I must be missing something. This guy’s books have a huge cult following
and I DON’T get it. This one was just plain bad. It’s dated, the premise
is stupid and the characters bored me to tears. I finished it, but only
because it wasn’t too long and I was too lazy to get up and get something
else to read. A co-worker of mine loves Dick and tells me he’s right out
of the 60’s drug culture which may explain it. My co-worker, from what I
can tell, is still halfway back in the 60’s drug culture which somehow is
interesting face to face but doesn’t really work very well on paper.

The story is that Mars has been colonized by Men. All of Earth’s
political and national divisions have been brought along to Mars. They
are using the canals dug by the, get this, indigenous Martians to
transport the precious little water they have up there. Everyone is
paranoid about mutations that have shown up due to the gamma ray exposure
during the long trip to Mars and autism and schizophrenia are seen as
manifestations of a mutation rather than as a neurological condition. The
native Martians are called Bleekmen and are sort of like the Australian
Aborigines in appearance except really small and kind of dried up. They
have a kind of mystical shamanist culture as well. And they are able to
communicate on some other mental plain that’s not really explained except
that that is where the autistic children and the schizophrenic’s minds are
really at.

That is the setting. I won’t go into the plot except to say that the 50’s
bored housewife messing around with the milkman comes into it, tediously,
and that it tries to imitate the social climate of the post war years,
badly.

Skip this one. Hated it. Hated it. Read something a little more developed
or thought out.