MARTIAN TIME-SLIP
Back Covers
1964 Ballantine edition
PHILIP K. DICK winner of the Hugo Award for the best science fiction novel of the year, and well known to s. f. aficionados, here embarks on a richly satisfying and exciting extrapolation of the problems of living on Mars.
Meet Goodmember Arnie Kott (member in good standing, that is) of the powerful plumbing union - which has a stranglehold on Mars. Dr Joe Bohlen, a slightly schizoid technician whose time sense has a way of slipping around on him. .
And the boy Manfred, who almost never gets to live in the present - except when he is with the odd native Bleek. men of Mars.
From these, and many others, Philip Dick weaves a tapestry shot through with color, excitement, conflict and humor - at once realistic, strange and totally convincing.
LOOKING BACK INTO THE FUTURE ON MARS COULD BE PROFITABLE -AND VERY DEADLY... Manfred Steiner was ten years old, a human defective on Mars whom the Earth authorities wanted destroyed. But Arnie Kolt had other plans. Doctors had discovered a curious derangement in Manfred's sense of time-a derangement that could, with the right equipment, actually push him into the future. To know what lay ahead could mean lots of money for an operator like Kolt. All he had to do was find a way to control Manfred. A man could go far with the right toolsin this case, a mentally ill kid with bizarre talents. But Kolt didn't realize that there was more than one way for things to go wrong. And that was his first mistake!
Vintage edition
On the arid colony of Mars the only thing more precious that water may be a ten-year old schizophenic boy named Manfred Steiner. For although the UN has slated "anomalous" children for deportation and destruction, other people- especially SUpreme Goodmember Arnie Kott of the Water Workers' Union -suspect that Manfred's disorder may be a window into the future.
But What sort of Future? ANd what happens to those unfortunates whom Manfred ushers into it? In Martian Time-Slip, Philip K Dick, the incomparable genius of speculative fiction, uses power politics and extraterrestrial real estate scams, adultery, and murder to penetrate the mysteries of being and tim
New English Library Editions
Mars in the 1990s is fast becoming Earth's most neglected colony. Short of water and no more than marginally suitable for settlement in the first place, it had always been a struggle to attract emigrants from Home.
Now, as Earth's attention and energies are increasingly directed elsewhere, the problems are worsening. Supplies are difficult to obtain, new technology reaches the colony late or not at all. To know that you live in a low-priority backwater is not encouraging of initiative or innovation. As things fall apart and the machinery of civilisation grinds slow, the repairman becomes the symbol of society. To get by is all that most people can hope for.