Now Wait for Last Year [Paperback]

"Now Wait for Last Year" is yet another example. As with most of Dick's later novels, it's difficult to state simply what it's "about". NWFLY is "about" a future Earth that, like Italy and Hungary in WW II, has made a hideously bad choice and is lined up on the wrong side against a very alien but far from ignoble species. It's also "about" a drug that allows people to slip from one alternate timeline to another. And about a man debating his responsibility to a wife suffering from progressive brain damage from abusing that very drug. And about another man (one of Dick's beloved simpletons) whose hobby is making little carts for rejected missile guidance systems out of no more than a sense of fairness.

The other reviewers are far from wrong in their view that very little happens. This is Dick writing SF in mainstream mode, where what occurs is less important than how people handle it, from Earth's military dictator (who is a lot better than he has to be--more of a MacArthur than a Mussolini) to the guy with the carts. There's no grand climax or slick SF "solution", just a minor epiphany as things finally fall into place for one character. The last scene, which in other hands would have been simply absurd (it does, after all, portray a character named "Sweetscent" having an emotional conversation with an automated cab) comprise some of the most hopeful pages in any recent novel in SF or out.

NWFLY is the book that most clearly reveals Dick's fundamental decency, his sweetness of spirit. John Gardner, the litcrit who was not a poststructuralist and suffered for it, once wrote that the novelist must never forget that some of his readers will be sick, some dying, and some in trouble. Dick never forgot. "Now Wait for Last Year" is a book for people in trouble. Which means, of course, just about everybody.

As in many Philip Dick novels there are logical challenges which may compromise the story for people who are unable/unwilling to accept a basic premise of the novel. In this case it is the power of a drug to actually move people temporarily in time - forwards or backwards - or across parallel worlds. Not make it appear that they move, but actually move them. The descriptions of characters in the influence of the drug are so fascinating - for me anyway - that the logical discontinuities disappeared into the far recesses of my mind. And now I realise that there are many logical problems for me in the REAL world that I have trundled away in the back of my mind so that I can get on with life.

Philip Dick's graphic and extending speculations on the natureof reality certainly push hard into my reality and how I understand it. And here's a quote: '..... you've only got one tiny life and that lies ahead of you, not sideways or back.'