The Zap Gun (Gollancz S.F.) (Paperback)

This is of course a problem when the Sirius Slavers arrive and West and East have to work together.

While this is not one of Dick's best books, he is still one of the best sf writers around. As always, everything is turned upside down at the end of the book, as always you are still caught off guard when it happens and of course the Sirius Slavers are secondary to the book. The real enjoyable part of the book is the ill-concealed ridiculing of the arms race between USA and Soviet. And don't forget, this book was written in 1965, while the Cold War was still happening.

It's not that Dick doesn't have enough plot ideas to make it work. Rather, he sets off on lots of plot excursions which don't really go anywhere, and don't contribute to the overall mood or direction of the book.

Despite everything I enjoyed this novel, and I've read it about four times now. The double premise - a toy maker who can't design a toy simple enough to sell, and weapons designers who design in a trance and are unable to design a weapon that works - is intriguing enough, and the eventual resolution is excellent.

I suppose my final comment is - this would have made a great short story, if only Dick had had the self-discipline to cut out the unnecessary.

"The Zap Gun" was originally published in two parts in Worlds Of Tomorrow in 1965 as "Operation Plowshare", but parts of the book will become familiar if you've read Dick's short story collections. As with many of his novels, he simply cribbed a large proportion of it from one of his earlier magazine submissions. Again, this sometimes works -- "The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldridge", his best book, for example, is a tangent off the "Days Of Perky Pat" short story -- but here it doesn't, and the short story source seems to have been introduced late in the proceedings to compensate for a lack of inspiration. There's also a telling drift from a purposefully literary and lighthearted opening chapter toward the familiar terse, neurotic PKD voice, and the emotional thrust of the book appears to happen by accident. It seems that PKD set up the scene in question without knowing what was going to happen, and spent the rest of the book trying to explain itself. Whatever original concept he had in mind -- a concept, not a plot -- ceased to be interesting about half way through.

Not satisfying as a novel, then, and not one of Dick's most memorable or in any regards important works. For what it's worth, the concept may have been a dead end from the start, a potential short story that drifted out of control. It's the near future (from PKD's 1965 perspective; the book takes place in 2004) and as the cold war has mounted pace, barbaric nuclear weapons (which also destroy property and infrastructure -- Dick's disgust at the absurdity of this is one of the book's more effective passages) have been replaced by ever more exotic devices -- time and space disrupters and the like -- which are channelled from beyond by psychics under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. In reality, none of these weapons work. The authorities of both sides know this, but fear of them keeps the population under control. Unfortunately, then earth is attacked by hostile aliens, and the population begins calling for some of those fantastic weapons to be used in their defence.

All of which Dick ignores: the alien attack is hardly mentioned, the horrific loss of life hardly noted. Instead a totally irrelevant and uninteresting power struggle and love triangle is the focus. Great ideas are suggested but not developed. PKD seems aware that the book veers into parody and comedy, but is unable either to correct the problem or to swerve the book into all-out humour. Instead -- and unusually for Dick -- the novel suffers from an unnecessary dramatis personae in the form of a Ripley billboard and an unwieldy mockery of a subtitle: "Being that Most Excellent Account of Travails and Contayning Many Pretie Hystories By Him Set Foorth in Comely Colours and Most Delightfully Discoursed Upon As Beautified and Well Furnished Divers Good and Commendable in the Gesiht of Men of That Most Lamentable Wepens Fasoun Designer Lars Powerdry and What Nearly Became of Him Due to Certain Most Dreadful Forces". Which is fine if you're Kurt Vonnegut and write the novel to support it, but seems entirely out of place here. A shame: if he was capable of it, I would have loved to have read a picaresque Philip K Dick comedy romp. This isn't it.