Counter-Clock World by Philip K. Dick

Even in the daytime it was a forbidding place. Despite the nascent life beneath the ground potentially crying out for aid. Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, he thought in quotation from vaguely remembered portion of the Bible. And the tongues of the dead unstopped. A lovely passage; and now so factually, accurately true. Who would have thought? All those centuries, regarded as a pretty and comforting fable by the world's intellectuals, something to lull people into accepting their fate. The understanding that, as predicted, it would one day be literally true, that it was not a myth--

Philip K. Dick's Counter-Clock World is one of those science fiction novels spun from a single hypothetical question: what if time began moving backwards? In 1986, the world entered "the Hobart Phase," in which normal processes suddenly began moving in the other direction. People began getting younger, not older, and soon the dead began reviving in their coffins. (Causality, it seems, still moves in the same direction, otherwise the shaggy intrigue of the novel wouldn't work.)

Dick seizes on this idea for several sly jokes. People open their conversations with "goodbye" and end them with "hello." Instead of eating, they anally ingest a substance called "sogum" around the dinner table, and then disgorge food in shameful privacy. Instead of "shit," they said "food." But the implications, as they often do in Dick's novels, touch on the theological; the Biblical promise that the dead will be reborn has finally been fulfilled. And yet, the resurrection of the dead has not exactly ushered in a peaceable kingdom. Instead of senescence and death, people can now look forward to their inevitable regression to a child, then an infant, and then a fetus which must be reinserted into a human host. (The process is complete when the host woman copulates with a man, and you're split into a sperm and egg. Neat!)

The plot centers on Sebastian Hermes, the owner of a "vitarium"--an organization responsible for digging the "old-born" out of their graves when they wake, then selling them (!) to family or friends--who discovers the burial spot of Anarch Thomas Peak, a leader of a mysterious religion who is expected shortly to be reborn. The Anarch Peak is a hot commodity for a vitarium, and Hermes finds himself in the middle of a violent war for Peak between Peak's followers, the Church of Udi, the Church of Rome, and the nefarious Public Library, who want to eradicate Peak's ideas as they eradicate, bit by bit, all the new information and learning written since 1986.

Hermes himself is an "old-born," but like most people, his memory of death is minimal. He tells his team at the vivarium that his principal recollection is a feeling of overwhelming smallness:

"We have to be little," Sebastian said, "so there ca be so many of us. So billions of billions of separate creatures can live; if one of us were big, the same size of God, then how many would there be? I see it as the only way by which every potential soul can--"

The Udi practice a drug-induced rite that supposedly unites users in a single mind; there is hope that the resurrected Peak may be able to shine some light on the relationship between the individual soul and God, who, despite death's reversal, remains mysterious and aloof.

In addition to the religious and metaphysical angle, I was interested in the way Counter-Clock World deals with race. Peak, like most of the Uditi, is black, and the religion is most popular in a splinter portion of the United States known as the Free Negro Municipality. It's not hard to see echoes in the racial violence of the 1960's, and perhaps even Martin Luther King's assassination, in the struggle over Peak; does the reversal of time perhaps promise an ultimate return to pre-racial humanity, a common ancestor? Does the Uditi's religion of the single mind promise to obliterate racial strife? And how does that fit into the idea that the "old-born" are essentially chattel slavery at the mercy of those who dig them up? Dick handles these questions too obliquely to be answered in any meaningful way, and a Balkanized United States is such a common trope in his novels it's hard to see how the idea fits in here. But the ideas are here, below the surface.

My feeling is that Dick's best novels, like Martin Time-Slip and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said always seem to break out of the orbit of their central idea. Counter-Clock World never quite does that; it seizes on the time-reversal thing and sticks with it until the bitter end. As always, it's heady and compelling, but I wouldn't place it on the level of his best work.