Rediscovered Review: Lace and Blade, edited by Deborah Ross

I resurrect another review of a rather nice original anthology from a small press, back in 2008. This review originally appeared in Locus, as a Divers Hand review.

Lace and Blade, edited by Deborah J. Ross (Leda (an imprint of Norilana Books, Winnetka, CA), ISBN: 978-1-934169-91-9, $11.95, 307 pages, tpb) February 2008

A review by Rich Horton

“Lace and Blade” is a term coined by Norilana publisher Vera Nazarian, for a sort of romantic subset of Sword and Sorcery: stories where the duels are as likely to be with wits as swords, and where women are as likely as men to wield swords (not to mention wits!). And here is a book composed entirely of such stories. Stories resembling older novels like The Scarlet Pimpernel – or newer novels like Swordspoint. I have to say first that this subgenre fits my tastes: I read more Georgette Heyer and Baroness Orczy than Conan in my formative years. And I add, then, that Lace and Blade delivers exactly what it promises; almost every story satisfies, with plenty of color and passion and wit and magic. I’m not sure any story transcends its mold: and so nothing here pierced me like Richard St. Vier’s rapier, but I really had fun.

A particular highlight is Sherwood Smith’s novella “The Rule of Engagement”, in which a woman is kidnapped by a man who hopes to marry her, and must find a way to engineer her escape without causing political issues, or harm to the man’s retainers. The story is satisfying in its scope, and hints at a fascinating backstory … all part of a grand fantastical history that Smith has been elaborating since childhood, and which is the source of her excellent Inda novels for DAW.

Tanith Lee’s “Lace-Maker, Blade-Taker, Grave-Breaker, Priest” is also great fun – on a ship journey, a couple of swordsmen take a sudden inexplicable dislike to each other, to the point of proposing a duel. But a shipwreck intervenes, and the real story is eventually made clear on the (mostly swordless) island at which they end up. Most readers will see quickly the shape of the story, and the twist, but it remains a delight getting there.

Two stories very nicely use Spanish settings. Robin Wayne Bailey’s “Touch of Moonlight” has a Lady encountering an outlaw – rumored to actually be a ghost – while on a journey to ransom her younger brother. By the end, supernatural beings have been encountered – as well as, of course, more naturally beastly humans. In Mary Rosenblum’s “Night Wind”, a young man is being pushed to a marriage he fears will be loveless, in order to save his family’s fading fortunes. But the mysterious rider called the Night Wind may change his ideas … again, the reader will recognize immediately what’s going on, but the story still satisfies.

Dave Smeds, in “The Beheaded Queen”, features the most interesting main character, as indicated by the title. And her fate is treated uncompromisingly – her interest is seeing to the future of her son. Madeleine E. Robins’s “Virtue and the Archangel” reminded me just a bit of her wonderful Sarah Tolerance novels (how I wish a publisher would pick them up so she could write more), in telling of a woman led by circumstance to a not very respectable job as a private investigator – here she helps an old school friend to recover a lost jewel.

The other stories come from Diana L. Paxson – an effective tale set in Brazil; Chaz Brenchley – sort of a pendant to his novel Bridge of Dreams, involving enough but perhaps just a bit too much a side trip and not its own journey; and Catherine Asaro, whose story was the only one here to really disappoint me.

Remastered Fantasy Magazine Review: Paper Cities, edited by Ekaterina Sedia

SF Site isn't the only place I reviewed for that has gone defunct. (Not by a long shot, alas!) I also did a number of reviews for Fantasy Magazine. Here's one, of a really fine original anthology, from 2008, that won the World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology -- but that, alas, seems hardly remembered at all now.

[I thought Fantasy Magazine was defunct -- but perhaps not, as I see there are issues as recently as late 2025 at the Psychopomp site (including some of the reviews I did for them back in the day): Fantasy Magazine.]

