Eye in the Sky: A Novel

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

This Paperback Book item from Vintage was reviewed on 26-Oct-2008.

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1) Paperback Book Eye in the Sky: A Novel by Vintage. Writers are always borrowing from each other, twisting classic literary styles, playing ruthless games with plot and character and logic. This, however, may be the first time I´ve run across a novel that gets its opening setup from a comic book.

That´s not to say that Philip K. Dick intended to ring changes on a comic book, or even that he realized he was doing so - his readers know by now that he got inspiration and ideas anywhere he could find them, consciously or otherwise. I only suggest that readers of classic Marvel comics might find more here to identify with than they suspect.

Anyone who reads those comics, or has seen the movies, knows that the heroes often fall victim to industrial or lab accidents and emerge with super powers. The eight major characters of "Eye in the Sky" literally fall into a linear accelerator, and emerge with powers beyond anything that the Incredible Hulk ever dreamed of. They only get those powers one at a time, though. There goes PKD again, taking a standard story idea and showing us that maybe it wouldn´t be such a good deal after all.

Lest some non-reader of comics stop there, however, let me assure you that you won´t find any costumed oddballs here and almost no lines of dialogue end with exclamation points, so you´re quite safe. Aside from the peculiar originating incident at the atomic energy plant, then, this is mostly a sort of scientific/ontological puzzle. Interesting as a brain teaser, but you have to dig for the human content. Happily, it´s there.

Unfortunately, it´s also a little dry. Jack Hamilton (the author had not yet developed his gift for interesting character names) loses his job at a missile plant because his wife goes to progressive political meetings and signs peace petitions. By the twisted logic of the age, this makes him a security risk. He and his wife, five other characters and a guide go to tour the accelerator, arriving just in time for that accident. The eight of them gradually realize that the world they have awakened in is not quite the one they fell out of. As I said, they also realize that, one by one, they are gaining Godlike powers, or so it seems. They spend the rest of the story in a straightforward attempt to learn what´s going on and to get home.

Now, "Eye in the Sky" came out in 1957 and takes place in 1959, so there´s plenty of other stuff going on here. The security man responsible for getting Hamilton fired over his wife´s activities is part of the group that falls, so we get some commentary on the Red Scare of the 1950s and its effects. The group´s guide is a student of advanced physics, but he´s black and has to take relatively menial jobs, so we get some commentary on the early civil rights movement. Some of the characters have psychological disorders to deal with, and because of the nature of the crisis they fall into, everyone else has to deal with those disorders as well.

In other words, this novel is somewhat more than just a hard science romp. It turns out that this accident and its aftermath give Jack Hamilton the chance to confront his latent racism, to uncover his paternalistic attitude toward his wife and the buried cracks in his marriage, to consider just how he feels about his country and what´s happened to it, and I think I´m not giving anything away by saying that he emerges as a stronger and better man. All of this is touching in its own way, and well worth the ride.

Maybe it´s just the industrial setting, or the Cold War politics, or the episodic nature of the storyline, but for all the emotional upheavals, "Eye in the Sky" is sort of plain vanilla. The ideas and environments are typically more interesting than the characters, which can be a dangerous state of affairs - in clumsier hands, it can leave the reader nothing to care about, and even here it makes the book drag in spots. This is the last thing one expects from Philip K. Dick, as is the hard science content. Still, even leaving that aside, the book is a trifle drab. It´s also frustrating that we don´t get a very clear sense of anyone´s inner life other than Jack Hamilton´s (and when you read the book, you´ll know how ironic that statement is). At least there´s a genuine eye in the sky, even if it disappears about halfway through.

Nevertheless, "Eye in the Sky" is a good read, with enough spice along the way to keep the interest level going. And for those who take an interest in Philip K. Dick´s work, this novel shows us some good early promise. You can see the author working out his interest in paranoia and obsession, his distrust of political systems, his concern for working people and for married couples, and his obvious love for his characters, even the horrible ones. He was also clever enough, this early in his career, to end on a slightly ambiguous note, letting us wonder if all will be well. That he got his mass-market pulp SF publisher to put it out with that kind of conclusion is an accomplishment in itself.

