Time Out Of Joint (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

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Ma questa è un'epoca su cui aleggia lo spauracchio fobico della bomba H e la certezza di un’imminente invasione russa. In una qualunque cittadina, di una qualunque provincia americana, Ragle Gumm vive con la sorella Margot, il cognato Victor ed il nipotino Sammy. E questo Tempo fuor di sesto, per quanto ancora un po' "acerbo" nello sviluppo della trama, rientra in questa categoria. The right frame of mind for reading Time Out of Joint would be to consider it a newly found episode of The Twilight Zone. Imagine Rod Sterling in his skinny suit, skinny tie, and deadpan voice: Ma abbiamo anche un intrigante sguardo sul futuro, tra strani abbigliamenti e slang, vita post-bellica e guerre civili inimmaginabili.

It had nothing to do with minerals, resources, scientific measurement. Nor even exploration and profit. Those were excuses. The actual reason lay out-side their conscious minds. If he were required to, he could not formulate the need, even as he experienced it fully. No once could. An instinct, the most primitive drive, as well as the most noble and complex. It was both at once." In many ways, PKD is playing with the readers mind, because he isn’t giving too much away, or offering any number of ideas on the nature of Ragle’s reality.My only criticism is that it takes a while to get where it is going, but this is good, vintage PKD. The book itself seems to be divided into three different fragments. The first part is a creeping horror of existence - what if something is wrong around you? Something small, unimportant, but still unexplainable. The deeper you look, the more things just seem wrong. Can you really believe the people around you? Even your neighbour? Una storia appallottolata come il filo di una matassa e che sbrigliandosi va a costruire un'originale trama fantastica.

On the surface, Time Out of Joint reminds me of The Cosmic Puppets. Both are linear narratives, both are set in the 50s, and most importantly, both pose questions about the nature of reality, playing with the idea that things are not what they appear to be. The novels differ primarily in how they resolve their mysteries. This is where Time Out of Joint misses its mark. Some of the most intriguing ideas from the early part of the book just drop out of sight at the end.In a civil war", Ragle said, "every side is wrong. It's hopeless to try to untangle it. Everyone is a victim." I have a copy of Time Out of Joint languishing in my house for over ten years. I have no idea where it came from, I am pretty sure I never bought it. Is that weird? No, I guess not. I could tell you how I suddenly decided to read it after having ignored it for ten years, but that would be a spectacularly uninteresting anecdote so I will leave that out. Imagine if you will a man, an ordinary man who enjoys solving the daily newspaper puzzle. But while this man’s attention is focused on this one task, the puzzle of his life remains unsolved. This man presently resides in the The Twilight Zone… Written in 1958 when Phil was just 30, and published in '59, this is the earliest of his novels that I've read. He may not have always shown it over the course of his 45-novel career, at least in part because he wrote some of those novels in two-week amphetamine binges, but Time Out of Joint reminds me that not only did he have brilliant ideas, but that by this early point in his career he was also a real craftsman who knew what he was doing with a story. There's an elegant simplicity to this novel, yet it somehow managed to keep surprising me.

Blade Runner, or The Man in the High Castle, or his short story, Minority Report that Stephen Spielberg made into a movie in 2002. As always when examining a quotation, it's important to know the precise context in which it was uttered. In the case of this particular quotation from Act 1, Scene 5 of Hamlet, the title character speaks these words just after his encounter with the ghost of his father, who's told him how he was murdered by Claudius.Some friends and I were just mentioning this book in the context of it perhaps inspiring the producers of the 1998 Peter Weir film The Truman Show starring Jim Carrey. Without giving too much away, it wasn’t exactly like the film, but there was enough going on to suggest that there may have been a connection. What I most enjoyed in the book was the philosophical speculation about the nature of reality and the meaning of words. When Ragle initiates a conversation with his brother-in-law about philosophy, he cites George Berkeley ~ the Idealist philosopher who proposed that nothing actually exists except as ideas in the mind of God. “ How do we know that piano exists?” says Ragle and Vic replies “ I’m sorry, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s just a bunch of words” (49). Un'idilliaca cittadina americana degli anni '50, dove vive la sua strana vita Ragle Gumm. Non sposato, sta in casa della sorella, di suo marito e del loro figlio. Al contrario del cognato Vic, commesso del supermercato, lui non lavora: si guadagna da vivere rispondendo al popolare quiz "trova l'omino verde" sul giornale, quiz del quale è il campione indiscusso da quando è cominciato. Ragle Gumm is an ordinary man leading an ordinary life, except that he makes his living by entering a newspaper contest every day -- and winning, every day. But he gradually begins to suspect that his life -- indeed his whole world -- is an illusion, constructed around him for the express purpose of keeping him docile and happy. But if that is the case, what is his real world like, and what is he actually doing every day when he thinks he is guessing 'Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next?' Under everything else,’ Ragle said. ‘The word. Maybe it’s the word of God. The logos. ‘In the beginning was the Word‘”(170).

