The Game-Players of Titan by Philip K. Dick

The board was so enormous that it petrified him. Its sides, its two ends, faded, disappeared into the understructure of reality in which he sat. And yet, directly before him, he made out cards, clear-cut and separable. The vugs waited; he was supposed to draw a card.

It was his turn.

Pete Garden, after having a little too much to drink, makes too large a bet around the gambling table. By the time the game is over, he's lost Berkeley, California, a region he controls as its "Bindman." He's also lost his wife; his marriage dissolved. Bad luck. In the future of The Game-Players of Titan, the human race is radically reduced after an intense war with a race of aliens from Titan they dismissively call "vugs." The vugs make the remaining Terrans play a board game in which huge regions of the Earth are swapped for one another and marriages swapped and recombined to search for what every one calls luck: the ability to get pregnant, a rare feat in the aftermath of immense weapons that failed to defeat the vugs but which rendered much of humanity infertile. Pete, determined to win back Berkeley, finds it's already been sold to the world's greatest and luckiest player of the game; to defeat him Pete will end up mixed up with the secret machinations of the vugs on earth.

At the heart of The Game-Players of Titan is a crude sort of social satire: power and wealth are determined through a set of obscure rules unavailable to ordinary people, and though the game itself requires luck, you can't really say that advancement is available to all. It reminded me of Old Spencer from The Catcher in the Rye telling Holden that "Life is a game one plays according to the rules," to which Holden wisely observes that this is only true for the "hot-shots" who find themselves winning. Life for the Bindmen is still fluid and precarious; livelihoods and marriages are always on the chopping block, but Dick notes wryly that this is not so different from the way things have always been:

But marriage had always been primarily an economic entity, Schilling reflected as he steered his auto-auto up into the early-morning New Mexico sky. The vugs hadn't invented that; they had merely intensified an already existing condition. Marriage had to do with the transmission of property, of lines of inheritance. And of cooperation in career-lines as well. All this emerged explicitly in The Game and dominated conditions; The Game merely dealt openly with what had been there implicitly before.

In fact, you might even say The Game is fairer than life on the old free Earth we live in; the rules of the Game are at least laid out ahead of time and clear to all. Pete's quest to get back his Berkeley bind leads him to another playing group whose members, after a few feints and false reveals, turn out to be vugs in disguise, a radical group of warmongers who work outside of the game to undermine humanity: essentially, cheaters. Through this group Pete learns to play the game as the vugs play it, with their psionic powers, which makes bluffing a very different thing. Instead of pretending to read an eleven as a twelve, for instance, your vug opponents might infiltrate your mind and make you see your twelve as an eleven.

Through this door come Dick's old familiar tropes: pre-cogs who can preview the future, telekinetics, real things that look fake and fake things that look real, and of course psychotropic drugs, which dampen the abilities of vugs and psionics and make the playing level fair, if such a thing is even possible. The final "game," which pits Pete and his playing group against the vugs with the whole Earth staked, is Dick at his very pulpiest, though his ability to describe states of irreality and transformation makes The Game-Players of Titan more interesting and more sophisticated than its antecedents. It's one of the least memorable of Dick's novels that I've read; but even the least memorable of them are stupendously rich with ideas, and supremely strange.