Lies, Inc. by Philip K. Dick

There was silence. And then, by labored, unnaturally retarded degrees, a groaning noise came from the speaker of the television set; the noise at last became intelligible speech, at the proper pitch and rate: his categories of perception had again achieved a functioning parallel with the space-time axis of the image of Omar Jones. Or had the progression of the image resumed as before? Time had stopped or the image had stopped, or perhaps both... or was there such a thing as time at all? He tried to remember, but found himself unable to; the falling off of his capacity for abstract thought--was--what--was--

He did not know.

Something looked at him. With its mouth.

It had eaten most of its own eyes.

Millions of people on an overcrowded planet (population--LOL--seven billion) have already made the journey by teleport to the distant planet known as Whale's Mouth. The problem is, the teleportation only works one way. Rachmael ben Applebaum is one of the few on Earth who don't trust the veracity of the images of idyllic life being beamed back from Whale's Mouth, and he plans on finding out exactly what's going on the old fashioned way, on a seventeen-year trip by spaceship. (It doesn't hurt that Rachmael's transportation business is on its last legs, and might be reinvigorated by the existence of a few million people eager to sign up for a return trip to Earth.) The plan puts him directly in the crosshairs of a battle between the teleportation company, the very funnily-named German company Trails of Hoffmann and the secret police service known as Lies, Inc.

Classic PKD premise, no? Lies, Inc. has a fascinating publication history: originally written as a novella in the 60s, Dick added about 100 pages of new material toward the end of his life that was rejected by his publisher and released only posthumously. The result is a mishmash that doesn't quite work as a novel, but provides a really fascinating study in the contrast between early and late Dick. The early book is quite familiar, down to its obsession with the repetition and extension of World War II-era politics: note the German company and the Jewish hero. (One of the horrors of the seven-billion-strong world is, in fact, that Germany has been reunited once more.) The new material follows Rachmael who has decided (confusingly) to travel through the portal anyway, where he finds himself in a waiting room with a couple dozen other people who are not fit to be released. Each of them suffers from a series of delusional "paraworlds" filled with monsters; periodically they must compare notes on their paraworlds and make sure they're not the same, which would suggest that one is becoming real. That's very Dickian, I think: the proliferation of one premise into several, the carefully orchestrated logic of the sci-fi world dissolving into multiplicities.

But like I said, as a novel, it's a mess, even at the level of basic logic and coherence. It's no wonder that no one wanted to published it like it is, though another pass at editing might have made it into something great. There are several memorable images of the kind that only PKD could write: the monster--actually the head of Lies, Inc. transformed via paraworld--that grows and eats its own eyes; the corporate apparatchik who lives slightly outside of normal time and is kept, like a pre-cog, in a glass room; the book that seems to tell people about their fate, by which I mean it borrows paragraphs from later on in the book. What I love about PKD is that he tosses off these ideas, which for another writer would make up the whole center of the work, by the bucketful.