Now Wait for Last Year

Author - Philip K. Dick ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Paperback Book item from Vintage was reviewed on 3-Nov-2008.

Search ISBN:0679742204 offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. Now Wait for Last Year Reference Book. Classifications : General AAS United States World Literature Literature & Fiction Subjects Books Dick, Philip K. ( D ) Authors, A-Z Science Fiction & Fantasy Subjects Books General Science Fiction Science Fiction & Fan . Click the following link to view the cover of Now Wait for Last Year.

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1) Paperback Book Now Wait for Last Year by Vintage. This one seldom gets a mention among Philip K. Dick´s greats, like "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," "Ubik," "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and "The Man in the High Castle". With all due respect to those classics, it´s a sin and a shame. This novel should be welcomed into that august company, and without delay.

On the other hand, perhaps "Now Wait for Last Year" flew under the radar because the story is really so ordinary. You can wrap up the basic plot in a very few words; a doctor, in a bad marriage made worse by addiction, grows into a genuinely good man by means of the hardship thrown in his way by a high-pressure government job during wartime. Sort of a combination of "The Days of Wine and Roses" and "Dr. Zhivago". With poisonous addictive drugs and time travel thrown in.

I can´t think of any other author who postulated time travel by chemical means - that is, the idea that certain drugs might affect actual reality, not just your sense of reality. Take JJ-180 in the world of "Last Year" and you find yourself in the actual past or future. Of course, then you come down, come back, and die in great pain a few months later if you don´t take it again. If you do take it again, you die of irreversible neurological damage in a year or so.

Now, here´s what makes this one of PKD´s great novels; like the ones mentioned above and a few others, this time the author found a way to unite his multiple plot strands into a cohesive story. In this book, humanity develops JJ-180 as a weapon against the insectoid reegs. Our ostensible allies, the humanoids of the Lilistar Empire, make use of the drug against certain humans to keep Earth in the war on their side. One of their victims is Karen Sweetscent, who hooks her husband Eric to force his help in getting her off the stuff. (Or maybe just out of spite - PKD was a trifle peeved at women during these years.)

The Sweetscents are one of PKD´s typical couples of this period in his work - they can´t stand each other but can´t let go, either - and the whole thing is complicated by the fact that Eric Sweetscent has recently become personal physician to the ruler of Earth, Gino Molinari. In short, here is a war between various galactic species and a war between a man and a woman; each conflict comments on the other, and JJ-180 emerges as a weapon in both.

Eric, the linchpin of all this hoo-ha, must decide where his loyalties lie. The question is all the more pressing because the fate of the Earth may depend upon his answer, by means of his relationship with Molinari, also known as "The Mole". And he doesn´t have much time for necessary reflection, because the Mole is not normal either mentally or physically. He´s desperately ill with any number of complaints, many of which ought to be fatal, but he keeps on surviving. This is obviously a man of enormous power even when sick.

And the most astonishing thing about him isn´t even his ability to overcome cancer, renal failure, heart attack and God knows what. It´s the way in which he uses his illness to avoid the destruction of Earth. The sicker he gets, the less he can administer his government, and the less he can subordinate humanity to the destructive Lilistar Empire. Like many of his people, he comes to realize that allying himself with the so-called ´Starmen was a serious error, and so his disease allows him to accept responsibility and pay for his mistakes both at the same time. This is not your typical Christ figure - he´s a fat, middle aged, peevish, desperately sick, brilliant political strategist. The Moral Majority will burn this thing in a heartbeat if they ever bother to read it. Which they won´t.

Anyway, whatever else may be true, this is a war story like none you´ve ever seen before, complete with chemical and biological weapons like none you´ve ever seen before, both of which operate best when turned upon ourselves, not the enemy. And we haven´t even gone into the time travel aspects yet. Why, you may ask, would anyone come up with a weapon that literally sends the enemy back in time temporarily?

Oh, no you don´t. You´re going to have to read the book to learn that little detail. Suffice to say that the time-travel character of JJ-180 lies at the heart of the Mole´s power, as well as his illness, and therefore at the heart of Eric Sweetscent´s journey into his own character. And there you have the brilliance of PKD and of "Now Wait for Last Year" - everything connects and becomes richer by its contact with everything else. Sometimes this produces paranoia, in life and in PKD´s work. At other times, again in both places, it produces some kind of spiritual breakthrough.

So I invite you to follow Eric Sweetscent as his life spirals out of control, first in his marriage, then in his employment, then in his ability to stay in one place at one time. The last chapter is particularly worthwhile, an early example of PKD´s trademark emotional conclusions in which his protagonist wanders through the lonely city wondering whether it´s even worth going on, and finds inspiration in watching a simple (and in this case artificial) form of life just doing the best it can. When someone blesses Sweetscent as a good man at the end, you know it´s true.

Besides, what could be bad about a novel that starts off in a building shaped like an apteryx? No one but PKD would think of that.

