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Counter-Clock World
Counter-Clock World
Counter-Clock World
Audiobook7 hours

Counter-Clock World

Written by Philip K. Dick

Narrated by Patrick Lawlor

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

About this audiobook

Counter-Clock World is a theological and philosophical adventure in a world set in reverse from the Hugo Award-winning science fiction novelist Philip K. Dick, author of The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—the basis for the film Blade Runner.

Time has begun moving backward. People greet each other with "goodbye," blow smoke into cigarettes, and rise from the dead. When one of those rising dead is the famous and powerful prophet Anarch Peak, a number of groups start a mad scramble to find him first—but their motives are not exactly benevolent, because Anarch Peak may just be worth more dead than alive, and these groups will do whatever they must to send him back to the grave.

What would you do if your long-dead relatives started coming back? Who would take care of them? And what if they preferred being dead? In Counter-Clock World, these troubling questions are addressed; though, as always, you may have to figure out the answers yourself.

"Dick is the American writer who in recent years has most influenced non-American poets, novelists, and essayists."—Roberto Bolaño

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 26, 2012
ISBN9781455881529
Author

Philip K. Dick

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 25 languages.

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Reviews for Counter-Clock World

Rating: 3.4450171182130584 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    An admirable effort. Philip K. Dick did a lot with his characters and plot in making it readable for the viewer. The plot is generally interesting and the characters follow through with it well, supplementing the chapter quotations which provide relevance towards the plot and themes of the book. This is typical Dick and it shows, through and through, of some of what he was capable of.3 stars.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    But this world *doesn't* move backwards - only select aspects of it, those that are most fun to write about, do.

    The sexism and near-pedophilia and religious drama are dominant here, not the ideas or even the *L*iterary stylings. And, get this, the *cop* is a sympathetic and heroic figure. That's weird for our favorite paranoiac, isn't it? (Or maybe not... I'll have to reread Do Androids... soon.)

    Anyway, by the end of this book there was no real impact on the world or on me, so despite the fact that I do feel I understood most of it, I won't pretend I either enjoyed or was impressed by it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Not the best Dick. Hobart Phase idea was weird and grotesque, as in his best works, but he usually comes up with one or more twists in his plots. Women characters poorly drawn, he is displaying his pulpy roots. Ending seemed unfinished, as if he wasn't getting paid for any more words.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    How much do I love Philip K. Dick? A lot, okay? I love him a lot. For which I mostly blame my father, but not in a bad way. It's just one of those things that are clearly attributable to a single source, like my love of novelty songs, or my compulsion to catalog and create checklists.

    So of course when I heard about the publication of his Exegesis I was excited. (Dick's that is. Not my father's.)

    But then reading about it made me strangely paranoid. It's not that reading about his theology/philosophy was in any way surprising -- I mean, I've read the V.A.L.I.S. trilogy. But reading about it as a theology/philosophy made me suspicious that each Dick novel I read was progressively programming my brain -- rewiring it along his own beliefs. Still, I was delighted to arrive at the bookstore and discover an entire Dick display, centered around The Exegesis. I picked it up and flipped through it, but in the end decided I was just not read for that much crazy, and set it back down.

    Happily, though, it was surrounded by a collection of handsome new editions of his novels by Mariner. I could not resist them, and so I picked up a copy of Counter-Clock World, which I read mostly in transit on my D.C. trip the next week.

    The central concept of the book is The Hobart Phase -- a reversal of time's (or entropy's) arrow, for the most part localized to the Earth. Long buried bodies reassemble themselves and come back to life in their coffins, from where they must be rescued before they run out of air and expire again. People disgorge their food, put it back in the fridge to take to the store later. With interesting ramifications -- disgorging is something to be done in private -- embarrassing, "food!" is an expletive, and "mouthhole!" a perjorative. But the central problem of the plot is religious in nature. What if you were the leader of a major religion, and you knew that the major prophet of your faith was shortly to rise again from the grave?

