Month: January 2012

Brilliantly inventive and enjoyable

I came across this 26 year old copy of the Times today – November 11, 1985

I would have been nearly 18 when it was published, but now it feels it
belongs to an age a good deal earlier than that – the 70s maybe or
even the 60s.

This is 10 years before the web made any impression on even early
adopters. It shows a Britain full of strikes, an Apartheid-era South
Africa, denser news, chess coverage in depth, football violence and,
perhaps most strikingly of all… no celebrity stories.

Someone recently said that Philip K. Dick made a career out of making
you wonder what was real or not, and this book is very much in that
space.

The story is set in an alternate 1960s where the US lost the war. It’s
a great premise and a wildly tangled and unusual storyline –
apparently much of the plot was derived by Dick taking guidance from
the I, Ching.

One of those books that I very much enjoyed, but couldn’t necessarily
recommend widely. Fascinating, original and, well, a bit barmy.