A journey into the future. A society that values death more than life. A unification of ethnicities and a life expectancy of just fifteen years. Philip K. Dick usually delivers brilliant ideas and important themes that spark reflection, but this time he gets lost, dwelling too much on the paradoxes of time travel, leaving the reader with a thousand unanswered questions about "Dr. Futurity." Perhaps exploring the initial theme in greater depth would have been preferable to watching the main cha...

Tales of time travel have been around for hundreds of years. Perhaps the best known work within the world of science fiction is The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. In addition to Wells' tale of an Edwardian scientist battling the Morlocks in the distant future, my personal favorites are: 1) Return from the Stars by Stanisław Lem published in 1961 and featuring an astronaut returning to Earth more than one hundred years into the future to find a utopian society based on a universal medical procedure ...

Dr. Futurity marks phase two of my Philip K. Dick (PKD) reading project. I just finished the last of Dick’s 1950s novels, and now I’m diving into the '60s. Consider this my latest book review. Reading those early novels was good preparation for this one. I feel like Dr. Futurity is inferior to those earlier works, but I want to appreciate it as much as possible despite its flaws. There are really two stories here that are loosely stitched together, and while I'm usually okay with that (Dick has...

Back in the day, Ace books put out paperbacks with TWO sci-fi gems packed inside – those classic Ace Doubles. In 1960, Ace published Philip K. Dick’s *Dr. Futurity* as one half of an Ace Double. Flip the book over, turn it upside down, and you'd find John Brunner’s *Slavers of Space* on the other side. *Dr. Futurity* is a proper time travel book by PKD, brimming with all the wonderfully kooky eccentricities that Phil brings to everything he writes. Fans will think of other alternate history sto...

As I mentioned in my review of Philip K. Dick's 1960 novel "Vulcan's Hammer," by 1959, the future Hugo winner was feeling decidedly disenchanted with science fiction in general, despite having had published some 85 short stories and half a dozen novels in that genre. The author, it seems, was still pinning his hopes on becoming a more "respectable," mainstream writer, and had indeed already completed nine such novels: "Return to Lilliput," "Pilgrim on the Hill" and "A Time for George Stavros" ar...

"There was simply no complete theory about time, he realized. No hypothesis by which results could be anticipated. Only experiment -- and guesswork."- Philip K. Dick, Dr. Futurity.One of the most "traditionally" SF novels PKD has written. This is largely due, obviously, to it being early in the PKD's output. Dr. Futurity was published in 1960 and was his 7th published novel (after Time Out of Joint and before Vulcan's Hammer). In this novel Dick explore basic ideas of time travel, complete with ...

Time travelling surgeon…Dr Jim Parsons, a proud and condescending famous surgeon is very abruptly kidnapped and rapidly is found outside of his own time where he saves the life of a teenage girl only to be arrested for the crime of preventing death! While enroute to the penal colony on Mars, he is again kidnapped and escapes finally finding the family who is reaponsible for it all in a desperate generation long struggle to save 1 Iriquois man from 1600s.This was a wild ride but isnt quite PKD ye...

20° secolo o giù di lì, Jim Parsons, il nostro protagonista, è un medico. Un giorno, come succede quotidianamente, esce di casa per andare a lavoro, ma succederà qualcosa che cambierà totalmente la sua vita.P.K. Dick, questa volta, utilizza il viaggio nel tempo per raccontarci di come la società si potrebbe evolvere se i fondamenti della vita, non ci fossero più. Così veniamo sballonzolati avanti ed indietro nel tempo alla ricerca della verità, ma la verità cos'è?Un altro tassello, nell'immenso ...

It gets the extra star only because I don't have the heart to give a 1-star rating to a Dick novel. I still can't believe this was actually written by the author of Do Androids dream of electric sheep, The man in the high castle and so many other books I've loved. It was like reading a ten-year-old kid's effort in creative writing. I'll blame it partly on the translation and partly on the fact that it was one of his earlier novels.

This book inspired me to write a song. It goes a little like this:

Salagadoola mechicka boola bibbidi-bobbidi-boo
Put 'em together and what have you got
A far more coherent statement than this book
Salagadoola mechicka boola bibbidi-bobbidi-boo
Not even magic can salvage this work