Perhaps that´s what I respond to in "Eye in the Sky" - you can feel Phil Dick revving his engines here. A couple of years later he published "Time Out of Joint," using a lot of the same thematic materials to astoundingly better effect, and he was well on his way. So were we.

Benshlomo says, One man´s trashy read is another man´s practice swing.¤

2) Paperback Book Eye in the Sky: A Novel by Vintage. Eye in the Sky was written by the eponymous Philip K. Dick, he of Blade Runner ("Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") and The Running Man, among other seemingly made for the big screen novels. Dick´s meditations on consciousness are a running theme throughout all of his works, and Eye in the Sky is no different. In this tale, our hero Jack Hamilton and has just been given a choice at his military contractor job, where he works at a facility that contains the particle accelerator known as the Bevatron. Jack´s wife, Marsha, is suspected of being a Communist sympathizer, and as a result Jack´s job is at risk. Adding to the betrayal, Jack´s friend Charles McFeyffe is head of security and leads the prosecution against them.

With Jack questioning his own wife´s loyalty and choosing between his marriage and his career, Jack, Marsha, Charles, and a few other folks take a tour of the newly operating Bevatron. Then disaster strikes.

The Bevatron´s particle beam tears through the visitor catwalk above, dumping eight people into it, including Jack, Marsha, and Charles, along with Bill Laws, an African-American scientist reduced to giving tours of the Bevatron; Arthur Silvester, a fundamentalist World War II veteran; Joan Reiss, a neurotic secretary; and Edith Pritchert and her son, a prim-and-proper patron of the arts. While their bodies lay crumpled on rubble of the broken Bevatron, their consciousnesses are whisked away to alternate universes created by each of the visitors.

In some ways, Dick was light years ahead of his time. Although the novel is obviously dated by references to McCarthyism, the challenges posed by each world couldn´t be more apt for our modern times. The first world, created by Silvester, is a fundamentalist´s dream, combining geocentric Christian and Islamic beliefs. Dick skewers both religions with one deft chapter, and the reference to Eye in the Sky has (among other parallels) a literal manifestation in Silvester´s God. That´s right, he´s a big Eye of Sauron, so big that it looks like a gigantic lake.

Silvestri´s world is either terrifying or hilarious, depending on your perspective. With the divine so intimately real, prayers manifest (one simply prays for money), God´s wrath is always around the corner (transforming straying believers into hunchbacked damned souls), and science is a cult that nobody seriously practices. Dick shows just how capricious and dangerous an old Testament God would be, and the difficulty of navigating a modern world with such an omniscient presence.

And yet, Silvester´s world has laws. Subsequent worlds range from the bizarre to the outright terrifying. Pritchet´s world is one of absolute tranquility, a super-filter that causes anything offending Edith to disappear from existence. Again, Dick hits the mark: in the world of Tivo, the Internet, and politicized news channels, the ability to filter out dissenting opinions has become all too common. If it were literally true, Dick demonstrates how what might on the surface seem ideal rapidly descends into a very personal hell.

The next world is by far the most terrifying; If Mrs. Pritchet found everything offensive, Reiss is afraid of it all. The water is poisoned, houses literally try to eat you, and lurking inside every one of us is a cold, calculating insect just dying to burst free...

The final world brings us back to the crux of the conflict for Jack and Marsha - a Communist´s view of what America must be like. The identity of the creator will ultimately determine if Marsha is guilty of being a Communist.

The book is not without its flaws. Dick comes off very much a political author who doesn´t necessarily know the targets he skewers. A fight with angels devolves into a peculiar human-like brawl, with angels being kicked in the groin, skewered in the spleen with a hatpin (seriously), and otherwise being beaten up as if they were common thugs. No fundamentalist worth his bible would ever believe angels could be so easily defeated, much less beaten up.

Bill Laws, the African-American, is cast in a sympathetic light, but he has little to do. Laws never gets his own world and thus he seems more of a caricature, content only to chastise Jack on his own hypocrisy. Marsha comes off as whiny and self-centered, and her supposed interest in political causes makes her seem more like a suburban socialite with too much time on her hands than a believable advocate of human rights. And then there´s Jack, who just comes off as an arrogant jerk most of the time.

