Now Wait For Last Year
First DAW paperback, 1981
Now Wait for Last Year (1966) is a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick set during an interstellar war in 2055, in which a transplant surgeon's marriage unravels alongside Earth's political situation when his wife becomes addicted to a time-displacing drug with no known cure. This is the first DAW Books paperback edition, first printing.
Softcover. First DAW Books Edition. DAW Books UE1654 ($2.50). Cover art by Michael Mariano. New York: DAW Books, 1981. Wintz & Hyde SF14.5. ISBN: 0879976543. #10964.
Nearly fine with couple tiny spots on spine.
Softcover. First DAW Books Edition. DAW Books UE1654 ($2.50). Cover art by Michael Mariano. New York: DAW Books, 1981. Wintz & Hyde SF14.5. ISBN: 0879976543. #10964.
Nearly fine with couple tiny spots on spine.
Additional Details
Now Wait for Last Year (1966) is set in 2055, when Earth has allied itself with the Starmen of Lilistar against the insect-like Reegs in an interstellar war that is going badly for everyone. Dr. Eric Sweetscent is a transplant surgeon employed by the Tijuana Fur & Dye Corporation, a sprawling conglomerate whose most important client turns out to be Gino Molinari, Earth's ailing world leader. Molinari is one of Dick's more remarkable characters, a politician who seems to genuinely suffer on behalf of the people he governs. He also cheats death with suspicious regularity, and his inner circle has quietly begun to wonder whether the man they are protecting is entirely human.
Eric's wife Kathy is something else entirely. She is acquisitive, manipulative, and entirely certain of her own judgment, and their marriage has become a war of attrition that Eric is losing. When Kathy becomes addicted to JJ-180, a hallucinogenic drug developed by a German pharmaceutical company and distributed illegally through Tijuana, the situation becomes catastrophic. JJ-180 does not simply distort perception, it appears to displace the user in time, flinging them into the past, the future, or possibly into alternate timelines that branch from moments of historical decision. Withdrawal is fatal, and there is no known cure for addiction to the drug.
The novel's structure follows the fracturing of time itself, as Eric and Kathy slip between versions of the future, one in which Earth surrenders, one in which it prevails, others that may exist only within the drug's hallucinations. Dick refuses to anchor the reader in any single timeline, and the effect is genuinely disorienting in a way that serves the novel's central concerns with obligation, and the insanity of holding onto something that is destroying you.
In arguably the novel's most memorable scene, Eric is riding in an autonomous cab and asks the robotic driver whether he should leave his wife, given that the brain damage from her addiction may be permanent. The cab thinks it over and tells him it would stay. Eric asks why. "Because," the cab answers, "life is composed of reality configurations so constituted. To abandon her would be to say, I can't endure reality as such. I have to have uniquely special easier conditions." Eric says he thinks he agrees. "God bless you, sir," the cab says. "I can see that you're a good man." This moment of moral philosophy delivered by a machine carries the strange credibility we come to expect in Dick's worlds, where meaning tends to arrive from the least likely sources.
The novel was dedicated to Don Wollheim, the editor whose support of Dick's early work at Ace Books was essential to his career. Originally published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1966, Now Wait for Last Year was later selected as one of five Dick novels to represent his work in the Library of America volumes edited by Jonathan Lethem.
Eric's wife Kathy is something else entirely. She is acquisitive, manipulative, and entirely certain of her own judgment, and their marriage has become a war of attrition that Eric is losing. When Kathy becomes addicted to JJ-180, a hallucinogenic drug developed by a German pharmaceutical company and distributed illegally through Tijuana, the situation becomes catastrophic. JJ-180 does not simply distort perception, it appears to displace the user in time, flinging them into the past, the future, or possibly into alternate timelines that branch from moments of historical decision. Withdrawal is fatal, and there is no known cure for addiction to the drug.
The novel's structure follows the fracturing of time itself, as Eric and Kathy slip between versions of the future, one in which Earth surrenders, one in which it prevails, others that may exist only within the drug's hallucinations. Dick refuses to anchor the reader in any single timeline, and the effect is genuinely disorienting in a way that serves the novel's central concerns with obligation, and the insanity of holding onto something that is destroying you.
In arguably the novel's most memorable scene, Eric is riding in an autonomous cab and asks the robotic driver whether he should leave his wife, given that the brain damage from her addiction may be permanent. The cab thinks it over and tells him it would stay. Eric asks why. "Because," the cab answers, "life is composed of reality configurations so constituted. To abandon her would be to say, I can't endure reality as such. I have to have uniquely special easier conditions." Eric says he thinks he agrees. "God bless you, sir," the cab says. "I can see that you're a good man." This moment of moral philosophy delivered by a machine carries the strange credibility we come to expect in Dick's worlds, where meaning tends to arrive from the least likely sources.
The novel was dedicated to Don Wollheim, the editor whose support of Dick's early work at Ace Books was essential to his career. Originally published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1966, Now Wait for Last Year was later selected as one of five Dick novels to represent his work in the Library of America volumes edited by Jonathan Lethem.
Related items
