ISBN: 9780575074583
Date read: 26/07/2021
How strongly I recommend it: 9/10
Support your local bookshop by going to Bookshop.org to buy your copy (instead of THAT online shopping website…)
‘He unfolded, in a confidential manner, a copy of the day’s Gazette. Almost reverently he opened it to page fourteen. There, at the top, was a line of photos of men and women. In the center was a photo of Ragle Gumm himself, and under it the caption:
Grand all-time winner in the Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next? contest, Ragle Gumm. National champion leading for two straight years, an all-time record ‘[1]
Ragle Gumm is just a regular guy. He lives in the suburbs with his sister and brother-in-law, drinks warm beer and covets his neighbour’s wife. You know, usual suburban life. But there is something strange about the way Ragle makes a living. Every day, he enters a newspaper contest, Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next?, and every day he wins. Through a strange, unexplained method of his own design, Ragle has been winning the contest every day for two years. He only begins to question it once small, surreal occurrences start befalling both him and his family that seem to call into question the very nature of the world around them.
Questions such as: Is it really 1959? Are Ragle’s family really his family? Has this entire world been constructed around him with the sole purpose of keeping him happy and docile? And just why is it so crucially, deadly important that Ragle keeps entering and winning the Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next contest?
I’ve been reading Philip K. Dick since I was a teenager after being turned onto his work by the multitude of film adaptations of his work, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall being two favourites of mine. I’ve loved everything of his that I’ve read and Time Out of Joint is no exception.
In fact, one of the reasons I found Time Out of Joint even more enthralling than my other Dick favourites, Ubik and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, is that unlike in those books, Time Out of Joint isn’t set in a dystopian, then-future full of exotic future tech and intergalactic colonies. No, it’s set in 1959, in American suburbia, and the reality that is being interfered with is our own, one that we recognise and one that, just like Ragle, we also take for granted. For this reason, Ragle’s paranoia and fear are that much more relatable, with the setting functioning as snapshot of 50s paranoia:
‘The smartest investment we ever made, she said to herself. Buying a foreign car. And it’ll never wear out; those Germans build with such precision. Except that they had had minor clutch trouble, and in only fifteen thousand miles… but nothing was perfect. In all the world. Certainly not in this day and age, with H-bombs and Russia and rising prices.’[2]
You will also be surprised at just how many now commonplace sci-fi tropes and conventions you’ll recognise from any fictional media concerning the nature of reality from the past 50 years or so; The Matrix (1999) and The Truman Show (1998) spring to mind as two examples that have liberally, albeit lovingly, pilfered from this novel. This is because Dick literally wrote the book, or more accurately books, on the sub-genre of dystopian, virtual reality sci-fi. Only he was writing about it all the way back in 1959.
Over 63 years later, with us now having to deal with the technological nightmare that is Zuckerburg’s proposed ‘Metaverse,’ I don’t think its an exaggeration to call Philip K. Dick one of literature’s few, true prophets. If you’ll permit me a quick biographical digression, Dick himself said that he wrote this novel to ‘derail himself from the Skinnerian task-reward treadmill he was caught in, churning out novels for Don Wollheim at Ace.’[3] Just like Dick and his characters in Time Out of Joint, aren’t we all now trapped on that same treadmill while participating in the modern world? It’s a fact that most of us carry and operate a Skinner Box of our very own every single day of our lives, our very own personal task-reward system that never leaves our side and governs most of the consumer decisions we make, only these days we simply call it by a different name: a smartphone.
On top of his ability to create exciting sci-fi and criticism, Dick is also easily just as capable at writing truly beautiful, literary prose. Take the following for example: ‘Nothing is so alien, so bleak and unfriendly, as the strip of gas stations – cut-rate gas stations – and motels on the rim of your own city. You fail to recognize it. And at the same time, you have to clasp it to your bosom. Not just for one night, but as long as you intend to live where you live.’[4]
For all of the reasons above, Time Out of Joint has only become more relevant and essential as time has gone by, and it definitely deserves your attention.
[1] Philip K. Dick, Time Out of Joint (London: Gollancz, 2003), P. 15
[2] P. 8
[3] P. 215
[4] P. 162