And yet, Eye in the Sky is so far ahead of its time. Dick has set up a perfect series of foibles to demonstrate his own beliefs, and in doing so shows how we all barter our individual freedoms for religion (Silvester), peace (Pritchet), security (Reiss), and democracy.¤

3) Paperback Book Eye in the Sky: A Novel by Vintage. This novel is best enjoyed if you know nothing about it and just read it cold. I was fortunate enough to have done just that, and got a lot more out of it, because the back blurb gives quite a bit of it away.

Eye In The Sky is another expedition into PKD´s favorite theme: "what is reality?" As such, the reader spends the first half of the book learning what the "game rules" are, and once the fun of that has played itself out, the back half is spent trying to figure out who the "game master" is -- which purposefully shifts several times. Because of this, there are two levels of enjoyment in the book.

Normally, I´m a bit wary of PKD´s early works, especially his short stories (which were written for pulp magazines with an obvious looming deadline and word limit.) Eye In The Sky surprised me at how well it was written (for someone still early in his career) and I believe it ranks up with the classics of his later days.¤

4) Paperback Book Eye in the Sky: A Novel by Vintage. "Eye in the Sky" is a twisted trip through the mental realities of several messed up characters. The idea is interesting but I think that it could have been executed better by Dick, who writes this book too chaotically. Ultimately, the conclusion is disappointing and predictable. Read "Time Out of Joint" or "A Maze of Death" for some better examples of Dick´s work.¤

5) Paperback Book Eye in the Sky: A Novel by Vintage. In the 1950s, America was troubled with an identity crisis...the struggles between paranoia and socialism and communism and the fear of the different or seemingly un-American were gripping the nation. From the Beavers´ sterile vision of America to the youth yearning to throw off the yoke of societies norms through figures like Elvis Presley to McCarthy, we were defending our society from every angle - both the overly conservative who wanted us all to act and behave the "right" way and those who embraced the false hope of socialism or communism and the belief that we can make an "equal" society and everything in between.

During a tour of the new Bevatron facility, eight people from different walks of life are bathed in the Bevatron beam when something goes terribly wrong with the Bevatron experiment. After the accident, these eight people think that they have escaped any effects of the accident until they realize that they are trapped in a time hole and dropped into an alternate reality - kind of a quantum virtual reality - where one of the eight are secretly creating the rules and manipulating the laws of physics through their dreams. And these dreams are definitely specific about how they think the world should be and how people should live in it.

From here, this book also becomes a whodunit of sorts as some the eight begin to understand what is going on; they must learn who their new companions are and what they believe if they are to determine who is controlling their reality so they can stop the madness before things get out of control. But they also figure out that the only way to stop the person is to kill them...something that isn´t too easy to do when that person controls the nature of reality.

Oh yeah...and killing this person is just the beginning of their journey back to reality.

In one of his most lucid novels, Philip K. Dick´s *Eye in the Sky* takes a critical look at the America where one group or another thinks they have all the answers and know exactly how everyone else should live. If ever someone wanted to truly understand the importance of keeping society out of the bedroom and the like, this would be the book to start with. And, for anyone just wanted to get started in reading Philip K. Dick, *Eye in the Sky* is one of the five to start with.

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A Guide to my Book Rating System:

1 star = The wood pulp would have been better utilized as toilet paper.
2 stars = Don´t bother, clean your bathroom instead.
3 stars = Wasn´t a waste of time, but it was time wasted.
4 stars = Good book, but not life altering.
5 stars = This book changed my world in at least some small way.¤

6) Paperback Book Eye in the Sky: A Novel by Vintage. While sightseeing at the Belmont Bevatron, Jack Hamilton, along with seven others, is caught in a lab accident. When he regains consciousness, he is in a fantasy world of Old Testament morality gone awry—a place of instant plagues, immediate damnations, and death to all perceived infidels. Hamilton figures out how he and his compatriots can escape this world and return to their own, but first they must pass through three other vividly fantastical worlds, each more perilous and hilarious than the one before.

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 utilizes vividly unfamiliar worlds to evoke the hauntingly and hilariously familiar in our society and ourselves.¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 23-Nov-2008, 14000301029781400030101, 500-510-040-860-750-561-021-371-8

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