American Editions
From the back cover of the 1964 Ace edition
Holding a precarious liberty as the result of an interstellar stalemate, the human survivors of Alpha Centauri's hospital moon readied themselves for their war of independence. Naturally, the Pares, always suspicious and cunning, assumed the leadership, leaving it to the Manses to provide the super weapons out of their sheer love of violence. Propaganda and other details would have to be left to the Skitzes, the Heebs, the Polys, and the Ob-Coms. But when the Earth expedition arrived, everything turned out to be different. . . because they too were divided among themselves, and some of them weren't really human at all! It's a Philip K. Dick tour-de-force of the far future.
THE MAD SATELLITE
Earth dumped Its psychotics on the moon of Alpha III -then forgot about them. After more than two decades, the Alphane moon suddenly became Important again, and a crashpriority project sent a Terran contact team to open up a society that had had twenty.flve yean to bring Its madness to full flower. The trouble was, Earth's representatives weren't all that sane themselves....
CLANS OF THE ALPHANE MOON, now In print once more after many years, Is one of Philip Dick's most fanious-and most Outrageous-novels of science fiction.
The small, habitable moon was once an insane asylum. Its patients, abandoned long ago, formed clans based on their different psychoses. The result is a society which is a bizarre parody of our own. It's fragile equation becomes unbalanced when Earth and the alien Alphanes vie for control of the cursed moon's resources. A futuristic adventure on one level, this novel also poses the disquieting question of where sanity ends and madness begins...and asks, who among us is truly qualified to make such a judgement. This edition includes a new Afterword by the Hugo Award nominated author and critic Barry Malzberg.
From the back cover of the 1985 Carroll & Graf edition
This small habitable moon is an insane asylum. Its patients, abandoned long ago by planetary superpowers, have formed clans based on their respective psychoses. Till now, it's been an unstable yet viable society of psychopaths. But when Mary Rittersdorf an over-zealous social worker, attempts to rehospitalize these troubled people, all hell breaks loose. Now the moon's vital resources are up for grabs and CIA agents, protected by their robots set about thwarting Mary's good intentions, triggering a deadly conflict with the Alphane Empire.
