Our Friends From Frolix 8
First British edition, 1976
Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970) is a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick set in a future Earth where ordinary people have been displaced from power by superintelligent and psionic elites, and a radical returns from deep space with an alien capable of leveling the playing field. This is the first British edition, a Panther paperback original.
Softcover. First British Edition. Panther 04295 (60p). Cover art by Jim Burns. St. Albans, U.K. Panther, 1976. Levack 30e. Wintz & Hyde SF15.5. ISBN: 0586042954. #10981.
Fine.
Softcover. First British Edition. Panther 04295 (60p). Cover art by Jim Burns. St. Albans, U.K. Panther, 1976. Levack 30e. Wintz & Hyde SF15.5. ISBN: 0586042954. #10981.
Fine.
Additional Details
Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1970) is set in a future Earth governed by two classes of evolved humanity who have displaced ordinary people from positions of power. The New Men are superintelligent, the Unusuals are psionic, and between them they control every meaningful function of government and society. Ordinary people, called Old Men or Old Regulars, are consigned to low-level work and have no meaningful path to advancement regardless of effort. The Federal Bureau of Personnel Standards administers a system of tests that appear objective but are rigged to ensure that New Men and Unusuals continue to dominate.
Nick Appleton is an Old Man, working a minor job and scraping together enough money to send his son Bobby to the testing center, hoping against his own experience that the boy might somehow place high enough to matter. Nick drinks too much, takes pharmaceutical combinations at the drugbar, and maintains a running inner monologue of quiet despair punctuated by bursts of political outrage. He has connected himself to the underground resistance movement around Thors Provoni, a radical who has left Earth entirely and traveled deep into space in search of an alien intelligence that might be capable of defeating the New Men.
The alien Provoni brings back is Morgo, a vast, genial entity from Frolix 8 whose biology renders New Men's superintelligence irrelevant and Unusuals' psionic abilities ineffective. Dick plays the political situation for both earnestness and dark comedy. The novel is simultaneously a critique of meritocracy as a mask for entrenched inequality and also a somewhat chaotic adventure story. What stays with the reader is less the plot than the texture of Nick Appleton's life, the pharmaceutical cocktails, the rigged tests, the son who already knows what he is and doesn't want to be tested for it.
First published as an Ace paperback original in 1970.
Nick Appleton is an Old Man, working a minor job and scraping together enough money to send his son Bobby to the testing center, hoping against his own experience that the boy might somehow place high enough to matter. Nick drinks too much, takes pharmaceutical combinations at the drugbar, and maintains a running inner monologue of quiet despair punctuated by bursts of political outrage. He has connected himself to the underground resistance movement around Thors Provoni, a radical who has left Earth entirely and traveled deep into space in search of an alien intelligence that might be capable of defeating the New Men.
The alien Provoni brings back is Morgo, a vast, genial entity from Frolix 8 whose biology renders New Men's superintelligence irrelevant and Unusuals' psionic abilities ineffective. Dick plays the political situation for both earnestness and dark comedy. The novel is simultaneously a critique of meritocracy as a mask for entrenched inequality and also a somewhat chaotic adventure story. What stays with the reader is less the plot than the texture of Nick Appleton's life, the pharmaceutical cocktails, the rigged tests, the son who already knows what he is and doesn't want to be tested for it.
First published as an Ace paperback original in 1970.
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