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'One of the most original practitioners writing any kind of fiction'
Sunday Times
'Dick quietly produced serious fiction in a popular form and there can be no greater praise' Michael Moorcock
'No other writer of his generation had such a powerful intellectual presence. He has stamped himself not only on our memories but in our imaginations' Brian W. Aldiss
'The most consistently brilliant SF writer in the world' John Brunner
Product Description
Pre-empting novels such as the Booker Prize-winning ‘Time’s Arrow’ by as much as twenty years, Counter-Clock world is a story of racial tensions told against the background of the year 1998 in which time flows in reverse as people are born old only to grow younger and younger.
Time runs backwards in the Counter-Clock World. Old people emerge from their graves, grow to middle age, youth, adolescence and childhood to be finally unborn in their mothers wombs. The most powerful - and most feared - organisation in the world is the Library, in charge of expunging the written records of events, which have no longer happened.
When a powerful black leader is reborn, the Library's one concern is to eliminate him before the renewal of racial violence tears the country apart. But in this counter-clock year of 1998 it isn't that simple…
This eerie and unforgettable premise encapsulates Philip K Dick's ambitious and inimitable approach to fiction writing. The attempts of his characters to cope with the bizarre reality of a world that runs backwards while their minds run forwards like ours, operate as a stunning critique of the way in which we perceive our own civilization.
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Despite all the flaws, and some tedious chapters where not much actually happens, the book is still - like all Dick's work, however hastily written - well worth reading. And the book certainly picks up around the halfway mark, with some riveting action sequences inside the Library, and a final downbeat, disturbing and memorable scene in the same graveyard where the book begins. Along the way Dick explores race, philosophy and religion, manages to caricature two of his many wives, and (as usual) throws in an entertaining mix of mind-boggling sci-fi inventions and ideas, any one of which would be worth a whole novel on its own.
If you're new to Philip K Dick, then don't start here - try 'Time out of Joint', 'A Maze of Death' or 'Do Androids Dream...', before moving on to 'The Man in the High Castle', 'Martian Time-Slip' and the above mentioned 'Three Stigmata' and 'Ubik'. But if, like me, you're already immersed in alternative Dickian worlds, then you won't be disappointed with this curiosity. 7/10.
Time running backwards is a difficult subject to do well. At a perfect level, we would simply be unable to comprehend a description of backwards time. Martin Amis has a separate intelligence as narrator, whose mind runs the same way as ours while the world around him has time that runs the other way. Philip K Dick's take is to leave his characters with forward running minds, but place them in a world where all of life is backwards. People get younger and then have to look for mothers so that they can be born. The garbage men bring the rubbish. Restaurants are not pleasant to consider. It is the character's adaptation to this reality that tells us so much about how weird our own civilisation really is.
I know the main thrust of the story concerns matters of societal well-being as opposed to 'true,' futuristic sci-fi, but I would still have expected as reknowned a novelist as Dick to appreciate that if the future has flying cars and vidphones, it certainly wouldn't need TVs to be turned off manually.
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