The Incident, a 2014 Mexican film in which the book notably appears, about people trapped in an infinite loop. What I was trying to do in that book was account for the diversity of worlds that people live in. I had not read Heraclitus then, I didn’t know his concept of idios kosmos, the private world, versus koinos kosmos, which we all share. I didn’t know that the pre-Socratics had begun to discern these things. There’s a scene in the book where the protagonist goes into the bathroom, reaches in the dark for a pull-cord, and suddenly realizes there is no cord, there’s a switch on the wall, and he can’t remember when he ever had a bathroom when there was a cord hanging down. Now, that actually happened to me, and it was what caused me to write the book. It reminded me of the idea that Van Vogt had dealt with, of artificial memory, as occurs in THE WORLD OF NULL-A where a person has false memories implanted. A lot of what I wrote, which looks like the result of taking acid, is really the result of taking Van Vogt seriously! I believed Van Vogt, I mean, he wrote it, you know, he was an authority figure. He said, people can be other than whom they remember themselves to be, and I found this fascinating. You have a massive suspension of belief on my part." No one takes the immaterialist philosophy of the 17th century Bishop Berkeley seriously today - that being is a result of being perceived. But perhaps we should. Isn’t this what quantum theory suggests, that only when something is noticed or measured does it become definite? And, at a more quotidian level, isn’t Berkeley’s kind of immaterialism the foundation of advertising in all its forms, from retail selling, to political campaigning, to the generating of national feeling? The only thing real is what is perceived to be real by enough people. The bulk of the plot is a spoiler, so to say as little as possible about this book: A man called Ragle Gumm lives an ordinary life next door to some great neighbors and in a seemingly ordinary town in the same house with his sister and his brother in law. He makes a living, oddly, by winning big prizes from newspaper competitions. Ragle starts searching for answers when a soda-pop turns into a slip of paper with Soda-pop written on it before his eyes, and he slowly notices other objects turning to slips of paper. He sets out on a journey for the truth along with his brother in-law and the curtains slowly unravel as the pieces of the puzzle are put together. They", a 1941 story by Robert A. Heinlein about a man surrounded by persons whose job is to convince him that he is insane rather than one of the few genuine people in his world.Rossi, Umberto, “The Harmless Yank Hobby: Maps, Games, Missiles and Sundry Paranoias in Time Out of Joint and Gravity’s Rainbow”, Pynchon Notes #52–53, Spring-Fall 2003, pp.106–123 In my earlier review I also noticed a possible connection to Orson Scott Card’s writing and again I noticed what could be some allusions to, or inspiration from, Orwell’s 1984. Published and marketed along with his SF canon, but written during the period of his mainstream efforts and less "far out there" than many of his works. A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children. Central problem in philosophy. Relation of word to object . . . what is a word? Arbitrary sign. But we live in words. Our reality, among words not things. No such thing as a thing anyhow; a gestalt in the mind. Thingness . . . sense of substance. An illusion. Word is more real than the object it represents. Word doesn’t represent reality. Word is reality. For us, anyhow. Maybe God gets to objects . Not us, though” (50).