Dr. Futurity
First British paperback, 1976
Dr. Futurity (1960) is a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick in which a 21st-century physician is displaced four centuries into a future society that has inverted the logic of medicine entirely, treating death as a eugenic necessity and the prolonging of life as a crime. This is the first British paperback edition, published by Methuen.
Softcover. First British Edition, Paperback Original. Methuen, 36540 (60p). London: Methuen Paperbacks, 1976. Levack 14f. Wintz & Hyde SF8.7. ISBN: 0413365409. #11016.
Near fine with age darkening.
Softcover. First British Edition, Paperback Original. Methuen, 36540 (60p). London: Methuen Paperbacks, 1976. Levack 14f. Wintz & Hyde SF8.7. ISBN: 0413365409. #11016.
Near fine with age darkening.
Additional Details
Dr. Futurity (1960) expands Dick's 1954 short story "Time Pawn," first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, into a novel-length exploration of a future society that has inverted the moral logic of medicine. Jim Parsons, a physician from the 21st century, is involuntarily displaced four hundred years forward into a world where death is not only accepted but engineered. The society he finds has embraced eugenics as its governing principle, deliberately culling the population to optimize the human gene pool. Doctors, whose entire purpose is to preserve life, are regarded as enemies of progress. Parsons finds himself not just stranded but structurally at odds with everything the civilization around him values.
The novel's time-travel plot, which draws Parsons into a scheme to assassinate Sir Francis Drake in order to alter the fate of Native American civilization, sits somewhat uneasily alongside the eugenics premise, but the two are connected by the same underlying question of who has the right to determine which lives matter and which do not. A lighter work than much of Dick's output from this period, but its central premise anticipates the darker institutional dystopias he would develop more fully in later novels.
The novel's time-travel plot, which draws Parsons into a scheme to assassinate Sir Francis Drake in order to alter the fate of Native American civilization, sits somewhat uneasily alongside the eugenics premise, but the two are connected by the same underlying question of who has the right to determine which lives matter and which do not. A lighter work than much of Dick's output from this period, but its central premise anticipates the darker institutional dystopias he would develop more fully in later novels.
Related items
