Synopses & Reviews
On a planet run by escapees from a mental institution, the doctors who arrive to restore order may be the craziest of all.
For years, the third moon in the Alphane system was used as a psychiatric hospital. But when war broke out between Earth and the Alphanes, the hospital was left unguarded and the inmates set up their own society, made up of competing factions based around each mental illness. When Earth sends a delegation to take back the colony, they find enclaves of depressives, schizophrenics, paranoiacs, and other mentally ill people coming together to repel what they see as a foreign invasion. Meanwhile, back on Earth, CIA agent Chuck Rittersdorf and his wife Mary are going through a bitter divorce, with Chuck losing everything. But when Chuck is assigned to clandestinely control an android accompanying Mary to the Alphane moon, he sees an opportunity to get his revenge.
Synopsis
Clans of the Alphane Moon deals with one of Philip K. Dicks favorite themes: mental illness and what that actually means. The Alphane moon may be full of people with clinical disorders, but are the "normal" people who are supposed to cure them really any saner?
Synopsis
From Philip K. Dick, the Hugo Award-winning author of The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep -- the basis for the film Blade Runner -- Clans of the Alphane Moon explores the meaning of mental illness through the actions of people with clinical disorders and those of the doctors tasked with curing them.
For years, the third moon in the Alphane system was used as a psychiatric hospital. But when war broke out between Earth and the Alphanes, the hospital was left unguarded and the inmates set up their own society, made up of competing factions based around each mental illness. When Earth sends a delegation to take back the colony, they find enclaves of depressives, schizophrenics, paranoiacs, and other mentally ill people coming together to repel what they see as a foreign invasion.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, CIA agent Chuck Rittersdorf and his wife Mary are going through a bitter divorce, with Chuck losing everything. But when he is assigned to clandestinely control an android accompanying Mary to the Alphane moon, he sees an opportunity to get his revenge.
Synopsis
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 Year bursts through the envelope between the impossible and the inevitable. Even as it 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 is.
Synopsis
Earth is trapped in the crossfire of an unwinnable war between two alien civilizations. Its leader is perpetually on the verge of death. And on top of it all, a new drug has just entered circulation—a drug that haphazardly sends its users traveling through time. In an attempt to escape his doomed marriage, Dr. Eric Sweetscent becomes caught up in all of it. But he has questions: is Earth on the right side of the war? Is he supposed to heal Earths leader or keep him sick? And can he change the harrowing future that the drug has shown him?
About the Author
Over a writing career that spanned three decades, Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) published 36 science fiction novels and 121 short stories in which he explored the essence of what makes man human and the dangers of centralized power. Toward the end of his life, his work turned toward deeply personal, metaphysical questions concerning the nature of God. Eleven novels and short stories have been adapted to film; notably: Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly. The recipient of critical acclaim and numerous awards throughout his career, Dick was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2005, and in 2007 the Library of America published a selection of his novels in three volumes. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.