One of the problems with slightly offcenter speculative fiction is that
the reader has to understand the subculture or political situation or
technology the author is talking about. Authors quite often ask the
question “What if…” and then go on to tell a story or spin a tale that
answers the question. What if…we could clone dinosaurs from fossil DNA?
Jurassic Park. Not a particularly good book, way too gruesome for my
taste, but an interesting question in light of the recent developments in
cloning technology. Should we? How far do we go?

In The Man in the High Castle, Dick answers the question “What
if the Allied Forces had lost WWII? What would the world be like?” The
book is interesting not for his speculations but because his story
reflects light from what really did happen after the war. Of course you
have to know what happened after the war to appreciate the book. It was
written in 1962. The Cold War. The division of Germany. The diplomacy of
brinksmanship. The Stalinist state. Joseph McCarthy. Those things were
all current, still fresh.

In the book, the Allies lost. Roosevelt was assassinated before America
could enter the war. The US is divided roughly at the Rockies into a Nazi
German state and a Japanese one. Americans are a repressed nation. The
Four Freedoms and all the rest of the Bill of Rights have disappeared.
The Nazis have carried out horrific genocidal experiments in Africa,
thankfully not fully explained. The remaining Africans are slaves, as are
the Chinese. And one man writes a book about what could have happened if
the Allies had won the war. It’s a revolutionary thought. And it isn’t
suppressed in the more liberal Japanese west. I found the whole premise
very interesting.

Unfortunately, “A Scanner Darkly” didn’t hold forth with the same
quality. It was mushy in parts, hard to follow, long winded and not all
that pertinent to anything in general. Most of the problems I had with it
was that Dick was trying way too hard to find great meaning about society
and individuality in the drug culture. I don’t personally find much
meaning there. But part of the problem, I have to admit, is that the used
copy I picked up had obviously been used by a student reading it for a
class. Marginalia in pink gel pen with hearts over the I’s instead of
dots distracted me. Especially since she, and I can only assume the
writer was female, seemed to find it so deep. In fact I started reading
the marginalia and then the text just to see what the previous owner had
made of that paragraph or that sentence. And then I started to wonder the
kid who had taken these notes and why was she was finding this so
interesting. About that time, I realized I was pathetically bored and
put it down.

Too many books, too little time.