- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Harper Voyager; (Reissue) edition (2 Jun 2008)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0007115881
- ISBN-13: 978-0007115884
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 14.6 x 1.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 391,510 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Review
'One of the most original practitioners writing any kind of fiction’ Sunday Times
'A great philosophical writer'
Independent
'Dick quietly produced serious fiction in a popular form and there can be no greater praise' Michael Moorcock
Product Description
Philip K Dick’s classic dystopian novel set in the future where the remaining human survivors on Earth must gamble for their future with aliens from Titan, one of the moons circling Saturn.
Roaming the pristine landscape of Earth, cared for by machines and aliens, the few remaining humans alive since the war with Titan play Bluff, allowing them to win or lose property and also form new marriages in order to maximise the remote chance some pairings will produce a child. When Pete Garden, a particularly suicidal member of the Pretty Blue Fox game-playing group, loses his current wife and his deed to Berkeley, he stumbles upon a far bigger, more sinister version of the game. The telepathic, slug-like Vugs of Titan are the players and at stake is the Earth itself.
The Game-Players of Titan is a brilliantly conceived vision of a future dystopia, full of imaginative detail, moments of pure humour and thought-provoking musings on the nature of perception, as the seemingly straightforward narrative soon turns into a tumultuous nightmare of delusion, precognition and conspiracy.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I regard "The game-players of Titan" as one of Philip Dick's top... say 5 books. It is certainly hard to discriminate, especially with so many criteria on which to judge such an author's work, but this book contains everything, in good quantities and excellent quality.
Seasoned readers will feel immediately familiar with the story's opening with the hero 'going down' already. All the landmarks of the author's style are there: the suicidal hero, his equally problematic close circle, the vague overwhelming threat, the public figure who steps in, precogs, telekinetics, aliens, a novel social structure, various states of mind (drug-induced and otherwise) and the strange sense of satisfaction that comes at the end of the book when nothing seems to have been resolved proper.
It is quite a strange world in which Pete Garden lives: he wins and loses land titles on, and has his marital life directed by, a board game much like monopoly, but with the element of bluff added in. This game has been introduced or, rather, enforced by the Titanians although they apparently lost the war with the Earth. Moreover, they seem to be taking over again, but by much more subtle means this time. But does this make the game, which all Terran landowners are obliged to play, more or less important?
The plot twists, which mean you can never know for sure what has really happened or who is telling the truth, start very early in this novel and continue throughout. There is subtle humour/irony as well as outright hillarious scenes (Pete Garden fighting with his drug cabinet in order to get enough pills off it to commit suicide without it calling for help being a handy example), and one of the most ingenious solutions to a seemingly insurmountable problem, which is most notable about the book. The scenery is a rapidly degrading world, more suggested than described, which is usually what books win over films about.
Overall, and this is the part the non-Philip-Dick-fan will find less unfamiliar, it could be adequately described as a 'fast-paced thriller' (probably by some Hollywood nut) with various strange, sometimes unforeseen and a few bewildering elements interacting in a way as to have the reader constantly guessing, sometimes as often as about a new thing in each paragraph, in order to bring the plot to a conclusion of revelation in a rather anti-climactic way. If this last is contradictory, it's a credit to the literary and imaginative genius of the author that it is, also, precisely so.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is PKD's 13th science fiction novel and he had produced Man in a High Castle a couple of years earlier and it is 10 years since he published his first novel. It is very typical PKD, it has a variety of scifi ideas rather than one of two, some bad jokes, lots of of psychiatry/psychology, drugs and a good plot. It also has a lot of one of PKD's trademarks about identity and false identity and can you trust who you are talking to. It is based around a small group of long lived, almost sterile humans who have lost the war to game playing Titans and have to play an odd form of Monopoly crossed with poker to win huge tracts of land. They are mainly infertile, humans are slowly dying out and they swap partners regularly in the hope of getting pregnant. The game involves a lot of bluffing and the Titans are telepathic, as are a small group of humans. Two plot lines are how can you get away with murder when the Titan police can read your mind to find your guilt and how can you bluff in a game where the opponents are telepathic. You will have to read it to find the answers.
Format:Paperback
World sterility keeps Earth underpopulated. Aliens from Titan control the world. People frantically play a game called "Bluff" to maximise the probability of having children. P.K.Dick explores the implications of psychic powers applied to bluffing and game strategy. One of the best books I've ever read written by Mr. Dick.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Potential cleverness
Potentially excellent in effect - but only relatively engaging. Characterisation too based on dialogue perhaps. Read more
Published on 1 April 2006 by greenwise design
A typical Philip K. Dick story - and one of his best
In contrast to the previous review, I'd like to state right away that I regard "The game-players of Titan" as one of Philip Dick's top... say 5 books. Read more
Published on 19 Dec 2002 by Symeon Charalabides
particularly horrid
The Chinese used chemical arms in the last war and presently foreign creatures called Vugs now run the planet. Earthlings now are living but very weak. Read more
Published on 17 Aug 2001
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