Remastered Fantasy Magazine Review: Paper Cities, edited by Ekaterina Sedia (Senses Five Press), ISBN: 978-0-9796246-0-5, $14.95, 288 pages, tpb) April 2008

A review by Rich Horton

Paper Cities is subtitled “An Anthology of Urban Fantasy”. “Ahhh!”, I thought, “A bunch of stories about irruptions of magic in a contemporary city. (Probably either Minneapolis or Seattle, or somewhere in Canada.)” Not sure how many of those I could have stomached all in a row, fine as they can be on occasion. But this book defines “Urban Fantasy” rather more expansively. Indeed, the great bulk of the stories are set in secondary worlds, albeit indeed in cities in those worlds.  There is no question that makes the book more interesting to me. In many cases the “urbanness” of the stories is sort of a side issue, at least in that many of the stories are not in any real sense about the experience of living in an urban environment. Which doesn’t mean they don’t work!

Instead, the single element that marks many of these stories as “urban” fantasy is the way that their fantastical cities are central to the interest of the narrative. That is, they are not just a backdrop, or a convenient setting, but integral to the story. Indeed, these are “stories about cities” more than “stories about living in a city”, if you see what I mean. So Cat Rambo’s  “The Bumblety’s Marble” is believably set in a fantastical city and redolent of that city’s atmosphere, as it tells of a girl happening onto the title marble, then feeling obligated to return to a boy she meets from the underworld who says it is his mother’s heart. And with Jay Lake’s “Promises: A Tale of the City Imperishable”, a dark story of the initiation of a girl into an order of “Sisters” in the title city. And “The Title of this Story”, by Stephanie Campisi, about a man whose job is to assign names to things, and his difficulty titling an obscure religious book from a distant village. And Ben Peek’s “The Funeral, Ruined”, about a city of cremation ovens and Morticians, and a woman mourning her lover, whom she calls dead – but he, perhaps, disagrees. Richard Parks’s “Courting the Lady Scythe” tells of a lower class man’s infatuation with the Lady who serves as the executioner in his town. The results of his scheme to meet her are predictable, but well told. The story is at one level fairly traditional fantasy, but it does tell – sort of behind its ostensible central story – the story of a city.

Other fine stories turn on striking central images, as with Vylar Kaftan’s “Godivy”, a very odd very short piece about an ambitious office worker and his unusual office, complete with living photocopier. Or Kaaron Warren’s “Down to the Silver Spirits”, in which a couple find a highly unusual way to have a baby. Or Greg van Eekhout’s “Ghost Market”, about buying ghosts, of course, but more sharply about the worst consequences of such a market. And Barth Anderson’s “The Last Escape” is a oddball little piece about an oddball escape artist making trouble for the rulers of a curiously isolated island city in time of plague – central here is not so much an odd image as an odd character. One story I both enjoyed and found frustrating was Cat Sparks’s “Sammarynda Deep”, which tells a moving and original story of a woman coming to her lover’s home city after the war they fought in is over, trying to find him and learning why he left. I thought the point-of-view choices were a bit off, and the setup a bit too labored, but the story I detected behind all that is lovely.

There are other strong stories here, by the likes of Anna Tambour, David Schwartz, and Jenn Reese; and only a couple real disappointments, most notably Hal Duncan’s piece, which is, as ever with him, very strikingly written, but, as too often with him, doesn’t tell a coherent story. The book on a whole is a strong, original, selection; giving a useful reinvigoration to the idea of Urban Fantasy.

Renamed SF Site Review: Beyond Lies the Wub and The Father-Thing, by Philip K. Dick

These reviews were done for SF Site in 1999, using the 1999 Millennium editions of the first and third volumes of the five books of Dick's collected short fiction. At the time I didn't know the history of those books -- they actually were first published in 1987 by the oustanding small press Underwood-Miller. And they have been reprinted by a number of publishers since then, often with the titles changed and with some shuffling of contents. Not surprisingly, some of the title changes were attempts to capitalize on movies. More recently, Gollancz/Orion has produced a four volume edition of Collected Stories. My advice to any buyer is to carefully study the tables of contents to try to get consistent editions.

