MARTIAN TIME SLIP

"I believe these ontological dysfunctions in time do occur, but that our brains automatically generate false memory-systems to obscure them, at once."

"A deadly trap waits for the colonists on Mars"

1st. EDITION:

UK 1st.: NEL, hb, 02978-6, Jun 1976, 240pp, L3.95 (Gerald Grace) {Levack: "Bound in blue paper boards with gold lettering on the spine and front cover. 'This edition first published in Great Britain by // New English Library,// ... in 1976' on the copyright page. Introduction by Brian W. Aldiss."}

OTHER ENGLISH EDITIONS:

FOREIGN EDITIONS:

{For the best bibliographic info in French goto: www.multimania.com/ggoullet/pkdick/frames.html Thanks for the cover pix, Gilles}

Addressing himself to the remaining men, Arnie soaped himself all over and said, "You know I got to protect my mineral rights; I can't have some smoozer coming in here from Earth and making those mountains into like for instance a national park for picnickers..."

Vote for your Fave PKD Story!    Favorite Novel: (where "importance" and "literary quality" meet): MARTIAN TIME SLIP. By a slight margin over THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, despite (instead of because the latter novel's infamous open-ended last chapter. The very open-endedness of HIGH CASLTE points the way from the solid craftwork of Phil's best novels of the 50s, and toward the wonderful work which followed. -- Gregg Rickman, CA

Vote for your Fave PKD Story!   MARTIAN TIME SLIP. Just as good as UBIK for me is TIME SLIP. Like in THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE it has its qualities of showing us credible characters. All in all his most homogenous novel.
        I have a bit of a problem expressing my opinion about this book in just a few sentences. Still, I gave it to a friend of mine who hasn't much time to read books and has, therefore, high standards so as not to waste his time. He was enthusiastic about it!  -- Jurgen Thomann, Germany

PKDS-2 10:

Publication date:April 27, 1964.

PKDS-2 13:

I enjoyed writing all of them, but I think that if I could only choose a few, which for example might escape WW3, I would choose ... MARTIAN TIME SLIP... {PKD 1968}

PKDS-6 12:

(PKD:)I don't care for MARTIAN TIME SLIP
(Apel:) That's talked about as one of your major works...
(PKD:)I know.
(Apel:)... but I'd have to agree with you. I didn't find it very original.
(PKD:) I think its a very dull book, too... {PKD-A&B 1977}

PKDS-12 7:

{Mark Hurst Chronology}

PKDS-13 15:

The PKD Estate has granted permisssion for the Broome Street Theatre in Madison, WI to present an experimental drama based on MARTIAN TIME SLIP, Directed by Joel Gersmann.

PKDS-22 12:

Gollancz will soon be issuing a paperback of MARTIAN TIME SLIP

PKDS-24 11:

Gollancz has issued MARTIAN TIME SLIP as a paperback (L3.50) in their VGSF Classics series.

PKDS-28 10:

Brian Aldiss has strong support from BBC-TV for what is planned to be a five-part mini-series, 240 minutes long, that will be a faithful-to-the-original film adaptation of MARTIAN TIME SLIP, adaptation to be written by Aldiss and produced by his production company, Avernus. This is not a sure thing yet...

PKDS-28 16:

John CLute has a full-page piece in the Washington Post Book World (Aug 25, 1991), titled "Modern SF; A Reader's Guide." He singles out 29 books written in the last 30 years, including 4 by Dick.
Clute's excellent piece goes on to cite MARTIAN TIME SLIP and DR.BLOODMONEY as "two of the best novels published in the 1960s, in or out of the genre, hilarious, unsettling, convoluted, surreal, nervy, paranoid and wise."

From a magazine rack he took a copy of Motor World, and heard, with his trained ears, a switch click. The school had noted his presence. It noted which magazine he selected, how long he sat reading, and what he next took. It measured him.

OAR 181:

25. MARTIAN TIME SLIP (original manuscript title Goodmember Arnie Kott Of Mars, serialised as All We Marsmen; received by SMLA Oct 31, 1962; sf, published 1964.

