The Man Who Japed
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Narrated by:
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Luke Daniels
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By:
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Philip K. Dick
About this listen
Following a devastating nuclear war, the Moral Reclamation government took over the world and forced its citizens to live by strictly puritanical rules - no premarital sex, drunkenness, or displaying of neon signs - all of which are reinforced through a constant barrage of public messages. The chief purveyor of these messages is Alan Purcell, next in line to become head of the propaganda bureau. But there is just one problem: a statue of the government’s founder has been vandalized and the head is hidden in Purcell’s closet. In this buttoned-up society, maybe all a revolution needs is one really great prank....
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- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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What, you ask, is a Fred Fitch? Well, for one thing, Fred Fitch is the man with the most extensive collection of fake receipts, phony bills of sale, and counterfeit sweepstakes tickets in the Western hemisphere, and possibly in the entire world. For another thing, Fred Fitch may be the only New York City resident in the twentieth century to buy a money machine.
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American Gods for the Grifter set!
- By William R. on 09-06-11
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Welcome to the Monkey House
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: David Strathairn, Maria Tucci, Bill Irwin, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut's shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, what these superb stories share is Vonnegut's audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.
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Classic Vonnegut
- By Michael Carrato on 08-17-06
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Perchance to Dream
- Selected Stories
- By: Charles Beaumont
- Narrated by: J. Paul Boehmer, Gabrielle de Cuir, Harlan Ellison, and others
- Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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The profoundly original and wildly entertaining short stories of a legendary Twilight Zone writer. It is only natural that Charles Beaumont would make a name for himself crafting scripts for The Twilight Zone - for his was an imagination so limitless it must have emerged from some other dimension. Perchance to Dream contains a selection of Beaumont's finest stories, including five that he later adapted for Twilight Zone episodes.
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Contents
- By Ralph Freaster on 06-22-16
By: Charles Beaumont
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A Grave Talent
- A Kate Martinelli Mystery, Book 1
- By: Laurie R. King
- Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan
- Length: 14 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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The unthinkable has happened in a small community outside of San Francisco. A series of shocking murders has occurred, the victims far too innocent and defenseless. For Detective Kate Martinelli, just promoted to Homicide and paired with a seasoned cop who's less than thrilled to be handed a green partner, it's a difficult case that just keeps getting harder. Then the detectives receive what appears to be a case-breaking lead.
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Another Fantastic Series by Laurie R. King
- By Anna on 03-29-15
By: Laurie R. King
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Blood Music
- By: Greg Bear
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Vergil's innovative experiment restructuring the cells of a common virus becomes a nightmare when, in order to save his research, Vergil injects the entire culture into his bloodstream.
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THOUGHT UNIVERSE
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 08-01-15
By: Greg Bear
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Red Plenty
- By: Francis Spufford
- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the 20th-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away. Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, and as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant.
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Simple review
- By Jay J Peters on 06-24-18
By: Francis Spufford
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Mistress of Justice
- By: Jeffery Deaver
- Narrated by: Tanya Eby
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Taylor Lockwood spends her days working as a paralegal in one of New York's preeminent Wall Street law firms and her nights playing jazz piano anyplace she can. But the rhythm of her life is disrupted when attorney Mitchell Reece requests her help in locating a stolen document that could cost him not only the multimillion-dollar case he's defending but his career as well.
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Pathetic! I wasted a credit!
- By Wayne on 06-28-18
By: Jeffery Deaver
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Bright Lights, Big City
- By: Jay McInerney
- Narrated by: Daniel Passer
- Length: 5 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The tragicomedy of a young man in New York City, a writer, never named, who works as a fact-checker for a prestigious magazine. He struggles with the reality of his mother's death, alienation, and the seductive pull of drugs and a vibrant nightlife.
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Curiously, mundanely real
- By Amber on 01-07-12
By: Jay McInerney
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The Cleaner
- By: Elisabeth Herrmann
- Narrated by: Imogen Church
- Length: 14 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Pools of blood, scenes of carnage, signs of agonising death - who deals with the aftermath of violence once the bodies have been taken away? Judith Kepler has seen it all. She is a crime-scene specialist. She turns crime scenes back into habitable spaces. She is a cleaner. It is at the home of a woman who has been brutally murdered that she is suddenly confronted with her own past. The murder victim knew Judith's secret: as a child Judith was sent to an orphanage under mysterious circumstances - parentage unknown.
