The Penultimate Truth
Second American paperback, 1975
The Penultimate Truth (1964) is a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick in which most of humanity has been living underground for fifteen years, producing robot soldiers for a war that ended long ago while a small elite occupies the emptied surface. This is the first printing of the second American paperback edition, published by Leisure Books.
Softcover. First Leisure Books Paperback Edition. Leisure Books 285NK ($0.95). New York: Leisure Books, 1975. Levack 32i. Wintz & Hyde SF25.2. #11014.
Fine.
Softcover. First Leisure Books Paperback Edition. Leisure Books 285NK ($0.95). New York: Leisure Books, 1975. Levack 32i. Wintz & Hyde SF25.2. #11014.
Fine.
Additional Details
The Penultimate Truth (1964) is set in the aftermath of a nuclear war that may or may not still be ongoing. Most of humanity lives underground in sealed "ant tanks," vast subterranean factory complexes where they labor around the clock producing robot soldiers called leadies for the war effort above. They have been down there for fifteen years, sustained by televised updates from a reassuring simulacrum called Talbot Yancy, who tells them the war continues and their sacrifice is essential.
The surface is not a wasteland, and the war ended years ago. The surface has been divided into vast private estates called demesnes, seized and maintained by a small class of elites, the same people who managed the descent into the tanks below and have since had no intention of allowing the population back up. The leadies produced underground are used to tend their lavish gardens. Meanwhile, their rhetorizors generate the inspiring speeches Yancy delivers to keep the underground apparatus churning.
Nick St. James, the chief mechanic of his tank, travels to the surface to obtain an artificial pancreas for his dying leader. The journey introduces him to the world above and to the realization that the war in whose name his community has been underground for fifteen years is a fiction. What he finds on the surface is a world of speechwriters, propagandists, and rival estate owners maneuvering against each other with manufactured crises and controlled information. The tanks keep people physically confined, but it is the rhetorizor and the Yancy simulacrum that keep them compliant. Dick is as interested in the mechanics of that deception as in the physical imprisonment.
The novel expands Dick's earlier short story "The Mold of Yancy," published in If magazine in 1955. First published as a Belmont paperback original in 1964.
The surface is not a wasteland, and the war ended years ago. The surface has been divided into vast private estates called demesnes, seized and maintained by a small class of elites, the same people who managed the descent into the tanks below and have since had no intention of allowing the population back up. The leadies produced underground are used to tend their lavish gardens. Meanwhile, their rhetorizors generate the inspiring speeches Yancy delivers to keep the underground apparatus churning.
Nick St. James, the chief mechanic of his tank, travels to the surface to obtain an artificial pancreas for his dying leader. The journey introduces him to the world above and to the realization that the war in whose name his community has been underground for fifteen years is a fiction. What he finds on the surface is a world of speechwriters, propagandists, and rival estate owners maneuvering against each other with manufactured crises and controlled information. The tanks keep people physically confined, but it is the rhetorizor and the Yancy simulacrum that keep them compliant. Dick is as interested in the mechanics of that deception as in the physical imprisonment.
The novel expands Dick's earlier short story "The Mold of Yancy," published in If magazine in 1955. First published as a Belmont paperback original in 1964.
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