Renamed SF Site Review: Beyond Lies the Wub and The Father-Thing, by Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick died in 1982, just on the cusp of achieving great popularity, fueled in good part by the outstanding movie Blade Runner (based on Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), released just months after his death. That led to several other movies based on his work, none as good as Blade Runner, but still sufficient to make him well-known. Now, almost 20 years after his death, many of his novels are still in print, available in very nice large sized paperback editions. And, perhaps even more surprising, his Collected Stories are in print, in 5 volumes, available in large-sized paper from the UK publisher Millennium.

Dick is best known for his novels, notable among them his Hugo winner The Man
in the High Castle, Martian Time-Slip, Ubik, and his strange late "trilogy" consisting of VALIS, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer

. I have to say this is correct: he was at his best as a novelist. A significant reason for this is that his career followed a common path: a period of apprenticeship writing short fiction, leading to novel sales. After he started selling his novels, he wrote much less short fiction, presumably because novels pay better. I have on hand for review the First and Third volumes of his Collected Stories, which are arranged chronologically by order of composition. These books include stories written from 1951 to 1954. Thus, in the first four years of a 30-year career, Dick produced approximately 60% of his short fiction.

It is, then, not much of a surprise that the stories collected in these two books are on the whole lesser creations than his great novels. In many cases, Dick appeared to be writing to market, and his main markets were the lesser pulps of the early '50s. He did make some sales to Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy; and his favourite early market appears to have been If, which throughout most of its 20 some years was a quirky and valuable second tier magazine.

These early stories, as a group, do not really reflect much of Dick's later obsessions with the nature of reality and memory, though there definite few hints to that effect. The biggest obsessions in these stories, however, are the threat of nuclear war and the subsequent danger of mutation. Another major theme (often an offshoot of the mutation theme) is psi powers. And, finally, the stories reflect the '50s concerns with advertising and the growth of the suburbs. Of course some of these ideas are present in some of Dick's novels. There is the occasional story in these books that directly prefigures later work: for example, "Shell Game" presents a world of paranoids escaped from a hospital ship, much like the more developed situation in Clans of the Alphane Moon.

For all that many of these stories are minor, there are some jewels. From Volume 1 there is "Beyond Lies the Wub," Dick's first published story (though not his first sale), which builds to a cute conclusion. "The Preserving Machine" takes an utterly strange idea -- turning music into animals -- and makes it work in an odd, haunting, fashion. "Meddler" is a legitimately scary look at time travel, and "Colony" is a scary look at a planet in which everything is a predator. Definitely a prefiguration of some later Dick themes. And "Nanny" takes on suburban life, planned obsolescence, and the fight to "keep up with the Joneses" effectively.

From Volume 3, "The Father-Thing" is scary and psychologically effective SF horror. "The Golden Man" is a brilliant and honest look at what an "advanced" human race might really be like, and how it might regard us "primitives."  "Misadjustment" is one of several stories (including "The Golden Man") in which mutations are regarded with fear and strictly controlled, and in this case the paranoia thus induced is beautifully observed. "A World of Talent" and "Psi Man Heal My Child!" take quite different looks at a curious variant of time travel which I really haven't seen treated much: a person with this time travel ability can change places with his own self at different times on his worldline, but can't go back before his birth or after his death.

I don't think anyone would necessarilyconclude from the contents of these volumes of short fiction alone that Philip K. Dick was destined to become one of the field's greats, though I think one could conclude that he had the potential to be one of the field's true originals. Neither collection is by itself a landmark, but all these collections are worth the attention of anyone interested in the work of Philip K. Dick or in the history of the SF field. And in their own right they provide a lot of interesting reading, if relatively few moments of brilliance. Moreover, the story notes at the end provide interesting details about date of composition, original publication, and in some cases, Dick's own views on the story or its origin.