OAR 92:

{Paul Wiliams:} In my 1975 Rolling Stone article, Phil and I talked about what (we thought) happened next:

In 1962, after THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE was published in hardcover and greeted with loud hurrahs, Phil wrote a novel called MARTIAN TIME SLIP which was just as good if not better. It's a novel about schizophrenia and contemporary life, autistic children, drugged housewives, power-crazed plumbers (on Mars), and the fragility of the systems of shared assumptions that hold human society together. The writing is humorous, painful, awesome in its effect on both mind and heart; the themes of the book anticipate R.D. Laing and many other gurus of the 60s and 70s; the quality of the prose; paragraph by paragraph, is exquisite. There are few modern novels to match it. But for the author, the book was, in his own words, "a crucial defeat..."

It was a defeat because of what happened after he finished writing it:

"With HIGH CASTLE and MARTIAN TIME SLIP, I thought I had bridged the gap between the experimental mainstream novel and science fiction. Suddenly I'd found a way to do everything I wanted to do as a writer. I had in mind a whole series of books, a vision of a new kind of science fiction progressing from those two novels. Then TIME SLIP was rejected by Putnam, and every other hardcover publisher we sent it to."

"My vision collapsed. I was crushed. I had made a mis-calculation somewhere, and I didn't know where. The evaluation I had made of myself, of the marketplace, went poof! I reverted to a more primitive concept of my writing. The books that might have followed TIME SLIP were gone."

MARTIAN TIME SLIP was eventually published by Ballantine as an original paperback in 1964. It has been out of print for seven years.

An interesting thing happened on my way to fleshing out the story of Phil's career for this book. I came across very convincing evidence that the above quoted account is incorrect in some key details. MARTIAN TIME SLIP was never submitted to Putnam. There was another novel that Phil's agent, if not Phil, saw as the appropriate work to follow in the footsteps of HIGH CASTLE. It was called THE FIRST IN YOUR FAMILY.

...

These cards {in the SMLA file} clearly indicate that the first recorded receipt by the Agency of a manuscript from Phil following HIGH CASTLE was a novel called THE FIRST IN YOUR FAMILY (finally published ten years later as WE CAN BUILD YOU), received Oct 4, 1962.

This novel was submited the same day to Putnam, which had just published HIGH CASTLE. Over the next four months it was rejected by Putnam, Doubleday, Simon & Schuster, ballantine, and Crown, all hardcover publishers except Ballantine. It didn't ultimately find a publisher until Amazing Stories magazine serialized it in 1969, and then Don Wollheim, who had bought all of Phil's early novels at ACE, published it in 1972 through his new paperback imprint, DAW Books.

Later that same month, on Oct 31, 1962, Scott Meredith received from Phil another ms, this one entitled GOODMEMBER ARNIE KOTT OF MARS. Even given Phil's notorious dificulty with titles, it's hard to believe he intended this to be the book he would sell to Putnam to follow HIGH CASTLE -- it seems much more likely that he made this one sound pulpy in order that it not be confused with his new "serious" work, THE FIRST IN YOUR FAMILY. In any event, GOODMEMBER ARNIE KOTT OF MARS was indeed the book that Ballantine would later call MARTIAN TIME SLIP, and Scott Meredith's first move was not to submit it to a book publisher at all but to send it to a science fiction magazine to have it serialized.

GOODMEMBER sold for serialization in Dec 1962, and the Scott Meredith began marketing it to book publishers. The first three they tried -- ACE, Berkley and Pyramid -- were paperback science fiction publishers. They then tried Doubleday's hard-cover sf line, and finally sold it to Ballantine in June 1963.

Clearly the Agency never saw MARTIAN TIME SLIP as anything but a new sf adventure, and there's no reason to believe Phil thought any differently at the time. He may well have known how good it was (or, possibly, he may not have), but the evidence is that neither he nor his agent thought of it as having any chance outside of the hard-core sf market.

He had broken a union ruling which was a basic law. In his opinion it was a foolish ruling, but nonetheless... vengeance is mine, sayeth the Extraterrestrial Repairman's Union, Martian branch.

DI 82:

Of all the old Art Music crowd, Phil remained closest to Vince Lusby, who, by a recent marriage, had an autistic son. Phil and Kleo babysat for the boy, and he strongly influenced the character of Manfred in MARTIAN TIME SLIP (an autistic boy trapped in a schizophrenic "tomb world")

DI 103:

The Kant-Durkheim theory {Kant's theories as applied by Durkheim to the culture of the Australian Aborigines} shaped Phil's depiction of the Martian aboriginal tribe of Bleekmen in MTS.

