Dr. Futurity: A Novel

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

This Paperback Book item from Vintage was reviewed on 13-Oct-2008.

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1) Paperback Book Dr. Futurity: A Novel by Vintage. Authors, like all other humans, need some time to develop their own styles. That was certainly true of Philip K. Dick. "Dr. Futurity" was only the second novel he ever wrote, although it wasn´t published until seven years later, and he seems to have tried to stuff everything he wanted to communicate into its 150 pages, all before he had grown into his own man. You have to admire his ambition, but with all due respect he should have called this book "Dr. Futility".

Leaving aside for the moment the novel´s place in PKD´s body of work, though, it just isn´t very good. Its flaws are those of a lot of writers´ early work - much of the dialogue is way too expository to seem realistic, the plot jumps around beyond any possibility of coherence, and the characters are either heroes or villains of the deepest stripe. Not to mention that the whole thing lacks any sort of humor or subtext; it´s a Twilight Zone temporal puzzle and leaves little emotional impact. Good thing it´s so short.

The cover of my edition refers to this as a "chilling time travel classic". It´s got time travel in it, to be sure. Dr. Jim Parsons, driving to work, finds himself abruptly yanked into a far future where humans belong to totemic tribes and look forward to death as their greatest opportunity to contribute to the advancement of both humanity and their own tribes. Just why Dr. Parsons has been thus kidnapped and what he´s supposed to do relates to this societal attitude, but it takes his arrest, exile to a prison colony on Mars, rescue, association with a highly sensual tribal mother and travel to sixteenth-century California to prevent the assassination of Sir Francis Drake.

Got all that? Well, if you read this novel, don´t fret, you´ll come to understand. The writing is clear enough. Unfortunately, it´s got so much to do in conveying the incidents of the plot that it hasn´t got time to do anything else.

Now, in all fairness, "Dr. Futurity" asks some interesting questions about the efficacy of time travel. Even more unusual, it asks whether time travel is a moral activity. The first question has been asked before, but I´m not sure about the second. In fact, it´s that last question that gives this novel some relationship to PKD´s later work - he was always considering new aspects of old science fictional notions.

The old question asks us to suppose that we went back in time to right an old wrong - could we do it? Or, in changing the past, would we perhaps change things so as to prevent our own existence? And if we did that, since we would not be around to make the change, would the change be made? Writers have been pointing that out for eighty years or so.

The new question asks us to suppose that we went back in time to right an old wrong - have we the right to do it? Suppose that in doing so, we endangered ourselves. If we defended ourselves, what might the consequences be? What about those we left back in our own time? What consequences would they have to endure if we changed the past, even in a way they might approve of? Something tells me that PKD was the first, and maybe the only, writer to ask his readers to consider anything of that sort.

It´s just too bad that he wasn´t skillful enough as yet to work those ideas into a fictional context. His characters actually ask them, in so many words, and sometimes out loud. Surely I need not tell you that people don´t actually talk like that to each other. They may talk like that to themselves, of course, but not in well-crafted sentences, and usually with some overlay of emotional turmoil included.

Ironically, in the year that "Dr. Futurity" was published, PKD had recently completed the classic "Time Out of Joint", and would shortly produce his Hugo-Award winner "The Man in the High Castle". In those works, he showed conclusively that his lack of craft in "Dr. Futurity" was a thing of the past.

Benshlomo says, There´s a time to reach back into the past and a time to leave it alone.¤

2) Paperback Book Dr. Futurity: A Novel by Vintage. This 1960 effort starts with Dr. Parsons being swept up from his home time, something in the near future, to a strange culture of the farther future. His life-saving skills turn out not to be needed in that distant day. In fact, those who suffer day to day injuries (lots of them, they´re a careless bunch) are much more likely to call for a "euthanor" than for a medic. He´s convicted of saving someone´s life, with charge filed by the one he saved. All of which makes the question even more impenetrable? Who, in that death-crazed era, would go through such effort to hire a doctor? Well, we find out, and then the time-hopping begins. Remember those time-travel stories where one guy could be a heck of a crowd, and where future events impose a duty on some guy to make them happen? One of them.

Not too much of this story has aged. In fact, only the doctor with black bag would seem anachronistic to today´s reader, nearly half a century after the book was written. The fact that the bag contains things like a cardiac bypass pump, which can be installed under field conditions with just an hour´s work, leaves one wondering: just what kind of house call was he making? "It´s OK Mrs. Hausfrau, I gave little Johnny two aspirin and a cardiac bypass. He´ll be fin in the morning - just don´t forget to change his batteries."

I don´t see this as one of Dick´s finest efforts. Parts of the story seem bolted together, and individuals´ motivations in the second half get murky. Lots of SF stories get off the ground using reversal of some social assumption, but the death cult seems a bit ham-handed. "Dr. Futurity" is a fun ride, but not part of the ouvre that earned Dick his reputation as master.

-- wiredweird¤

3) Paperback Book Dr. Futurity: A Novel by Vintage. This is one of the last Dick novels to be reprinted, which should tell you something. It´s one of Dick´s weaker novels although probably not his worst (Vulcan´s Hammer anyone?)

Basically, save your money and time and read something else by Dick like Ubik, Man in the High Castle, etc...

¤

4) Paperback Book Dr. Futurity: A Novel by Vintage. This short PKD novel is not at the top of the list in execution but for Dick completists, it is an interesting time travel/paradox story. Many of us are now searching out more obscure stories by PKD, having read all his "classsics," and this novel certainly deserves a reading to compare it to his more fleshed-out novels.¤

5) Paperback Book Dr. Futurity: A Novel by Vintage. Although it would have to be called one of Dick´s weaker novels, Dr. Futurity, first published in 1960, is still a lot of fun. It concerns a present-day doctor who is plucked into the future by a tribe of Indians with time-travel technology. In their world the healing arts have been lost, since the ideal of dying to make room for an improved breed of humanity has displaced the value of living one´s own life. The Indians, however, are inspired by a fanatical and paranoid leader, who is lying mortally wounded, on whom they wish the doctor to operate. In his effort to save the man, the doctor is thrust into a series of ingenious time paradoxes, which can be seen as a warm-up for the far richer novels Martian Time-Slip (1964) and Now Wait for Last Year (1966).¤

6) Paperback Book Dr. Futurity: A Novel by Vintage. Jim Parsons is a talented doctor, skilled at the most advanced medical techniques and dedicated to saving lives. But after a bizarre road accident leaves him hundreds of years in the future, Parsons is horrified to discover an incredibly advanced civilization that zealously embraces death. Now, he is caught between his own instincts and training as a healer and a society where it is illegal to save lives. But Parsons is not the only one left who believes in prolonging life, and those who share his beliefs have desperate plans for Dr.Parsons´ skills, and for the future of their society. Dr. Futurity is not only a thrilling rendition of a terrifying future but it is also a fantastic examination of the paradoxes of time-travel that could only have come from the mind of Philip K. Dick.


Winner of both the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards for best novel, widely regarded as the premiere science fiction writer of his day, and the object of cult-like adoration from his legions of fans, Philip K. Dick has come to be seen in a literary light that defies classification in much the same way as Borges and Calvino. With breathtaking insight, he utlizes vividly unfamiliar worlds to evoke the hauntingly and hilariously familiar in our society and ourselves.¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 10-Nov-2008, 14000300999781400030095, 510-900-561-641-991-291-8

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