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Reader was very distracting
- By Merry Unbirthday on 10-16-17
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The Hercules Text
- By: Jack McDevitt
- Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins
- Length: 13 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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From a remote corner of the galaxy, a message is being sent. The continuous beats of a pulsar have become odd, irregular, and artificial. It can only be a code. Frantically, a research team struggles to decipher the alien communication. And what the scientists discover is destined to shake the foundations of empires around this world - from Wall Street to the Vatican.
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Lots to recommend here!
- By Matthew on 10-19-18
By: Jack McDevitt
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Báb's Treatise Between the Two Fern-like Sanctuaries
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The moods of the mass can't be fathomed...
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All Your Base Are Belong to Us!
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Sometimes even gods need help. In Galactic Pot-Healer that god is an alien creature known as the Glimmung, which looks alternately like a flaming wheel, a teenage girl, and a swirling mass of ocean life. In order to raise a sunken city, he summons beings from across the galaxy to Plowman’s Planet. Joe Fernwright is one of those summoned, needed for his skills at pot-healing - repairing broken ceramics. But from the moment Joe arrives on Plowman’s Planet, things start to go awry. Is the Glimmung good or evil?
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If You Like your Pottery & Gods Fractured & Funky
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Time's Second Arrow
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After the 20th century’s devastating series of wars, the world’s governments banded together into one globe-spanning entity, committed to peace at all costs. Ensuring that peace is the Vulcan supercomputer, responsible for all major decisions. But some people don’t like being taken out of the equation. And others resent the idea that the Vulcan is taking the place of God. As the world grows ever closer to all-out war, one functionary frantically tries to prevent it. But the Vulcan computer has its own plans....
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All Your Base Are Belong to Us!
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Galactic Pot-Healer
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If You Like your Pottery & Gods Fractured & Funky
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Time's Second Arrow
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Clans of the Alphane Moon
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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 on their particular mental illnesses. When Earth sends a delegation to take back the colony, they find enclaves of depressives, schizophrenics, paranoiacs, and others uniting to repel what they see as a foreign invasion.
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One of my favorite
- By M.Biblioswine on 05-06-21
By: Philip K. Dick
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Lies, Inc.
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When catastrophic overpopulation threatens Earth, one company offers to teleport citizens to Whale’s Mouth, an allegedly pristine new home for happy and industrious émigrés. But there is one problem: the teleportation machine works in only one direction. When Rachmael ben Applebaum discovers that some of the footage of happy settlers may have been faked, he sets out on an 18-year journey to see if anyone wants to come back.
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The Unteleported Man
- By Darwin8u on 01-15-16
By: Philip K. Dick
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We Can Build You
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In this lyrical and moving novel, Philip K. Dick intertwines the story of a toxic love affair with one about sentient robots, and unflinchingly views it all through the prism of mental illness - which spares neither human nor robot. The end result is one of Dick’s most quietly powerful works. When Louis Rosen’s electronic-organ company builds a pitch-perfect robotic replica of Abraham Lincoln, the firm is pulled into the orbit of a shady businessman, who is looking to use Lincoln for his own profit.
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Simulacra for me & simulacra for you.
- By Darwin8u on 01-15-16
By: Philip K. Dick
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Voices from the Street
- By: Philip K. Dick
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 13 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Stuart Hadley is a young radio electronics salesman in early 1950s Oakland, California. He has what many would consider the ideal life: a nice house, a pretty wife, a decent job with prospects for advancement, but he still feels unfulfilled; something is missing from his life. Hadley is an angry young man - an artist, a dreamer, a screw-up. He tries to fill his void first with drinking and sex, and then with religious fanaticism, but nothing seems to be working, and it is driving him crazy.