Recreated SF Site Review: The Collapsium, by Wil McCarthy

I reviewed Wil McCarthy's The Collapsium at SF Site in 2000 when it first appeared. I thought it lots of fun. A trilogy which somewhat more darkly explored the implications of the ideas introduced in this novel followed: The Wellstone (2003), Lost in Transmission (2004) and To Crush the Moon (2005). A couple further stories showed up later in Analog: "The Policeman's Daughter" and "Wyatt Earp 2.0", along with another story in an anthology: "Doc Holliday 2.0". I think the entire set of stories -- collectively called, I suppose, The Queendom of Sol -- are excellent radical speculation, and deserve a wider audience.

Recreated SF Site Review: The Collapsium, by Wil McCarthy

One of the time-honoured SF themes is the exploration of what we might call "edge science": ideas that are current in the scientific world, but far from established, often very speculative, sometimes even close to kooky. Wil McCarthy's novel, The Collapsium, is built wholly around such wacky scientific speculations.

The book is set several centuries in the future, or, as the opening line declares, "in the eighth decade of the Queendom of Sol." The social setting for McCarthy's baroque scientific speculations is thus appropriately baroque. The Solar System is united under a monarchy, and the ruler is the heir to the only monarchy that has survived to this time: the Queen of Tonga, Tamra Lutui. The central character is Bruno de Towangi, a brilliant scientist from Catalonia, now living a hermit's life in the Kuiper Belt, on an artificial planet, playing with miniature black holes arranged to form the "element" collapsium, in an attempt to create an arc de fin, which will allow him to see the end of time. Bruno is a Declarant-Philander, a title which reflects both his high scientific achievements, and his status as former official lover of the "Virgin" Queen, Tamra.

The first section, "Once Upon a Matter Crushed," was originally published as a novella in SF Age, in 1999. In this section Bruno is summoned by his Queen back to the inner Solar System to solve a problem with the Ring Collapsiter, a ring of collapsium which his rival Marlon Sykes is building around the Sun. This ring will allow faster than light travel and communications, improving on the current system of "faxes," by which people travel at light speed anywhere there is a receiving station, making copies of themselves, copies which retain their memories, and which also can be "edited" to correct internal problems. Thus, humans may have also become immortal.

This first section sets up the conflict that will be repeated in all three of the book's sections. Bruno is called in-system to solve a problem with the Ring Collapsiter that endangers the Sun, and hence all humanity. He needs to deal with Marlon Sykes' jealousy, with the technical problem causing the danger to the Sun, and with the human problem motivating someone to so endanger the Ring Collapsiter and the Sun. Thus, to some extent the three sections are a bit repetitive. In addition, McCarthy keeps on multiplying his weird scientific speculations, adding in such ideas as "true vacuum," elimination of inertia, electromagnetic grapples, and so on. All this is, on the one hand, pretty fun, but on the other hand not wholly believable. It's not so much the science itself that is unbelievable -- sure, it's all speculative, and probably mostly not very likely to be true, but that's all part of the game, and all the weird stuff is pretty well explained in a series of appendices. Rather, Bruno's Tom Swift-like ability to whip up new gadgets based on the new science in quick time becomes somewhat implausible.

That said, given the rather light tone of the whole book (albeit a tone which is at odds with any thought for the millions of innocents who die), it all ends up being quite entertaining. The science is larger-than-life, and so are the characters. Neither is quite believable in a realistic fashion, but both are acceptable within the conventions of this book. It's baroque, super-scientific, stuff: kind of like bad 30s pulp SF rewritten to be a pretty good new millennium take on those old tropes. It's not great SF, but it's good fun, and full of neat and wild ideas

Remastered SF Site Review: Embassytown, by China Miéville

Here's a review from 2011 at SF Site. As ever, my comments about the writer's career have dated badly!

