Ray Faraday Nelson (1931–2022)

Two authors. Both of them on drugs and a least one of them insane. This is an incompetently written novel.

The premise is that alien space worms have taken over the earth. The last hold-out against the invaders is a band of Nation of Islam guerrilla fighters who are holed up in the hills of Tennessee.

The novel is chock full of ideas, any one of which could be expanded in to novel of it’s own, but none of which appear to have any real connection to the plot in a way which brings meaning to the book. The most developed theme (if theme is a word that can be applied to this novel) is that of American racial politics. Do the authors have anything to say on the matter? I have no idea, and I’ve literally just finished reading it. You can look for meaning, but just when you think you’ve found it the authors will contradict themselves. They appear to be in as great a state of confusion as I am. Looking for meaning here is like looking for canals on Mars.

Early on in the novel we’re told that a precog has predicted that the occupation of earth will fail. So we’re in a deterministic universe. This immediately sucks all tension out of something about a struggle for survival. And we’re told this very early on so it must be important, yet it never has any impact on anything ever again.… (more)

What a mixed bag Philip K. Dick was. it's very hard to take any of this pot-boiler with giant worms running the Earth seriously. It reads like his early "anything for a dollar" pulp, but appeared after some of his best work in the 1960s, including Man in the High Castle and Martian Time-Slip. According to the Intertubes, it began as a sequel the High Castle. The Nelson/Dick collaboration is seamless to my eye, and there are the usual Dick tropes -- philosophical taxicabs, psycho-babble, and illusion generating machines. But none of them catch hold, not even the loss of reality, in the way that those tropes do in the best of Dick.

For Dick completists.… (more)