Author: Philip K Dick
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WORTHY!
It's the 22nd day of December, so this has to be a novel starting with a 'V'!
In 2036, Earth makes contact with a civilization in the Proxima Centauri system, but one hundred years later, Earth and Centaurus are in a war in which no shot has apparently ever been fired. Both sides are so obsessed with designing perfect weapons which can bring decisive victory that almost as soon as each design hits the drawing board, the other side has a defense which slightly betters it. Causing the original to be scrapped in favor of an improved design. Since nothing is ever stabilized, then nothing can actually be built! It’s delicious!
Dick comes up with a really entertaining concept of how faster-than-light travel works:
Hedge’s object continued to lose length and gain mass until it reached the theoretical limit of velocity, the speed of light. At that point the object, still gaining speed, simply ceased to exist. Having no length, it ceased to occupy space. It disappeared. However, the object had not been destroyed. It continued on its way, gaining momentum each moment, moving in an arc across the galaxy, away from the Sol system. Hedge’s object entered some other realm of being, beyond our powers of conception. The next phase of Hedge’s experiment consisted in a search for some way to slow the ftl object down, back to a sub-ftl speed, hence back into our universe.
Can’t argue with that! Actually I can because space is inextricably tied-in with time, but I'll let that slide!
The problem arises in this novel when humanity (or rather humanity's computers) decide that the odds are ever in its favor, and plans on launching an attack on the Centaurans within the week, using an FTL bomb which the Centaurans will not only not see coming, they will be unable to defend against.
In preparation for the end of the war, a historical research bubble is interrupted in its scan of the past and terminated manually. This causes it to bring a person back from two hundred years before. Unlike contemporary humans, this man is a generalist - he doesn’t specialize in a tightly circumscribed field of expertise as everyone else in this world does, and this results in those crucial computers being unable to calculate the odds of wining the war any more - they go blank because of this variable - this man who is an unpredictable unknown.
He arrives almost like a Messiah, right on the verge of a massive war to end all wars (as the claim goes) against the Centaurans and just like a Messiah, the powers that be, seeing him as a threat to the status quo, try to eliminate him. Unfortunately for them, it doesn't quite work out how they planned.
This is a really good story. I highly recommend it. It’s short so it’s a fast read, and while Dick wasn't really much on world-building or poetic conversation, he does just enough to get you engaged and keep you in his world - and in the end, maybe a lot of other writers could learn from that!
You can get this book on your reading device for 99 cents (it's free on Amazon as of the posting date of this review), but you can also read it for free online at the Gutenberg project:. Since Philip Dick has been dead for thirty years, trust me, he's not going to miss the income; only Big Publishing™ will benefit.