Benshlomo says, The road to enlightenment has never been easy.¤

2) Paperback Book Now Wait for Last Year by Vintage. This book belongs very much in the mainstream of Dick´s work. It has his typical emphasis on drugs, power structures, artificial people, alternate realities, and time discontinuities. What distinguishes it from many of his other works is the portrayed relationship between Dr. Sweetscent and his wife Kathy, one of conflicted love/hate and dominance games, a portrayal that is much more realistic than many such within the SF field, and which provides an underlying tension to the book well beyond its ostensible main plot of trying to save the Earth from the war between the `Starlings and the reeqs.

The drug in question is JJ-80, which not only is highly addictive after just one use, but makes the user actually travel in time. Regardless of the scientific implausibility of this, Dick handles the problem of time travel well, postulating that most such travelers end up causing parallel time tracks/universes, and neatly tying this concept in with using people from one universe as replacements for some in the viewpoint universe. Then Dick adds `robants´, artificial people, to the mix, which leads to his typical confusion of just who is who (or what), along with questions about the ultimate nature of reality.

Dick´s prose is quite utilitarian here, but it does get the job done. There are some odd lapses in both portrayals of some characters (mainly the Mole, ruler of the Earth) and in the underlying motives for some of the `Starlings actions. And it suffers from a typical failing of SF books of this period, that of the single average man as world saver, which makes the already difficult suspension of disbelief even harder. Still, it´s more coherent than many of his books, though it´s certainly not up to the level of excellence of his Man In The High Castle.

A must for Dick fans, worth reading by the casual SF fan.

-- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
¤

3) Paperback Book Now Wait for Last Year by Vintage. As the name suggests, this deals with time travel, sort of. PDK leaves it up in the air as to whether time travel is truly possible by suggesting that perhaps other time streams would be other parallel universes. Toss into this a bit of Xenophobia, marital strife and the drive of personal responsibility and you have a lot going on in 230 pages.

I am reading all the PDK novels, one a month. I am 10 months in to this three year trek. It seems, after 10 books, that PKD has an adjustment period. In the first few books I read he annoyed me. Now I´m into a groove.

One note, it´s interesting to see the concepts in this book played out in the longer and different works by other writers like Orson Scott Card. There´s more than a smidgeon of this in the Ender series.¤

4) Paperback Book Now Wait for Last Year by Vintage. I love Philip K. Dick´s books (almost all of them, and I´m pretty sure I´ve read just about all of them over the years). But I have a strong suspicion that he wrote Now Wait for Last Year when he was a kid and had it published after his writing credentials had been secured. In the book, he uses a lot of big words (for an S.F. writer), but he doesn´t seem to know how to use them properly. And he doesn´t know how to use the English language properly, either. There´s no way this book could have been published on its own, with no famous author´s name on it. The plot is excellent, and true PK Dickian. But I had a VERY hard time finishing it because of the astonishingly bad writing (it´s his style, but the awkwardness of the syntax and word usage is like driving on a pot-holed road). Any other book of his is better. Read this one last.¤

5) Paperback Book Now Wait for Last Year by Vintage. Dr. Eric Sweetscent´s love/hate relationship with his wife is the focus of this bizarre tale of drugs, time travel, interplanetary war, and alternate realities. After a single exposure, Sweetscent´s wife Katharine has become helplessly addicted to a little-known drug called JJ-180, which has time-warping properties. She purposely addicts the good doctor (her husband) in order to obtain his help. Eric´s fight for survival leads him through a pharmaceutical company to the world government itself, where UN Secretary General Gino Molinari is using the reality-warping powers of JJ-180 to ward off an alien invasion. Can Eric conquer his addiction, save his wife, and fend off the alien overlords? Longtime readers of Dick´s work can probably guess the answer.

Even with all the dangers and plot twists in this story, it´s still basically an allegory about power. JJ-180 gives its users power over others, and the power to control events far beyond themselves. Katharine uses the drug´s power to control her husband, even at the risk of killing him. Facing death, Eric uses his power to control others, but stops short of controlling his own wife. The moral is aptly summed up by the cabdriver at the book´s conclusion: for Eric to take some critical step "would be to say, I can´t endure reality as such. I have to have uniquely special easier conditions". A former drug addict himself, Dick is telling us that reality has to be enough for all of us, even when the going gets rough. We shouldn´t need to have anything "uniquely special" just to make life worth living. A must for fans of PDK; for others who aren´t put off by science fiction and Dick´s quirky storytelling style, a sad and moving tale of love and reality.¤

6) Paperback Book Now Wait for Last Year by Vintage. Dr. Eric Sweetscent has problems. His planet is enmeshed in an unwinnable war. His wife is lethally addicted to a drug that whips its users helplessly back and forth across time -- and is hell-bent on making Eric suffer along with her. And Sweetscent´s newest patient is not only the most important man on the embattled planet Earth but quite possibly the sickest. For Secretary Gino Molinari has turned his mortal illness into an instrument of political policy -- and Eric cannot tell if his job is to make the Male better or to keep him poised just this side of death.

Now Wait for Last fear bursts through the envelope between the impossible and the inevitable. Even as ushers us into a future that looks uncannily like the present, it makes the normal seem terrifyingly provisional -- and compels anyone who reads it to wonder if he really knows what time it is.¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 1-Dec-2008, 06797422049780679742203, 340-510-900-040-860-750-021-8

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