Dr. Bloodmoney (Paperback)

Dick began writing in the 1950s, a decade haunted by the Cold War and a decade which witnessed the blossoming of science fiction. While this form of literature was already haunting the margins of culture as early as 1926, when Hugo Gernsback identified it as "scientifiction", it was the terror of science gone mad-the atomic bomb-that gave science fiction its first, heroin-like shot in the arm.
Fear of the bomb is omnipresent in Dick's work, but perhaps his strongest expression of this Cold War terror comes in 1965's Dr. Bloodmoney. Written in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Dr. Bloodmoney is an attempt to somehow control the fear of a world teetering on the brink of nuclear war. In a fittingly Nietzschean gesture, Dick decides to drop the dreaded bomb. His evocation of the H-bomb's explosion over San Francisco in the opening pages of the novel is shattering, and we follow the shaken cast of survivors in their slow struggle to recover and rebuild.
These survivors include the eponymous and unbalanced Dr. Bluthgeld whose earlier atomic test for the U.S. government had unforeseen lethal consequences. He believes that he has triggered the atomic holocaust with the power of his mind, and the weight of this responsibility crushes him. But he also perceives himself as the reluctant executor of a terrible judgement against humanity. Thus, in this one character, Dick precariously balances the forces at play in the Cold War: the insupportable burden of possessing nuclear weapons, the existence of "lofty reasons" for the potential use of them, and the fear that decision-making power is exercised by mentally-ill individuals. Dick further heightens the reader's sense of the fragility of the nuclear situation by having Dr. Stockstill-unsubtly portrayed and named to form the solid centre around which the survivors gather-muse that the inevitability of nuclear war is a natural phenomenon, and that the very existence and proliferation of these weapons necessarily reaches a critical mass after which they irreversibly come into use. Against such an inexorable natural process, Dick holds up another: the sense of strength and healing that comes from community. Dick hopes for nothing more than a balancing of forces, which is hinted at by one of his favourite words-homeostatic. This word is highlighted during the tableau that concludes the novel: one of the survivors watches a homeostatic trap chase a pair of mutated bulldogs, but the trap is too slow to catch them. Yet the survivor knows that the trap will never abandon the chase. The tableau presents a balance emblematic of the stability that the characters in the novel strive for, and that the Cold War world sought as well.
Patrick R. Burger (Books in Canada)

Written in the late 1950s and early 1960s, these titles follow Dick's familiar theme that things and people are not quite what and who they seem, basically challenging reality. Though dead for 20 years now, Dick still is hugely popular among sf readers and Blade Runner nuts, so pop for these.
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