Martian Time-Slip
Ace paperback original, 1964
Martian Time-Slip (1964) is a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick set on a struggling Mars colony, where a repairman once treated for schizophrenia becomes entangled in a land scheme involving an autistic boy who may be able to perceive the future. First published in serialized form as "All We Marsmen" in Worlds of Tomorrow (1963). This is the first edition, a Ballantine paperback original.
Softcover. First Edition, Paperback Original. Ballantine, U2191 ($0.50). Cover art by Ralph Brillhart. New York: Ballantine Books, 1964. Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (43). Levack 25a. Wintz & Hyde SF12.1. #10094.
Crisp, fine copy.
Softcover. First Edition, Paperback Original. Ballantine, U2191 ($0.50). Cover art by Ralph Brillhart. New York: Ballantine Books, 1964. Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (43). Levack 25a. Wintz & Hyde SF12.1. #10094.
Crisp, fine copy.
Additional Details
Martian Time-Slip (1964) is set in 1994, on a Mars colony that has been occupied long enough to feel like a disappointment. The promises of the emigration era have curdled into bureaucratic routine, water politics, and the slow grind of maintaining machinery in an environment that resists it. There are no obvious heroes or villains here, only men and women muddling through fear, compromise, and longing. Jack Bohlen is a repairman, competent and quietly anxious, who once received treatment for schizophrenia on Earth. He works for a Chinese electrical engineer named Mr. Yee and tries to keep his distance from the colony's larger power structures.
The central figure of power is Arnie Kott, Supreme Goodmember of the Water Workers' Local, Fourth Planet Branch, who controls the colony's most essential resource. When Kott learns of Manfred Steiner, a ten-year-old autistic boy living at the colony's Camp B-G who seems to perceive time differently from everyone around him, he sees an opportunity. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Mountains, a stretch of apparently worthless desert, are about to be developed into a massive UN housing tract. Kott believes Manfred can look far enough forward to tell him whether to buy in. He recruits Jack as an intermediary, on the theory that Jack's own history of psychosis makes him better equipped to reach the boy.
What Manfred actually perceives is not easily translatable. The adult world around him appears as "gubble," a noise without meaning. The future he sees at the site of the planned development he labels "AM-WEB," a place of decay and abandonment where the old are stored and forgotten. The novel loops through several versions of the same sequence of events, rendered differently each time depending on whose consciousness is filtering them, and Manfred's version is the most disturbing by far. Jack Bohlen's own anxiety over his sanity mirrors the colony's fragile grip on reality, while the plight of the native Bleekmen, displaced, underpaid, and largely ignored, reflects the same patterns of exploitation the colonists carried with them from Earth.
As Brian Aldiss observed in his introduction to the first British edition, Dick's Mars is neither the adventure playground of Edgar Rice Burroughs nor the nostalgic frontier of Ray Bradbury, but rather a "metaphor of spiritual poverty." The canals are stagnant, the machinery unreliable, and the settlers endure dust, isolation, and a particular misery. Yet as David Pringle notes, the novel is filled with humor and wit despite its bleak vision — a paradox characteristic of Dick at his best. The novel first appeared in serialized form in Worlds of Tomorrow (1963) under the title "All We Marsmen," before Ballantine published it as a paperback original the following year.
The central figure of power is Arnie Kott, Supreme Goodmember of the Water Workers' Local, Fourth Planet Branch, who controls the colony's most essential resource. When Kott learns of Manfred Steiner, a ten-year-old autistic boy living at the colony's Camp B-G who seems to perceive time differently from everyone around him, he sees an opportunity. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Mountains, a stretch of apparently worthless desert, are about to be developed into a massive UN housing tract. Kott believes Manfred can look far enough forward to tell him whether to buy in. He recruits Jack as an intermediary, on the theory that Jack's own history of psychosis makes him better equipped to reach the boy.
What Manfred actually perceives is not easily translatable. The adult world around him appears as "gubble," a noise without meaning. The future he sees at the site of the planned development he labels "AM-WEB," a place of decay and abandonment where the old are stored and forgotten. The novel loops through several versions of the same sequence of events, rendered differently each time depending on whose consciousness is filtering them, and Manfred's version is the most disturbing by far. Jack Bohlen's own anxiety over his sanity mirrors the colony's fragile grip on reality, while the plight of the native Bleekmen, displaced, underpaid, and largely ignored, reflects the same patterns of exploitation the colonists carried with them from Earth.
As Brian Aldiss observed in his introduction to the first British edition, Dick's Mars is neither the adventure playground of Edgar Rice Burroughs nor the nostalgic frontier of Ray Bradbury, but rather a "metaphor of spiritual poverty." The canals are stagnant, the machinery unreliable, and the settlers endure dust, isolation, and a particular misery. Yet as David Pringle notes, the novel is filled with humor and wit despite its bleak vision — a paradox characteristic of Dick at his best. The novel first appeared in serialized form in Worlds of Tomorrow (1963) under the title "All We Marsmen," before Ballantine published it as a paperback original the following year.
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