    Counter-Clock World is an expansion of a short story, and in retrospect that seems obvious. While there were interesting ideas and brilliant moments, in places the plot seemed threadbare, predictions of future fall-out of Dick's contemporary social upheavals not fully thought out, and the ending anti-climactic. Of course, a lot of Dick's stories end with a sucker-punch to the gut, but this one seemed to miss some of the impact.

    For Dick fanatics like me, still plenty diverting and compelling. Probably wouldn't recommend to anyone who hadn't read five of the great ones first.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Definitely not one of his better ones. The attempt to have time run backwards is not in any way convincing, only rarely interesting, and merely serves as a device to explore some religious themes, and that is done poorly. But maybe "explore" is too strong a word. As an example of a strange question arising from this scenario: When does a soul re-enter a body that is reforming, rejuvenating as time is turned back? What sort of answer would be meaningful, outside of the book? None that I can think of. Inside, it has next to no plot significance, and the spiritual issues are only dealt with in the presence of robot lawyers. If you time-reverse the fact that a soul enters the body a few days before it's reformed enough to start breathing, it seems to indicate a stance that the soul lingers around the body for a few days after death. But that idea can't connect to anything else in the book, so it just dangles, like so many other things. Religion gets a bad rap, mysticism and violence seem to go hand in hand. Neo-Platonism is briefly outlined, but nearly just as quickly brushed off as being so much hokum. The big reveal is ambiguous and uneventful. The ending suggests that living in the past eradicates hope and meaning from the present, but you'd have to read it to see if you agree.At only one point did the content cause me to stop and ponder, and that was the relationship between consciousness and time. If time is an illusion, and everything exists in some sort of eternal Now, from some vantage point, then the movement from point to point in your thinking is also an illusion. The feeling you have of time flowing takes place at a moment, and is composed of memories, firings of the brain at that moment. The feeling of flow is an illusion. And your whole life is like that. Maybe I'm not explaining myself well, but this is tricksy stuff. When I first started thinking on this sort of thing, I would occasionally feel a bit of despair. Somewhat like the main character, who frequently feels despair over his seemingly ineffectual attempts to assert himself and affect the flow of events.It is a quick, light read though, and is never boring or hard to understand. The men all seem to be the same character, and the women, though more varied (note: not nuanced), are rarely portrayed in a good light. So, it's a toss up on whether I'd suggest someone read it. It'd be a weird place for someone to begin reading PKD, but maybe that's just the thing to really appreciate his weirdness.2.5 stars on oc
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The whole concept of this story, where everything moves backwards, is really interesting. Cigarettes get longer as you smoke them. People come back to life and return to wombs.The ending is definitely not happy and is still a cliffhanger, but is probably the most satisfying possible finish.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This book's spine is broken by its own conceit. You get a few chapters into it and realize that the idea is the only thing that received any thought. This rest just seems to hang there, waiting for the cool idea to do something.Unfortunately, it doesn't.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5


    I first read this when I was in my late teens or early twenties -- about the right age to most enjoy Philip K. Dick, in other words -- and, perhaps surprisingly, found it a great disappointment after works like The Man in the High Castle. When I picked it up to read again recently, as part of a project about time-travel stories that I'm toying with, a sense of deep miasmic gloom pervaded every fibre of my socks, etc. But this time round the surprise was in the other direction: I really quite enjoyed it. I still found the writing very clumsy, the characterization virtually nonexistent and likewise the sense of place, the pacing erratic and all of that sort of stuff, but at least I wasn't bored, which I recall was my overwhelming reaction the first time I read the book. I was also startled by how much of it I remembered -- not the important passages (I'd completely forgotten the femme fatale, for example), but odd little incidentals, like the opening line and the closing line. Odd.