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A very good book
- By H. Metz on 07-31-23
By: Philip K. Dick
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Time Out of Joint
- By: Philip K. Dick
- Narrated by: Jeff Cummings
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- Unabridged
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Ragle Gumm has a unique job: Every day he wins a newspaper contest. And when he isn’t consulting his charts and tables, he enjoys his life in a small town, in 1959. At least, that’s what he thinks. But then strange things start happening. He finds a phone book where all the numbers have been disconnected, and a magazine article about a famous starlet named Marilyn Monroe, whom he’s never heard of. Plus, everyday objects are beginning to disappear and are replaced by strips of paper with words written on them, like "bowl of flowers" and "soft-drink stand".
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Mediocre Mother to Gravity's Rainbow and the Truman Show?
- By Darwin8u on 06-13-15
By: Philip K. Dick
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The Zap Gun
- By: Philip K. Dick
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 7 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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In this biting satire, the Cold War may have ended, but the eastern and western governments never told their citizens. Instead they created an elaborate ruse wherein each side comes up with increasingly outlandish doomsday weapons - weapons that don’t work. But when aliens invade, the top designers of both sides have to come together to make a real doomsday device - if they don’t kill each other first. With its combination of romance, espionage, and alien invasion, The Zap Gun skewers the military-industrial complex in a way that’s as relevant today as it was at the height of the Cold War.
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Project Plowshare, or don't touch my Love Gun
- By Darwin8u on 01-29-15
By: Philip K. Dick
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Dr. Bloodmoney
- By: Philip K. Dick
- Narrated by: Phil Gigante
- Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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What happens after the bombs drop? This is the troubling question Philip K. Dick addresses with Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb. It is the story of a world reeling from the effects of nuclear annihilation and fallout, a world where mutated humans and animals are the norm, and the scattered survivors take comfort from a disc jockey endlessly circling the globe in a broken-down satellite.
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Post nuclear apocalyptic surburban middle class
- By Michael G Kurilla on 01-04-18
By: Philip K. Dick
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The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike
- By: Philip K. Dick
- Narrated by: Phil Gigante
- Length: 9 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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This novel, Dick said, is about Leo Runcible, "a brilliant, civic minded liberal Jew living in a rural WASP town in Marin County, California." Runcible, a real estate agent involved in a local battle with a neighbor, finds what look like Neanderthal bones in Marin and dreams of rising real estate prices because of the publicity. But it turns out that the remains are more recent, the result of an environmental problem polluting the local water supply.
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PKD's best story prior to "Castle"
- By Brad on 04-12-17
By: Philip K. Dick
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Radio Free Albemuth
- By: Philip K. Dick
- Narrated by: Jeff Cummings, Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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In Radio Free Albemuth, his last novel, Philip K. Dick morphed and recombined themes that had informed his fiction from A Scanner Darkly to VALIS and produced a wild, impassioned work that sounds like a visionary alternate history of the United States. Agonizingly suspenseful, darkly hilarious, and filled with enough conspiracy theories to thrill the most hardened paranoid, Radio Free Albemuth is proof of Dick's stature as our century's greatest science fiction writer.
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The Pistol to the Head
- By Darwin8u on 01-02-17
By: Philip K. Dick
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The Cosmic Puppets
- By: Philip K. Dick
- Narrated by: Nick Podehl
- Length: 4 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Following an inexplicable urge, Ted Barton returns to his idyllic Virginia hometown for a vacation, but when he gets there, he is shocked to discover that the town has utterly changed. The stores and houses are all different and he doesn't recognize anybody. The mystery deepens when he checks the town's historical records...and reads that he died nearly twenty years earlier.
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Remember Millgate?
- By Darwin8u on 06-21-16
By: Philip K. Dick
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Solar Lottery
- By: Philip K. Dick
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2203 anyone can become the ruler of the solar system. There are no elections, no interviews, no prerequisites whatsoever - it all comes down to the random turns of a giant wheel. But when a new Quizmaster takes over, the old one still keeps some rights, namely the right to hire an unending stream of assassins to attempt to kill the new leader. In the wake of the most recent change in leadership, employees of the former ruler scurry to find an assassin who can get past telepathic guards.
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Dick's First Novel Seems All Grown Up.
