sister and brother-in-
law in a seemingly typical smalltown in an America seemingly
contemporary with the novel's date of composition/publication:
Eisenhower High Fifties.  Gumm spends his whole day, every day,
obsessively solving a puzzle in the local paper:  "Where Will
The Little Green Man Land Next?", for which he receives monetary
prizes and a small fame.  BUT!!!!  Soon, cracks start to appear
in the landscape, leading to all sorts of paranoia and surrealism.
TO SPOIL THE STORY, Gumm soon finds out he is living in a small
stageset of Fifties America, and that the year is really 1998,
and that Earth is at war with a Moon colony, and, drumroll
please, that Gumm's puzzle-cracking efforts are vital to national
survival, hence the whole charade.  What is he doing?
"When I solve a puzzle I solve the time and place the next missile
[from Luna] will strike.  I file one entry after another.  And 
these people, whatever they call themselves, hustle an anti-missile 
unit to that square on the graph.  To that place and time.  And
so everyone stays alive...."
IS THERE ANY WAY TRP DID NOT READ THIS AND HAVE IT IN MIND WHEN
WRITING GR???  I find it hard to credit sheer synchronicity.
Feedback, anyone?

--
Paul Di Filippo&Deborah Newton/2 Poplar/Providence, RI 02906
Dada Charity:  "Clothe the hungry and feed the naked."
Capitalist Charity:  "Give the hungry clothes, the naked food,
and let them create a market economy."



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