Signed
Dr. Futurity
Signed Ace paperback original, 1960
Dr. Futurity (1960) is a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick in which a 21st-century physician is displaced four centuries into a future society that has inverted the logic of medicine entirely, treating death as a eugenic necessity and the prolonging of life as a crime. He becomes entangled in a scheme to alter history by assassinating Sir Francis Drake. First issued as an Ace Double paired with Slavers of Space by John Brunner.
Signed copy. Signed by Dick on the title page. Part of a group of titles that PKD signed for a collector at the 1972 World Science Fiction Convention in Los Angeles, in one of his rare convention appearances.
Softcover. First Edition, Paperback Original. Ace Double D-421 ($0.35). Cover art by Valigursky. New York: Ace, 1960. Levack 14a. Wintz & Hyde SF8.1. #10873.
Noticeable creasing along spine, but the binding is still tight and straight. Pages are darkened, and there is some slight edge wear. Covers are bright and attractive. Solid, very good+ copy.
Signed copy. Signed by Dick on the title page. Part of a group of titles that PKD signed for a collector at the 1972 World Science Fiction Convention in Los Angeles, in one of his rare convention appearances.
Softcover. First Edition, Paperback Original. Ace Double D-421 ($0.35). Cover art by Valigursky. New York: Ace, 1960. Levack 14a. Wintz & Hyde SF8.1. #10873.
Noticeable creasing along spine, but the binding is still tight and straight. Pages are darkened, and there is some slight edge wear. Covers are bright and attractive. Solid, very good+ copy.
Additional Details
Dr. Futurity (1960) expands Dick's 1954 short story "Time Pawn," first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, into a novel-length exploration of a future society that has inverted the moral logic of medicine. Jim Parsons, a physician from the 21st century, is involuntarily displaced four hundred years forward into a world where death is not only accepted but engineered. The society he finds has embraced eugenics as its governing principle, deliberately culling the population to optimize the human gene pool. Doctors, whose entire purpose is to preserve life, are regarded as enemies of progress. Parsons finds himself not just stranded but structurally at odds with everything the civilization around him values.
The novel's time-travel plot, which draws Parsons into a scheme to assassinate Sir Francis Drake in order to alter the fate of Native American civilization, sits somewhat uneasily alongside the eugenics premise, but the two are connected by the same underlying question of who has the right to determine which lives matter and which do not. A lighter work than much of Dick's output from this period, but its central premise anticipates the darker institutional dystopias he would develop more fully in later novels.
The novel's time-travel plot, which draws Parsons into a scheme to assassinate Sir Francis Drake in order to alter the fate of Native American civilization, sits somewhat uneasily alongside the eugenics premise, but the two are connected by the same underlying question of who has the right to determine which lives matter and which do not. A lighter work than much of Dick's output from this period, but its central premise anticipates the darker institutional dystopias he would develop more fully in later novels.
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