In the year 2080 every crisis of a couple of centuries had come to maturity. It was an election year, and Jim Briskin,candidate for President.was trying to solve the unsolvable and appease the unappeasable.
There were tens of millions of people in deep-freeze waiting for better times-and the pressure was on to wake them up or throw them away.
The jiffi-scuttlers which bypassed space to speed travel were breaking down and someone had to find out why fast.
And the racial problem had reached the point where a colored man now seemed likely to be the next chief executive.
Add to that a breakthrough into another sort of space and contact with a long-forgotten ancestral race. . . and you have a complex, taut, and tremendously exciting science-fiction novel as only Philip K. Dick can write.

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1974 Ace edition

Every crisis that had been building through the 20th century came to a head in the year 2080. And it was an election year. There were tens of millions of people in deepfreeze waiting for better times-and the pressure was on to wake them up or throw them away. Unemployment had reached an all-time high-and people were demanding jobs. The jiffi-scuttlers which made space travel possible were breaking down and someone had to find out why fast. The racial problem had become dangerous-and one of the candidates for President was black. But most important of all, scientists had broken into another dimension and found another world -and a long forgotten ancestral race.

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1977 Coronet edition

From Tomb to Womb
Time runs backward in the Counter-Clock world. Old people merge from their graves, grow to middle age, youth, adolescence and childhood to be finally unborn in their mother's wombs. The most powerful – and most feared –organization in the world is the Library, in charge of expunging the written records of events which have no llonger happened. When a powerful black leader is reborn, the libary's one concern is to eliminate him before the renewal of racil violence tears the country appart.

But in this counter-clock year of 1998 it isn't that simple

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1990 Grafton edition

The dead grow young, in a world where time has reversed its flow –
MOVING BACKWARD!
Now that Hobart Phase is in effect, Officer Joseph Tinbane isn't surprised when he hears a voice speaking to him from beneath the ground. He isn't going mad. Not at all. It is just one of the 'old-born' wanting to be dug up.
For time is moving backwards, people grow younger instead of older, to return finally to the womb....

Philip K. Dick has written a remarkable and compelling novel about time – a time which heals but can also destroy. And one man struggling alone in a world gone mad.