- By Darwin8u on 03-21-16
By: Philip K. Dick
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The Penultimate Truth
- By: Philip K. Dick
- Narrated by: Nick Podehl
- Length: 7 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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In the future, most of humanity lives in massive underground bunkers, producing weapons for the nuclear war they’ve fled. Constantly bombarded by patriotic propaganda, the citizens of these industrial anthills believe they are waiting for the day when the war will be over and they can return above ground. But when Nick St. James, president of one anthill, makes an unauthorized trip to the surface, what he finds is more shocking than anything he could imagine.
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Not One of Dick's Best
- By Richard on 03-21-12
By: Philip K. Dick
What listeners say about The Man Who Japed
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Richard
- 08-04-12
An Enjoyable Trip Down the Rabbit Hole!
This is a minor novel by Phillip K. Dick (PKD). It's certainly not in the same class as his masterworks such as UBIK or The Man in the High Castle (winner of a Hugo award), but it's still a very enjoyable trip down the rabbit hole. Like many PKD novels, this one takes place on a post-nuclear war Earth. The plot centers around Allen Purcell's mocking rebellion against a suffocating morally correct and politically correct social order and totalitarian state. On the surface, Purcell and his wife Janet are respectable upstanding citizens who run a successful agency that contracts with the totalitarian government to produce propaganda-oriented TV shows. But Allen finds himself subconsciously driven to repeatedly "jape" or mock the existing order, by secretly committing such pranks as defacing and decapitating the statute of General Streiter, the founder of the totalitarian order. It wouldn't be a real PKD novel unless mind altering drugs are ingested and reality shifts out from under the reader once or twice, but overall the plot of this book is relatively coherent and straightforward. There is humor here that withstands the test of time and a righteous cry for freedom that can't be denied. Excellent narration. Recommended.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Darwin8u
- 03-29-16
If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution
“A term we use in packet assembly. When a theme is harped on too much you get parody. When we make fun of a stale theme we say we’ve japed it.”
In a post-apocalypse world where you are tyrannized by not just your nation (aka the Moral Reclamation, or Morec), but your HOA, it is hard to be creative, to sin, to deviate from the norm. Enter Allen Purcell. His wife is bored to near hysterics. He is different. He is creative. He has a sense of humor. This impulse to speak his mind and periodically, late at night, screw with statues of sacred leaders will either destroy him or make him great. It might just do both.
This is Dick's third novel I believe and it is almost a perfectly constructed PKD novel. The tension is built in. You have him moving up in government at the same time he is secretly taking more and more risks in his own life. PKD builds this natural tension to the last few pages. The book is funny, odd, and for Dick fairly reserved.
It seems like a perfect novel for a revolution. Dick is kicking against conformity, government-sanctioned 'watching', and moral witch hunts. God would Dick ever flip at the current state of our nation. The novel seems to hark back to those revolutionary novellas from the turn of the century like Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Orwell's 1984. It belongs to the whole "man against tyranny" genre, but pushed through the hose of PKD it is funny, dark, and funky. Not his best, but definitely one not to miss.
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- Michael G Kurilla
- 06-04-15
Philip K Dick holds up well with time
Philip K Dick's The Man who Japed is a short story about a dystopic future where a puritanical, authoritarian regime dominates society. The tale revolves around one man, Alan, who while playing a significant role in media propaganda supporting the state, also displays a schiizophrenic nature by "japng" or pranking the statue of the historical founder of this society. Historical context is critical for understanding Dick's message as the original story was released in 1956 towards the end of McCarthyism.
Although the tale has an unsophisticated quality, partly due to its short length, Dick nevertheless focuses on the diffusion of societal passivity in the face of government intrusion into the personal lives of its citizens, as well as the extent the ruling hierarchy will go to preserve the fictional narrative for the basis of its legitimacy. Dick also demonstrates various modes of rebellion from the mundane to the complex.
The narration is well done, although females are rendered in either depressed or aging British high society styles. This is one author with a timeless quality due to themes that resonate across the ages.
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- M.Biblioswine
- 05-22-21
Multiple readings
I like this more each time I read or listen to it and the performance is excellent.
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- Adam
- 01-10-24
PKD world building begins
Short but still scary and strange. Very pkd I enjoyed seeing where his journey of being an author began Can’t wait to read his next. Cosmic puppets
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- Matt Powers
- 04-13-24
So ridiculously good - don’t skip it!
This book is so prescient - this book touches the now in a way that very few things can.
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