The Game-Players of Titan
First American hardcover, 1979
The Game-Players of Titan (1963) is a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick set on a depopulated, sterile Earth where the surviving human population plays a ritualized game called Bluff, wagering property and spouses in the hope of producing a child, while their Titanian overlords watch with unsettling benevolence. This is the first American hardcover edition, published by Gregg Press with a frontispiece by Hannah Shapero and a new introduction by Robert Thurston.
Hardcover. First American Hardcover Edition. Octavo, bound in dark green cloth with gold lettering on spine. Issued without a dust jacket. Boston, MA: Gregg Press, 1979. Levack 18hl. Wintz & Hyde SF21.3. ISBN: 0839824823. #10915.
Fine.
Hardcover. First American Hardcover Edition. Octavo, bound in dark green cloth with gold lettering on spine. Issued without a dust jacket. Boston, MA: Gregg Press, 1979. Levack 18hl. Wintz & Hyde SF21.3. ISBN: 0839824823. #10915.
Fine.
Additional Details
The Game-Players of Titan (1963) opens with Pete Garden losing an argument with his car. He's drunk, it won't let him drive, and as he lies in the back seat staring at the stars, he reflects on an even worse piece of news: he has just lost Berkeley in The Game. Not figuratively — Berkeley, the city, the actual property. He no longer owns it. He also no longer has a wife, having lost his previous marriage in an earlier round. This is simply how things are in what remains of Earth's human population.
The world of the novel is post-war and largely empty. A weapon called Hinkel Radiation, developed during a conflict with China, has rendered humanity almost entirely sterile. A few million people survive, organized into game groups called Bindmen. The Game they play is called Bluff, and the stakes are real: property, land, and spouses can all be won or lost on a roll. Marriage is not a romantic institution but a fertility lottery, reassigning partners in the hope that some combination will finally produce a child. Population decline is the existential crisis, and The Game is civilization's response to it.
The vugs, amorphous silicon-based telepathic beings from Titan, rule Earth in the aftermath of the war. They are ostensibly helpful, offering medical facilities to any human who achieves pregnancy, and genuinely baffled by the hostility most humans direct at them. Their relationship with humanity is uncomfortable and complicated — they are colonizers who present themselves as benefactors, and the humans who resent them cannot quite articulate why, since the vugs maintain a posture of impeccable goodwill.
Pete Garden, as the novel develops, becomes entangled in a murder investigation that leads into the deeper politics of the vug occupation and what the vugs actually want from the game they have encouraged humanity to play. The novel is darkly comic in its treatment of marriage, property, and the bureaucratic management of human extinction, and the vugs themselves are among Dick's more genuinely alien creations. First published as an Ace paperback original in 1963.
The world of the novel is post-war and largely empty. A weapon called Hinkel Radiation, developed during a conflict with China, has rendered humanity almost entirely sterile. A few million people survive, organized into game groups called Bindmen. The Game they play is called Bluff, and the stakes are real: property, land, and spouses can all be won or lost on a roll. Marriage is not a romantic institution but a fertility lottery, reassigning partners in the hope that some combination will finally produce a child. Population decline is the existential crisis, and The Game is civilization's response to it.
The vugs, amorphous silicon-based telepathic beings from Titan, rule Earth in the aftermath of the war. They are ostensibly helpful, offering medical facilities to any human who achieves pregnancy, and genuinely baffled by the hostility most humans direct at them. Their relationship with humanity is uncomfortable and complicated — they are colonizers who present themselves as benefactors, and the humans who resent them cannot quite articulate why, since the vugs maintain a posture of impeccable goodwill.
Pete Garden, as the novel develops, becomes entangled in a murder investigation that leads into the deeper politics of the vug occupation and what the vugs actually want from the game they have encouraged humanity to play. The novel is darkly comic in its treatment of marriage, property, and the bureaucratic management of human extinction, and the vugs themselves are among Dick's more genuinely alien creations. First published as an Ace paperback original in 1963.
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