DI 118:

{quote from OAR 92 above, then:}

But if Phil misremembered the details, his sense of defeat by the reception of TIME SLIP as sf was very real. Even its reception as sf was troubled: Wollheim at ACE -- who in 1969 had purchased Phil's two worst-ever sf novels VULCAN'S HAMMER and DR.FUTURITY -- turned down one of his best in TIME SLIP. Why? The novel was set in 1994. "It offended my science fiction sense," says Wollheim. "There couldn't have been a Mars colony when he put it -- if he'd thrown it ahead a hundred years, I would have liked it." Live by the sf sword, die by the sf sword.

DI 299

28. MARTIAN TIME SLIP, originally titled GOODMEMBER ARNIE KOTT OF MARS (written: 1962, published: August 1963 in shorter form as ALL WE MARSMEN in Worlds Of Tomorrow, Published 1964 by Ballantine.

... The key source for Phil's ideas on schizophrenia -- in TIME SLIP and throughout his last two decades -- was Swiss analyst Ludwig Binswanger, whose study of a schizophrenic, "The Case of Ellen West", terrified Phil when he read it in the early 60s. Phil used Binswanger's term tomb world (schizophrenic self-entrapment) in several 60s sf works; Jack Bohlen describes describes mental illness as "a moldering, dank tomb, a place where nothing came and went." In an Oct 1976 letter to Dorothy, Phil wrote: "In the hospital I had the occasion to reread my '64 novel MARTIAN TIME SLIP. I found it weak dramatically (weak in plot) but extraordinary in its ideas. I stripped the universe down to its basic structure. I guess I always do that when I write: analyse the universe to see what it's made over. The floor joists (sp?) of the universe are visible in my novels." Phil made contradictory claims for most of his works, but this assessment strikes me as just. Rating: 9.

Vote for your Worst PKD Story! one NASA employee who prefers to remain anonymous said, "... I would like to share with you my personal opinion of PKD's worst book: MARTIAN TIME SLIP. It's well thought-out, well-crafted, and certainly chock-full of innovative ideas, but coming from an author with some knowledge of mental health problems, it shows an amazing insensitivity and lack of empathy for the learning-disabled... I guess he did the same thing with CLANS OF THE ALPHANE MOON, but autism as a "hook" for an SF story strikes me as just plain cruel." Hmmm... I never thought of it that way before. I've always kind of liked MARTIAN TIME SLIP myself. {...} -- Paul Rydeen in FDO 6

TTHC 64:

In many of Dick's novels his protagonists struggle like Mary (in MARY AND THE GIANT), to escape what in DO ANDROIDS DREAM is called "tomb world", the gubble-gubble world of MARTIAN TIME SLIP, the world of entropy and decay. Late in his life he called this world the world of the "Black Iron Prison," and identified it as the world we live in. Bit someday soon, he told us, the walls will fall and it will be as if the Prison never were...

TTHC 84:

Nancy Hackett: "All the experiences he seemed to describe seemed to be pretty negative, about school, about being a kid, and his mother working. I know he felt alone and alienated." Ann Dick compared his boyhood, as he related it to her, as akin to the autistic Manfred Steiner's in TIME SLIP. Charley Hume recalls in CONFESSIONS, "the sharp contempt" in the voices of authority: his teachers in school, his mother.

TTHC 135:

As we can see, Phil's problems with agoraphobia, like everything else, fed into his writing. Many of his characters have trouble staying on buses, even seemingly healthy ones, like Arnie Kott..

TTHC 194:

References to the progressive politics of the late 40s dot Dick's later fiction. There's a statue on mars of Alger Hiss, "the first UN martyr, " in TIME SLIP...

TTHC 200:

Ultimately Dick questioned psychiatry's function as soceity's "reality enforcer." Sometimes this critique is limited to the role of therapy in "adjusting" someone to an unjust society...
In other , later works, psychoanalysis is shown to be a servant of a larger false reality, an untrue Koinos Kosmos. As Arnie Kott's manservant Holiogabalus puts it in TIME SLIP:

"Entire psychoanalysis is a vainglorious foolishness."
"How zat, Heliio?"
"Question they never deal with is, what to remold sick person like. There is no what, Mister... Purpose of life unknown., and hence way to be is hidden from the eyes of living critters."

