No wonder they all trembled; no wonder their nights were bad. They served—and knew it—a bad master. -- The Penultimate Truth (p. 72)
Not one of Dick’s most well known books, The Penultimate Truth is a more straightforward, for Dick, SciFi piece set in a future time in the aftermath of the ongoing WW III.
And because this was evening and the world was darkening, this fog scared him as much as that other fog, the one inside which did not invade but stretched and stirred and filled the empty portions of the body. Usually the latter fog is called loneliness. -- The Penultimate Truth (p. 1)
Astute readers of Hugh Howey’s brilliant Silo Series, may note similarities to Dick’s world where a duped population lives in underground “ant tanks” unaware that there is a paradisiacal above ground world of “demesnes”.
Your lives are incomplete, in the sense that Rousseau had meant when he talked of man having been born in one condition, born brought into the light free, and everywhere was now in chains. -- The Penultimate Truth (pp. 69-70)
In Dick’s story, the people of the tanks build “leadies”, robots ostensibly made to fight in the ongoing world. The story brings one of the “tank men”, Nicholas St. James, to the surface in search of a cache of replacement organs for dying colleague. Once on the surface, St. James falls in with a group of other tank men who have gone to the surface and realize they’re being manipulated by The Agency and it’s simulacrum of a leader, President Talbot Yancy.
What a great burden, Adams thought, the luxury of this way we live. -- The Penultimate Truth (p. 72)
As one of The Agency’s staff, Joseph Adams (a key part in the unraveling of a complex plot) goes to New York City for some research, he visits the great repository of knowledge, which like, many envisioned by researchers and writers from the 1940s to 1980s, looked a lot like Vannevar Bush’s Memex:
Joseph Adams made his way by horizontal express belt from the building at 580 Fifth Avenue to the Agency’s titanic repository of reference material, its official archives of every known datum of knowledge from before the war retained and fixed for perpetuity and of course instantly available to the elite, such as himself, whenever needed ... At the great central station he lined up, and when he found himself facing the combination type XXXV leady and Megavac 2-B which acted as ruling monad of the labyrinthine organism of spool upon spool of microtape—whole twenty-six volume reference books reduced to the size of a yo-yo, and merely a yo-yo’s shape and width and weight—he said, rather plaintively, it seemed to him as he heard himself speak, “Um, I’m sort of confused. I’m not looking for any one particular source, as for instance Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura or Pascal’s Provincial Letters or Kafka’s The Castle.” -- The Penultimate Truth (p. 73)
The Penultimate Truth hits on Dick’s themes of alienation, duplicitous authorities, technological control of thought and emotion, anxiety, and paranoia.
Read:August 10, 2020 | Buy on Kindle
See my complete 2020 Reading list on Goodreads.
