TRP & PKD

[Craig Clark]

Paul Di Fillipo writes:

> 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?

That was my impression too when I read _TOOJ_ a few years back. For 
that matter, read _V._ and _Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?_ in 
reasonably close proximity to each other and see if you don't get the 
feeling there's some cross-pollination of ideas happening here. Can't 
remember when _Androids_ came out, though - before or after _V._? 
Maybe PKD was influenced by TRP.

Craig Clark

"Living inside the system is like driving across
 the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
 on suicide."
   - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"