    Developed from a 1966 Amazing Stories tale called "Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday", the novel has the conceit that sometime in the near future the world -- but seemingly not other planets -- entered the Hobart Phase, whereby time started running backwards. So people regurgitate in private at mealtimes but have parties ingesting, via a long pipe, a substance called sogum whose precise nature the author is careful not to detail; they say goodbye on meeting and hello on parting; books are not written but erased; people have cute terms of abuse like "horse's mouth" and "mouth-hole" and "You're full of food"; and when they have sex it's often so that the man can, in effect, suck out the last remnant of the baby that, nine months ago, the woman implanted in her womb. In a similar vein, the course of life starts with the individual coalescing in her or his grave, being dug up (if lucky) and succoured until family or friends are found, and thereafter growing younger. Companies that patrol the graveyards to find "deaders", then look after them and sell them to (hopefully good) homes -- the converse of funeral parlours, in other words -- are called vitariums, and two of the principals, Sebastian Hermes and his wife Lotta, run one of these.

    It's while waiting for his team to arrive to dig up Mrs. Tilly M. Benton that Sebastian discovers nearby the grave of an important religious figure, the Anarch Peak, and realizes (a) that Peak is very soon going to revive and (b) that such a figure is sure to be worth a fortune on the market. That market consists of (1) the Udi, the predominantly black religious group based on the Anarch's teachings and now occupants of the Free Negro Municipality (i.e., most of the eastern seaboard of what used to be the US), (2) the Rome Syndicate, which appears to be the offspring of the Roman Catholic Church and the Mafia, and (3) the Udi's foe, the fascistic People's Topical Library, who would like to "disappear" the Anarch before he can come out with any new teachings, in particular any accounts of his time in the afterlife. The financial and political stakes are high, and Sebastian knows full well that his chances of coming out of this alive are not great.

    Soon he's out of his depth -- doubly so because the submissive, neurotic Lotta gets it into her head that she's in love with Officer Joe Tinbane, the cop whose discovery of Mrs. Tilly M. Benton started the plot rolling, and the two go off to have a fling in a seedy motel. Sebastian's ripe for seduction by one of the Library's crack agents, the sultry bombshell Ann Fisher, daughter of the intimidating Chief Librarian, Mavis McGuire. She soon weasels out of him the truth about the Anarch, but by this time Rome and the Udi are also in the game. Can Sebastian save Lotta, his marriage, the Anarch and his own life? Once he's reunited with Lotta -- Joe having been mown down by child (i.e., elderly) assassins sent by the Library -- the two plan to escape to Mars, even though the Hobart Phase is inactive there and Sebastian will have to find another line of work.

    The plot gets pretty woolly in places, as if Dick were making it up on the fly (which I imagine is very likely the case). There's some playful social satire, at least one bit of which reminds us that not much has changed: when Tinbane is killed, the LAPD is quick to blame the murder on "religious fanatics", which is racist code for members of the Udi, most of the Uditi being, as noted, black. As the Udi's current leader, Ray Roberts, explains: "The Uditi are always blamed for crimes of violence; it is common police and media policy." (p162)

    Where the book falls down, I think, is that -- as with other sf attempts to depict backward-running time (e.g., Aldiss's An Age/Cryptozoic! and Amis's Time's Arrow) -- the author isn't up to marshalling all the consequences of reversed time; and this may be because the task is impossible. (My own suspicion is that, if time ran backwards, either the universe would fall apart into chaos immediately or, contrariwise, we wouldn't notice any difference at all; the second possibility is the one that Aldiss proposes.) In Dick's novel people seem able to remember both the future and the past: to take a single example, the Anarch remembers being dead and reviving, but also his teachings and the establishment of the Udi. There are plenty of references to the long past, as it were, such as the teachings of St. Paul and an LP of Beethoven's music, and these might be rationalized as derived from artifacts that the backwards-living folk found littering up the landscape from when time was running in its ordinary direction; yet surely the very act of reading Acts would make you forget it, so people would have to rely on their partial or cloudy memories of the text they will one day read. (Of course, they might have read Acts a dozen times . . .) There's a quote from Lucretius engraved around the Anarch's tomb: Sic igitur magni quoque circum moenia mundi expugnata dabunt labem putresque ruinas ("So, likewise, the walls of the great universe, assailed on all sides, shall suffer decay and fall into mouldering ruin"); but how could someone discover a piece of Lucretius to quote accurately if the act of reading Lucretius meant you forgot the quote?