Review: Embassytown, by China Miéville

by Rich Horton

China Miéville's first few novels made a great splash in the SF/Fantasy field, particularly the Bas Lag "trilogy": Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council. After these books he seemed to fit neatly in a pigeonhole. He was a leading light of the briefly fashionable non-movement "The New Weird." His novels were long, baroque, "weird" (yes, in a new way!). They were admixtures of Fantasy, SF, and Horror, with a splash of leftish politics for flavor. He was pretty good, but you knew what you were getting: intriguing but not quite believable grotesqueries, a bit of overwriting, often enough redeemed by really striking stuff buried within, and a plot full of action and passion but not always logic. There was MORE in Miéville than in most writers, but the MORE was only half good.

But what is exciting is that Miéville was not content. On the evidence of his subsequent work, he clearly wanted to expand his range. I don't mean to suggest he would endorse my readings or criticism of his work, rather that he recognized that he wanted to tell a variety of stories, and realized that to to do so he needed to adopt a variety of voices, styles, modes. And he has done so, with an accomplished YA novel (Un Lun Dun), and then a truly brilliant police procedural/philosophical thriller, The City and the City. The latter novel nearly swept the major SF awards, winning the Hugo, Clarke, and World Fantasy Awards (but only reaching the Nebula shortlist). At the same time it received respectful attention in the mainstream.

Embassytown, then, is another expansion of his range. It is Miéville's first out and out SF novel, though to be sure much of his earlier work can be squinted at and called SF. Like The City and the City it is built around an idea that is not quite plausible, but that is philosophically very rich, and that is worked out quite rigorously in the book. In Embassytown the central idea is Language, which is the language of the Ariekei, the native intelligent species of the remote planet (remote as defined by its accessibility through human FTL travel, which is based on something like wormholes) of which Embassytown is the single colony city. Language is unique, in that it is spoken by two voices simultaneously, in that it will not support a lie, and in that it is unintelligible to the natives if not spoken by an intelligence. (Recordings are OK, but not synthesized speech, and not even AI speech.) The intelligences speaking the two voices must be synchronized closely, so humans have had to construct Ambassadors by cloning individuals, and then linking the clones' brains.

The novel is told by Avice Benner Cho, a native of Embassytown who is locally famous because she became a "simile." That is, because native Language speakers cannot lie, they sometimes have people act out behaviour which can be referred to in Language to represent truthfully a comparison. Avice is "the girl who was hurt and ate what was given her." She is also unusual in that she left Embassytown and returned. She had the rare ability to "Immerse" -- to remain functional throughout FTL travel, and so she became a starship crewmember. But one of her marriages was to a linguist, and partly because of his interest in Language, she returned.

The main action of the novel comes some time after her return. A new kind of artificially created Ambassador has been tried -- two unrelated humans with unusual empathy have been linked in the same way as the more traditional clones. But it turns out that their speech, while comprehensible to the Ariekei, is horribly addicting as well. Ariekei society collapses, and threatens to bring Embassytown down with it. Avice becomes part of a faction trying to save Embassytown, and eventually the Ariekei, with the help of a curious faction of the alien society: aliens who are trying to learn to lie.

This whole idea is inherently fascinating to me. The novel joins the shortish list of significant SF novels about linguistics. (Obvious predecessors: Jack Vance's The Languages of Pao, Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17, Ian Watson's The Embedding.) Ultimately Miéville here is considering the importance of language in constructing "story," and perhaps the importance of story in establishing individual consciousness. Some of the Ariekei seem, by the end, to be desperately trying to wake -- to become individuals, to become truly conscious. And some humans desperately regret the loss of innocence, in a sense, of this people who could not lie. Miéville doesn't insist on answers here -- he asks intriguing questions about language, about sentience, and we are urged to think about them.

On this level the novel is an exuberant success. It is also well written, in as has become normal for Miéville -- a different voice than he has used previously -- a voice consistent to Avice's character. The characters are well-portrayed, though they are not on the whole terribly admirable (terribly human, though), and Avice is a bit cold and distant -- in particular, her love affairs don't ever emotionally convince. The novel isn't wholly successful, primarily because the action, as oppposed to the speculation, is often not very absorbing. I still enjoyed it a great deal, and it's very well worth reading, but there are longeurs. It's not Miéville's best novel -- that is still The City and the City -- but it is very good, very thought-provoking, and a true Science Fiction novel in the pure sense. And: more evidence that China Miéville is a writer whose every novel we must await with great anticipation.

