Clans of the Alphane Moon
Third American paperback, 1980
Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964) is a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick set on a former psychiatric colony whose abandoned patients have organized into rival clan-based settlements according to their diagnoses. This is the third American paperback edition, published by Dell.
Softcover. Third American Paperback Edition. Dell, 11084 ($1.95). Cover art by Richard Courtney. New York: Dell, 1980. Levack 4a. Wintz & Hyde SF3.1. ISBN: 044011084x. #10950.
Slightly worn at base of spine, else nearly fine copy.
Softcover. Third American Paperback Edition. Dell, 11084 ($1.95). Cover art by Richard Courtney. New York: Dell, 1980. Levack 4a. Wintz & Hyde SF3.1. ISBN: 044011084x. #10950.
Slightly worn at base of spine, else nearly fine copy.
Additional Details
Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964) is one of Philip K. Dick's more unusual novels, and one of his funniest. It is set on Alpha III M2, a moon in the Alphane system that was once an Earth psychiatric colony, established before a war cut off contact with the home planet and left the patients entirely to themselves. In the decades since, they have organized into distinct settlements based on their former diagnoses. The Pares, paranoiacs, have built the most fortified city. The Manses, manic, are aggressive and inventive. The Heebs, schizoid-simple, live in something close to cheerful squalor. The Skitzes are regarded as visionaries. The Ob-Coms are meticulous and rule-bound. The Deps are, predictably, difficult to motivate. Each group has developed its own social logic, and together they form a functioning, if perpetually unstable, society.
Into this arrives CIA agent Chuck Rittersdorf, whose personal situation is as unstable as anything on the moon. His wife Mary, a therapist, is trying to have him committed as leverage in their divorce proceedings. Chuck has meanwhile accepted an assassination contract through a complicated series of decisions the novel treats with deadpan comic gravity. His unlikely companion is Lord Running Clam, a Ganymedean slime mold with telepathic abilities and a genuinely decent character, who functions as something close to the novel's moral center.
Dick based the novel on his 1954 short story "Shell Game," first published in Galaxy Science Fiction. The premise of a society organized around psychiatric categories reads partly as satire on the diagnostic categories themselves, with the implication that the residents of Alpha III M2 have simply made explicit what any society does implicitly. Originally issued as an Ace paperback original.
Into this arrives CIA agent Chuck Rittersdorf, whose personal situation is as unstable as anything on the moon. His wife Mary, a therapist, is trying to have him committed as leverage in their divorce proceedings. Chuck has meanwhile accepted an assassination contract through a complicated series of decisions the novel treats with deadpan comic gravity. His unlikely companion is Lord Running Clam, a Ganymedean slime mold with telepathic abilities and a genuinely decent character, who functions as something close to the novel's moral center.
Dick based the novel on his 1954 short story "Shell Game," first published in Galaxy Science Fiction. The premise of a society organized around psychiatric categories reads partly as satire on the diagnostic categories themselves, with the implication that the residents of Alpha III M2 have simply made explicit what any society does implicitly. Originally issued as an Ace paperback original.
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