    And it seems the characters are able to remember the past only when it's convenient for the plot that they should do so. For example, Joe Tinbane is eager to bed Lotta Hermes, and eventually (travelling backwards in time) he does; but, if he can remember other past events, why can't he remember whether or not his seductive efforts prevailed, and indeed what it was like romping with Lotta? If the implication is that the characters are carving out a fresh lifeline for themselves this time round, fair enough; but then the chances of the activities of the present eventually generating St. Paul, Lucretius and Beethoven a few centuries hence are surely essentially zero.

    And there are lots of lesser quibbles along similar lines. In the counter-clock world, people get out of bed in the morning; shouldn't they be getting up in the evening?

    Some parts of the novel demand to be thought about, such as the occasional theological speculations; I especially liked Sebastian's account of the afterlife he experienced while dead: it was there, all right, but absolutely nothing happened in it -- hence the promise in religious books of eternal life after death was strictly true, but . . . Yet there are other areas, notably the sciencefictional ones, where, if you start to think too hard about them, the narrative collapses under the weight of its own inconsistencies.

    As I say, this may be because the task of writing a reversed-time plot is actually an impossible one. In the end, I guess what I'm saying is that Counter-Clock World is an interesting curio, and expecting it to be anything more than that is to expect too much of it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A strange world even in Dick's standards. A world where everything happens backwards. Well, not everything.... there are some pitfalls in the logic (everybody walks, thinks forward...) but the idea is great. The dead DO resurrect. And if one of the newly living is a great religious leader, prepare mayhem in Dick's style...
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An intriguing book and one which I wanted to read for a long time before I got my hands on a copy. I enjoyed it quite a lot. Unfortunately, for some reason I decided to sell my copy back to the second-hand bookshop I got it from, but it's a book I would like to have in my permanent library.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A rather strange one, this. Time running backwards is a theme infrequently tackled; in Brian Aldiss' 'Cryptozoic', it's always been running backwards and our evolutionary advantage as hominids arose when we developed the ability to perceive time the wrong way round and foresee the future (i.e. run time in the direction we are familiar with). But in Dick's novel, causality seems reversed but people's experience of it isn't. So the police have resurrection squads to dig up the dead when they spring back to life and find themselves entombed; and the business of eating and digestion has become neatly hedged around with words like 'ingest' and 'disgorge' to describe what it is that people find themselves doing.The problem is, if time ran backwards, we wouldn't notice, being locked into that timeframe ourselves; and to make it noticeable involves making exceptions so that the story can be told. Perhaps this is why very few writers have tried it. Dick's attempt shows up some of the pitfalls of this plot device.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Written about the earth as it goes through the "Hobart Phase," where time reverses itself. People are aging backwards, gettting younger and eventually entering the womb. The dead start to awaken and need rescuing from their graves. A dead religious figure is about to reawaken, and competing groups are fighting violently for control of his person.The mere physicalities of a world where time is reversed is enough to give yourself a headache. Dick incorporates just enough details to remind you that time is running backwards; people greet each other with goodbye, end conversations with hello, and disgorge food onto plates, to be put into the refrigerator, and eventually returned to the store. But conversations flow using forward-flowing speech, cars are driven forward, and enough details are "normal" to make it possible to follow the storyline. This all combines to make the book a fun and intriguing read without hurting your head too much.I love that the most evil organisation in the book is the library. Librarians are eradicating information. Patrons enter the library and never leave again.If you can suspend belief about the impossibilty of such a world even existing, this is a very absorbing novel. Just keep reminding yourself that it is science FICTION, and don't take it too seriously.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An unusually silly book for Dick exploring themes typical for him - hallougenogenics, black power, (it was written in c.1968) time travel, and more crucially Christianity. He is usually remembered for posing the question "What is human?" (as he put it in 'How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later' ), & people tend to forget the importance of Christianity to his work. Dick was a believer, albeit a highly unorthodox, even heretical one, and his work continually returns to the essential themes of Christianty, no more so than in this book.