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The Man Who Japed
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 5 hrs and 29 mins
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Publisher's summary
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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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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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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The Keep
- The Adversary Cycle, Book 1
- By: F. Paul Wilson
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 15 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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"Something is murdering my men." Thus reads the message received from a Nazi commander stationed in a small castle high in the remote Transylvanian Alps. Invisible and silent, the enemy selects one victim per night, leaving the bloodless and mutilated corpses behind to terrify its future victims. When an elite SS extermination squad is dispatched to solve the problem, the men find something that's both powerful and terrifying. Panicked, the Nazis bring in a local expert on folklore - who just happens to be Jewish - to shed some light on the mysterious happenings.
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At long last, The classic horror novel on Audible
- By Shieldslinger on 07-22-20
By: F. Paul Wilson
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Autism, schizophrenia, and Martians
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In Counter-Clock World, 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.
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When a routine tour of a particle accelerator goes awry, Jack Hamilton and the rest of his tour group find themselves in a world ruled by Old Testament morality, where the smallest infraction can bring about a plague of locusts. Escape from that world is not the end, though, as they plunge into a Communist dystopia and a world where everything is an enemy. Philip K. Dick was aggressively individualistic, and no worldview is safe from his acerbic and hilarious takedowns.
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Báb's Treatise Between the Two Fern-like Sanctuaries
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The Unteleported Man
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When Dr. Jim Parsons awakens after a car accident, he finds himself in a future populated almost entirely by the young. But for the young to keep running the world, death is fetishized, and those who survive to old age are put down. In such a world, Parsons - with his innate desire to save lives - is a criminal and an outcast. For one revolutionary group, however, he may be just the savior they need to heal and revive their cryogenically frozen leader.
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Time's Second Arrow
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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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Autism, schizophrenia, and Martians
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Báb's Treatise Between the Two Fern-like Sanctuaries
- By Darwin8u on 01-31-15
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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
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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?
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Galactic Pot-Healer
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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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By: Philip K. Dick
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Time Out of Joint
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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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Puttering About in a Small Land
- By: Philip K. Dick
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- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
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When Roger and Virginia Lindhal enroll their son Gregg in Mrs. Alt's Los Padres Valley School in the mountains of Southern California, their marriage is already in deep trouble. Then the Lindhals meet Chic and Liz Bonner, whose two sons also board at Mrs. Alt's school. The meeting is a catalyst for a complicated series of emotions and traumas, set against the backdrop of suburban Los Angeles in the early fifties.
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Remarkable performance
- By M.Biblioswine on 04-26-22
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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The Crack in Space
- By: Philip K. Dick
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- Unabridged
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When a repairman accidentally discovers a parallel universe, everyone sees it as an opportunity, whether as a way to ease Earth’s overcrowding, set up a personal kingdom, or hide an inconvenient mistress. But when a civilization is found already living there, the people on this side of the crack are sent scrambling to discover their motives. Will these parallel humans come in peace? Or are they just as corrupt and ill-intentioned as the people of this world?
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Relevant reading for 2020
- By Anonymous User on 11-06-20
By: Philip K. Dick
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We Can Build You
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- Unabridged
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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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Valis
- Valis, Book 1
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What is VALIS? This question is at the heart of Philip K. Dick's groundbreaking novel, the first book in his defining trilogy. When a beam of pink light begins giving a schizophrenic man named Horselover Fat (who just might also be known as Philip K. Dick) visions of an alternate Earth where the Roman Empire still reigns, he must decide whether he is crazy or whether a godlike entity is showing him the true nature of the world.
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Life changing
- By Michael on 03-16-16
By: Philip K. Dick
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A Maze of Death
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Delmak-O is a dangerous planet. Though there are only 14 citizens, no one can trust anyone else and death can strike at any moment. The planet is vast and largely unexplored, populated mostly by gelatinous cube-shaped beings that give cryptic advice in the form of anagrams. Deities can be spoken to directly via a series of prayer amplifiers and transmitters, but they may not be happy about it. And the mysterious building in the distance draws all the colonists to it, but when they get there each sees a different motto on the front.
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JJ Abrams YOU are a book thief.
- By Darwin8u on 08-24-13
By: Philip K. Dick
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Humpty Dumpty in Oakland
- By: Philip K. Dick
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Al Miller is a self-proclaimed nobody, a used-car salesman with a lot full of junkers. His elderly landlord, Jim Fergessen, has decided to retire and has just cashed in on his property, which includes the lot that Al rents next to Fergessen's garage. Chris Harman is a record-company owner who has relied on Fergessen's for years to fix his Cadillac. When he hears about Jim Fergessen's sudden retirement fund, he tells him about a new realty development that Harman swears is a surefire path to easy wealth.
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Negative stars
- By Randall on 01-19-17
By: Philip K. Dick
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Vulcan's Hammer
- By: Philip K. Dick
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 5 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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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!
- By Darwin8u on 02-08-16
By: Philip K. Dick
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Our Friends from Frolix 8
- By: Philip K. Dick
- Narrated by: Nick Podehl
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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In Our Friends from Frolix 8, the world is run by an elite few. And what determines whether one is part of the elite isn’t wealth or privilege, but brains. As children, every citizen of Earth is tested; some are found to be super-smart New Men and some are Unusuals with various psychic powers. The vast majority are Undermen, performing menial jobs in an overpopulated world.
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Unhatched eggs sat on by a cosmic chicken
- By Darwin8u on 03-30-17
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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2 people found this helpful
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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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Performance
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Story
- 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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