TTHC 411

(note 7:) The character of Manfred Steiner in MARTIAN TIME SLIP is drawn from Bruno Bettelheim's 1958 Scientific American article "Joey The Mechanical Boy," later incorporated into his The Empty Fortress. Autism was at the time Dick wrote TIME SLIP largely blamed on inadequate parenting, as it is in Bettelheim's work. More recent studies of autism do not follow Bettelheim on this.

Vote for your Fave PKD Story!    MARTIAN TIME SLIP. I think this is the closest Dick came to melding his SF sensibility with his growing "mainstream" (whatever that means, I hate the word) skills. Real people with real problems; the exploitation theme is highly relevant to today's age. -- Greg Lee, CA

IPOV 81:

In fact, schizophrenia could be considered evidence for my system; it is an instance of the malfunction of that system, & with my system in mind, can be readily understood (in MARTIAN TIME SLIP I saw it as a breakdown of proper time functioning, which was close)...

IPOV 143fn:

The terms Eigenwelt (isolated, spiritual world of the inner self), Mitwelt (the middle or integrated world of the ego) and the Umwelt (earthly environment) were coined by the Swiss psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswanger in the course of his writings on schizophrenia. These writings, first read by PKD in the early 1960s, exerted a lasting influence upon him. See, especially the PKD novel MARTIAN TIME SLIP (1964) and its use of another Binswanger concept -- that of the "tomb world."

Kevin Lyons on PKD:

In MARTIAN TIME SLIP, one of his most wildly imaginative novels, "a generation of schizophrenics" has been born to the pioneer colonists on Mars. One of these emotionally damaged kids, the autistic Manfred Steiner, has retreated into the private universe he's created from his subconscious. But that reality is now seeping into, and superceeding, our own.

Martin Skidmore on PKD:

Probably the best of the lot is MARTIAN TIME SLIP, a stunningly powerful work, with one particularly outstanding section where the same scene is viewed a number of times, each from a different viewpoint, thus emphasizing the differences in perception betweem different people, who are supposedly sharing an experience...

DHG 209:

{"Man, Android & Machine."} ... The idea of dysfunctions such as bounce back and bounce forward are possible, here, but these would serve no teleological purpose; they would be time-slips, as in my novel MARTIAN TIME SLIP. Yet, if they were to occur, they would serve a purpose for us, the observer or listener; we would suddenly learn a great deal more about our universe. I believe these ontological dysfunctions in time do occur, but that our brains automatically generate false memory-systems to obscure them, at once. The reason for this carries back to my premise: the veil or dokos is there to decieve us for a good reason, and such disclosures as these time dysfunctions make are to be obliterated that this benign purpose be maintained. {PKD}

DHG 212:

For absolute reality to reveal itself, our categories of space-time experiences, our basic matrix through which we encounter the universe, must break down and then utterly collapse. I dealt with this breakdown in MARTIAN TIME SLIP in terms of time; in MAZE OF DEATH there are endless paralled realities arranged spatially; in FLOW MY TEARS the world of one character invades the world in general and shows that by "world" we mean nothing more or less than Mind -- the immanant Mind which thinks -- or rather dreams -- our world... {PKD}

DHG 220:

In MARTIAN TIME SLIP I've written in so many dream experiences that I can't seperate them, now, when I read the novel.

TSR 218

For absolute reality to reveal itself, our categories of space-time experiences, our basic matrix through which we encounter the universe, must break down and then utterly collapse. I dealt with this breakdown in MARTIAN TIME-SLIP in terms of time; {For continuation see: A MAZE OF DEATH}

TSR 224

In MARTIAN TIME-SLIP I've written in so many dream experiences that I can't separate them, now, when I read the novel.

{For continuation see: UBIK}

SL:38 79

[To James Blish]

{...}{...}

{...} And even my wife said so, and she is a Tough Hard Cold Cruel and Biting type who said once to me (regarding MARTIAN TIME SLIP) "I'd rather be a whore and walk the streets than live off money earned by stuff like this."(...){...}{PKD>James Blish, Jun 7, 1964}

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