Review: The Witness for the Dead, by Katherine Addison

 Review: The Witness for the Dead, by Katherine Addison

By Rich Horton

A few years ago I read Katherine Addison’s novel The Goblin Emperor, and I just lapped it up – it’s a captivating read, and among other things it is about a noticeably good protagonist – someone who tries to see the best in other people and do the best he can for all around him. I came late to that book, and now I come late to a book set in the same world. This is The Witness for the Dead, which is the job title of the protagonist, Thara Celehar, who was an important character in The Goblin Emperor. And while Celehar is in outward appearance and attitude rather different to the Emperor, he shares with him a virtuous character, and a sense of duty. The Witness of the Dead is the first of a trilogy about Celehar and the city of Amalo.

Thara has moved to Amalo and taken up his duties there. As a Witness, he can sense the perceptions of very recently deceased people, allowing for understanding of why and how they died, and perhaps some ability to help their spirit rest. Besides the religious aspects of his job -- and he is also a Prelate of the god Ulis -- this knowledge can help in investigating suspicious deaths. Thara also has the ability to "quiet" ghouls -- reanimated corpses that can escape a poorly constructed grave. Thara, partly for his somewhat prickly nature, partly for his connections to the royal family (and his relationship with the Emperor -- addressed in The Goblin Emperor, and partly simply out of jealousy, is regarded with hostility by the other priests in Amalo.

The novel works as sort of an introduction to Amalo, and to Thara Celehar's life there and his job. Thus we see him investigating a variety of cases. Mostly this arises from a request to Witness for a recently dead person -- requests he takes as sort of a civil servant. As the novel opens, he is trying to find a woman who was disappeared, and who her relatives believe was killed by her husband -- an unlikeable man they barely knew whom she had very suddenly married and who had died while pregnant -- supposedly due to enteric fever. Soon he is also enlisted to witness the last perceptions of a drowned woman just recovered from the river -- and he learns quickly that she was murdered, and that she was a roundly hated opera singer. Even as these investigations continue, he is hired to witness for a man who left two separate wills, in the hope that the dead man's memories will reveal which was the true will. A distant mountain village reports an infestation of ghouls, and Thara must travel there to find and quiet them. Other duties include tending to the victims of an airship explosion, and helping an old man, long exiled to Amalo for political reasons, to reconcile with a granddaughter he never met.

This perhaps sounds like a bit of a tangle, or an episodic fixup perhaps, but really the novel works very nicely as a unified work. The point is not the solution to the mysteries, but to portray Thara Celehar himself, and his milieu. The various stories to link up to a degree, and he is successful in doing what he can to resolve each situation, though such resolution can be complicated. The matter of the will, for example, leads him to legal trouble, as the politically connected man who loses out on the inheritance brings an action for fraud against Celehar. The airship explosion is in the end a wrenching tragedy, as is the case of the missing woman. The primary thread is about the murdered opera singer, and this leads Thara to meet some interesting people and to uncover some very unhappy secrets. Throughout, we are with Thara, and his stubborn virtuousness, his devotion to his duty, his refusal to play political games, and his deep pain over the loss of a lover (this another event covered in The Goblin Emperor.)

Much as with the first novel, I was enchanted. Thara Celehar is a character we root for, and one we admire. The events of the book -- the various mysteries -- are interesting in themselves. (I was reminded just a bit of Sarah Monette's long series of tales about one Kyle Murchison Booth, who, a bit like Thara Celehar, investigates various necromantic mysteries -- these stories are well worth looking for as well. Sarah Monette, of course, is Katherine Addison's real name.) One aspect I also appreciated was the novel's respect for religion -- for religious believers (like Thara himself), for the value of religious rites and observance, and for the inherent mysteries to sacred beliefs -- all while depicting the completely invented religions and gods of this fantasy world.

