"...suicide is painlessIt brings on many changesand I can take or leave it if I please.I try to find a way to makeall our little joys relatewithout that ever-present hatebut now I know that it's too late..." That song could have been written for Philip K. Dick when he wrote Now Wait for Last Year, and certainly for its hero. Eric Sweetscent is regularly, matter-of-factly suicidal. His suicidal thoughts are serious and a regular fallback for Eric when he's feeling overwhelmed, depressed, or un...

Standing in a filthy underpass amongst homeless people huddled under pee-soaked blankets, I was finishing the last 10 pages of Philip K. Dick's *Now Wait for Last Year*, where the protagonist decides his fate in a dirty Tijuana alley surrounded by mountains of garbage. Indifferent passersby shuffled past both of us. Both our worlds are immersed in a terrible war that seems endless. Both our heads are occupied with similar questions and facing similar challenges in the style of a Hamlet-esque "to...

My 26th Philip K. Dick novel. It feels a bit redundant to start by saying, "This is one of the more challenging Dick novels," mainly because, in their own ways, each of his books presents a unique challenge (for one reason or another). It's often a matter of degrees. That being said... much like 'Ubik', **Now Wait for Last Year** (great title!) can feel particularly daunting in its opening chapters – they're dense and disorienting. But then, so is the world of the novel itself. Things will becom...

I wonder if William Gibson was influenced by this book when he began his 2014 novel *Peripheral* (the Jackpot series). Both books deal with mysterious time travel aspects. I have long believed that Gibson was the literary heir to the Philip K. Dick universe. Gibson’s own anecdote about attending the 1982 film *Bladerunner* (loosely based on Dick’s 1968 novel *Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?*) during his writing of *Neuromancer* was a golden story behind the scenes of two of our most compel...

If you love Dick, this book won't disappoint. If you don't, I hope it makes you fall in love. Everything seems unchanged: hopelessness, depression, human feelings sprouting in robots, madness, drugs, and alternate realities... and yet Dick manages to amaze me every time. The phenomenon of war was also interesting in Now Wait for Last Year. One way or another, this was still new from Dick (unless you count The Man in the High Castle, and I don't think it should be). How far can it take us, or, if...

Another novel from the amphetamine-fueled writing spree of 1963, *Now Wait for Last Year* is like a highlight reel of Philip K. Dick's biggest obsessions from that era: time travel, mind-altering drugs, multiple versions of people and places, *Mad Men*-esque office politics, bizarre fashion, and telepathy. And, of course, his trademark habit of framing stories through ridiculously obscure companies – in this case, we see a three-way intergalactic war through the eyes of a middle manager at the '...

“The ethical understructure of medicine, he believed—and it was based on certain very real experiences in his own life—that if a man wanted to die he had the right to die. He did not possess an elaborated rationalization to justify this belief; he had not even tried to construct one. The proposition, to him, seemed self-evident. There was no body of evidence which proved that life in the first place was a boon. Perhaps it was for some persons; obviously it was not for others.”That sounds depress...

Welcome to the science fiction world of Philip K. Dick’s 1966 novel *Now Wait for Last Year*. We are plunged headfirst into a mid-twenty-first century interplanetary war: Lillistar, (human-like beings with superhuman strength) vs reggs (human-size semi-mechanical bugs). It just so happens Terra (Planet Earth) is also a potential big player in the outer space battles. If you're looking for a mind-bending science fiction read, *Now Wait for Last Year* delivers.The husband and wife team of Kathy an...

"Life is composed of reality configurations so constituted. To abandon her would be to say, I can't endure reality as such. I have to have uniquely special easier conditions."- Philip K. Dick (in Now Wait for Last Year) This is a book for married couples (having difficulties), suicides, drug addicts, politicians, and time travelers -- and it just happens to be one of my favorite Philip K. Dick novels ever (although ever with Philip Kindred Dick is always a fluid thing). Looking for a great Phili...

I treated myself to a rather obscure Philip K. Dick book to end the year. I've always loved just how wonky his works can get, but here's the really interesting aspect of Philip K. Dick's writing: it's never really wonky.In fact, it has heart. Especially when that heart is breaking, the story is still devoted to some of those most human questions: how to go on when life is hard.The old saying, "All's fair in love and war" holds doubly true here. Earth is caught in a conflict between two factions ...