Signed
Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb
Signed Ace paperback original, 1965
Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965) is a darkly comic post-nuclear novel by Philip K. Dick, set among the survivors of a limited nuclear exchange in Northern California. A 1965 Nebula Award nominee. This is the first edition, an Ace paperback original.
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 F-337 ($0.40). New York: Ace, 1965. Nebula Award nominee (1965). Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (47). Levack 13a. PA-SF7.1. #10875.
Fine.
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 F-337 ($0.40). New York: Ace, 1965. Nebula Award nominee (1965). Pringle, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (47). Levack 13a. PA-SF7.1. #10875.
Fine.
Additional Details
Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965) begins in Berkeley in 1981, before the bombs fall. Stuart McConchie is sweeping the sidewalk outside Modern TV Sales & Service, thinking about his second breakfast and his sales figures. Around the corner, Doctor Stockstill is receiving his first patient of the day, a man who gives his name as Mr. Tree and who is visibly deteriorating, convinced that strangers can read his thoughts and see blotches on his face that are not there. The patient is Bruno Bluthgeld, the physicist whose miscalculation during a 1972 high-altitude weapons test irradiated large portions of the Northern Hemisphere and may have been the first step toward what is coming.
When the bombs fall, the novel leaps forward seven years to the communities that have assembled in West Marin County, north of San Francisco, where a delicate rural economy has taken shape. People grow food, trade skills, keep animals. The world is quieter and in some ways more human than what came before, and Dick observes this with genuine affection alongside the horror. Mutations are common. Some are benign. Some are not. Edie Keller, a girl of seven, carries her twin brother Bill inside her body, in the inguinal region, where he has lived since birth. He is small, wizened, sentient, and communicates through Edie. He is one of the novel's more remarkable characters.
Stuart McConchie has survived and established himself in the new community. Bonny Keller, whose complicated romantic life runs through much of the novel, is a school board member and a force of nature. Doctor Stockstill has continued practicing medicine. And Hoppy Harrington, a phocomelus born without limbs who got around on a motorized cart before the war, has developed telekinetic abilities that make him one of the most powerful and most unsettling figures in the post-bomb world. Bluthgeld himself is out there, still paranoid, still convinced that he caused the war through some force of his own will, and it's never entirely clear whether he is right or not.
Orbiting above all of this is Walt Dangerfield, an astronaut whose Mars mission was aborted by the war, now left to circle the Earth indefinitely in a dying satellite. He broadcasts to those below, playing records, reading aloud, taking requests, maintaining a connection between isolated communities that have otherwise lost contact with each other. His transmissions are one of the novel's great inventions, a man suspended between worlds, providing comfort and continuity to a civilization that destroyed itself while he was on his way to another planet.
The title was suggested by Dick's editor Donald Wollheim as a nod to Dr. Strangelove, and the comparison is apt in spirit if not in tone. Where Kubrick's film dissects the machinery of mutual destruction, Dick's novel asks what comes after, and finds the answer in the ordinary stubbornness of people going about their lives. A 1965 Nebula Award nominee. First published as an Ace paperback original.
When the bombs fall, the novel leaps forward seven years to the communities that have assembled in West Marin County, north of San Francisco, where a delicate rural economy has taken shape. People grow food, trade skills, keep animals. The world is quieter and in some ways more human than what came before, and Dick observes this with genuine affection alongside the horror. Mutations are common. Some are benign. Some are not. Edie Keller, a girl of seven, carries her twin brother Bill inside her body, in the inguinal region, where he has lived since birth. He is small, wizened, sentient, and communicates through Edie. He is one of the novel's more remarkable characters.
Stuart McConchie has survived and established himself in the new community. Bonny Keller, whose complicated romantic life runs through much of the novel, is a school board member and a force of nature. Doctor Stockstill has continued practicing medicine. And Hoppy Harrington, a phocomelus born without limbs who got around on a motorized cart before the war, has developed telekinetic abilities that make him one of the most powerful and most unsettling figures in the post-bomb world. Bluthgeld himself is out there, still paranoid, still convinced that he caused the war through some force of his own will, and it's never entirely clear whether he is right or not.
Orbiting above all of this is Walt Dangerfield, an astronaut whose Mars mission was aborted by the war, now left to circle the Earth indefinitely in a dying satellite. He broadcasts to those below, playing records, reading aloud, taking requests, maintaining a connection between isolated communities that have otherwise lost contact with each other. His transmissions are one of the novel's great inventions, a man suspended between worlds, providing comfort and continuity to a civilization that destroyed itself while he was on his way to another planet.
The title was suggested by Dick's editor Donald Wollheim as a nod to Dr. Strangelove, and the comparison is apt in spirit if not in tone. Where Kubrick's film dissects the machinery of mutual destruction, Dick's novel asks what comes after, and finds the answer in the ordinary stubbornness of people going about their lives. A 1965 Nebula Award nominee. First published as an Ace paperback original.
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