Most helpful customer reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Overlooked masterpiece, Jun 7 2004
Although Now Wait for Last Year is usually grouped with the novels of Dick's late 1960s period, it was completed by late 1963. It as the first of several novels in which drugs are a major element, the others being The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Lies Inc., and A Scanner Darkly. In Now Wait for Last Year the drug in question, JJ-180, supposedly hallucinogenic, does more than alter consciousness: it takes the user backwards or forwards in time. It alters not just subjective reality, but also objective reality, and allows concourse between the parallel universes of different time tracks. Of the novel's main characters, Gino Molinari, the world leader, attempts to use the drug to break out of the fatality of history and linear time and borrow from other possible universes for the benefit of his own. His physician, Eric Sweetscent, for his part, tries to create a desirable future by communicating with future versions of himself. His love/hate relationship with his wife becomes a major element of his desire to escape the present. In a well-known scene, he gets psychological counseling from a talking taxicab. This is a brilliant and fascinating novel that tends to get overlooked among Dick's better known works.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Close to the Top, April 16 2004
There's real sense of the arbitrary in the rating of Dick's books. Serious misfires like "Time Out of Joint" and "Ubik" receive high praise, while fine minor works like "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said" fall through the cracks. It'll take some effort to fix this. It hasn't happened yet. "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.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
reality, reflections, speculation, May 21 2003
This is a very engaging novel typically for Philip Dick being centred on a character not quite at the hub of the action - an observer, one who can reflect and speculate. And isn't that all of us as our everyday lives infringe on the events of the world - infringe rather than impact?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.'
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by Philip K. Dick
by Philip K. Dick
by Philip K. Dick
by Philip K. Dick
by Philip K. Dick