Recovered SF Site Review: The Game Players of Titan, by Philip K. Dick

Here's an old SF site review I did of one of Philip K. Dick's lesser known novels. 

Review: The Game Players of Titan, by Philip K. Dick

British SF classic re-release series seem to be proliferating -- a nice thing. The latest example I have seen is called Voyager Classics, and the sample in front of me is a new large-sized paperback edition of Philip K. Dick's 1963 novel The Game-Players of Titan. The book is attractively packaged, with a simple dark blue cover, complete with flaps, though internally the paper quality and typography are rather indifferent. But it remains nice to see worthwhile SF books back in print, at a decent price to boot. This is part of a series of 36 reprints -- the entire list is printed inside the book. To my taste, the collection, taken as a whole, is a bit odd. There is a mix of unquestioned SF and Fantasy classics such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy; with more recent books that deserve consideration such as William Gibson's Neuromancer; with still more recent books that, good as they may be, hardly seem ready just yet for "classic" reprint status, such as Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy and Michael Marshall Smith's Only Forward. Not to mention a few choices at which my eyebrows were raised.

But my duty is merely to review the book at hand. The GamePlayers of Titan is not one of Dick's better-known works. It comes from a somewhat transitional period for him, when he was just beginning to produce his most impressive novels. This novel follows the brilliant Hugo winner The Man in the High Castle, and precedes the excellent The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, but the novel it most reminded me of is a third novel from the early to mid 60s, Clans of the Alphane Moon. Like that novel it is awash in concerns with marriage, mental health, and drug use; and like that novel it features overtly science-fictional elements such as silicon-based alien life forms to tell a story that, at its base, seems mostly about suburban life in the 60s.

The main character of this book is Pete Garden. Pete is part of a circle of California residents in a depopulated future world who own large swathes of property, and who regularly play a board game called simply the Game, at which they stake their property, and their marriages, and even their status as eligible game players. (Property owners are called Bindmen, and if you lose all your property, you are no longer a Bindman, and cannot play.) The Game is administered in part by the amorphous aliens from Titan, the vugs, who apparently put much stock in gambling. In addition, the wife-swapping encouraged by the game is intended to promote what is called luck: actually, interfertility. The human race is dwindling because a weapon developed during the last war made people largely sterile.

The book opens with Pete stumbling home after a binge -- it seems that he has lost his favourite property, Berkeley, and in so doing has also lost his wife Freya. But his personal concerns seem less important after he discovers that the man who won Berkeley from him sold it to a front for a notorious Bindman from the East Coast. Pete is also worried because he liked Freya, and he fears that his prospective new wife, on loan from another Game-playing group, will be less congenial. Moreover, he finds himself greatly attracted to a mysteriously fertile woman living in his remaining property, and also to her 18-year-old daughter.

Dick continues to throw idea upon idea, and to alter the direction the book seems to be taking. Some of the characters are PSIs (telepathy, precognition, and telekinesis figure prominently), and they resent the fact that they are not allowed in the Game (because they could use their powers to cheat). Then a murder happens, and Pete is implicated, along with several other members of his Game-playing group. And Pete becomes convinced that vugs have infiltrated the Earth. Then it turns out that there are multiple factions among the vugs... As you can see, there is a sense of kitchen-sinkery to this book, a sense that the author may have made it all up as he went along. Similar problems underlie the character relationships, which alter chapter by chapter. (I may have missed something, but I'm pretty sure one character is a vug some of the time, and a human at other times, not on purpose.) I don't think things really cohere.

Despite those problems, the book is readable and interesting. There are a number of nice minor touches, such as the artificially intelligent cars with attitude. And the character of Pete Garden, a fairly typical Dick protagonist, neurotic to the point of suicide attempts but basically decent, is nicely enough portrayed. It is by no means among Dick's best novels, but Dick is a sufficiently interesting writer that even his minor works are worth reading.