Counter-Clock World
First British edition, 1968
Counter-Clock World (1967) is a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick set in a future where time runs backward, the dead awaken in their graves, and a small industry has grown up around digging them out and returning them to the living world. This is the first British edition, a Sphere paperback original published the year after the American first edition.
Softcover. First British Edition. Sphere, 29564 (5/-). London: Sphere, 1968. Levack 7b. Wintz & Hyde SF4.6. #10983.
Fine.
Softcover. First British Edition. Sphere, 29564 (5/-). London: Sphere, 1968. Levack 7b. Wintz & Hyde SF4.6. #10983.
Fine.
Additional Details
Counter-Clock World (1967) is set in 1998, in a future where time has begun running backward. The dead awaken in their graves, calling out to be dug up. They emerge elderly and grow younger, living their lives in reverse until they dissolve back into the womb. The process is called old-birth, and a small industry of vitariums has grown up around it, staffed by people who listen for voices underground, dig up the recently awakened, and help them reintegrate into a society that has moved on without them.
Sebastian Hermes runs one such vitarium, the Flask of Hermes, a modest operation he treats more like a family than a business. When Officer Tinbane calls him out to an obscure cemetery late one night, Sebastian's excavation of the old-born sets off a chain of events involving a figure far more significant than the usual confused pensioner: Anarch Peak, a Black religious leader and prophet who died in 1971 and is now due to rise again. Various factions are competing to control him, including the Udites, the African American religious movement Peak founded, and the Rome Syndicate, the dominant white religious authority. The Library, a bureaucratic institution whose stated function is not to collect information but to expunge it, is also involved, and it has already "unwritten" the location of Peak's body as a matter of policy.
Dick commits fully to the logic of reversed time, and the novel derives much of its dark comedy from working through the implications. People no longer eat in the conventional sense but ingest a substance called sogum through a tube, expelling it orally later in private, an act considered shameful. Cigarettes grow longer as you smoke them. "Goodbye" and "hello" have traded meanings. The Library's role in unwriting books that have reached their publication date in reverse is simultaneously a parody of censorship and a literalization of how information disappears under bureaucratic management.
The United States in the novel is divided: the Western United States on one side, the Free Negro Municipality in the east, with Hawaii and Alaska having seceded altogether. The WUS regards the Uditi religion with suspicion, and the tension between the two regions runs through the novel's political background, shaping how different characters relate to Peak and what his resurrection means to them.
The novel expands Dick's short story "Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday," published in Amazing Stories in August 1966. First published as a Berkley Medallion paperback original in 1967.
Sebastian Hermes runs one such vitarium, the Flask of Hermes, a modest operation he treats more like a family than a business. When Officer Tinbane calls him out to an obscure cemetery late one night, Sebastian's excavation of the old-born sets off a chain of events involving a figure far more significant than the usual confused pensioner: Anarch Peak, a Black religious leader and prophet who died in 1971 and is now due to rise again. Various factions are competing to control him, including the Udites, the African American religious movement Peak founded, and the Rome Syndicate, the dominant white religious authority. The Library, a bureaucratic institution whose stated function is not to collect information but to expunge it, is also involved, and it has already "unwritten" the location of Peak's body as a matter of policy.
Dick commits fully to the logic of reversed time, and the novel derives much of its dark comedy from working through the implications. People no longer eat in the conventional sense but ingest a substance called sogum through a tube, expelling it orally later in private, an act considered shameful. Cigarettes grow longer as you smoke them. "Goodbye" and "hello" have traded meanings. The Library's role in unwriting books that have reached their publication date in reverse is simultaneously a parody of censorship and a literalization of how information disappears under bureaucratic management.
The United States in the novel is divided: the Western United States on one side, the Free Negro Municipality in the east, with Hawaii and Alaska having seceded altogether. The WUS regards the Uditi religion with suspicion, and the tension between the two regions runs through the novel's political background, shaping how different characters relate to Peak and what his resurrection means to them.
The novel expands Dick's short story "Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday," published in Amazing Stories in August 1966. First published as a Berkley Medallion paperback original in 1967.
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