Anyone else here read Time out of Joint by Philip K. Dick?
I thought this was a nice, concise, and original read, and my first real attempt at an American SF story. I went into it with very little background, only a brief blurb written in Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie about Dick's description of the uncanny feeling of driving to the outskirts of one's own town - one of the most memorable scenes from the book. The first half is certainly the better, while the second half's over-explained and sort of goofy rational explanation for everything took away a bit of the intrigue.
Very cinematic. Funny when it needed to be, moody throughout, and pretty transgressive to [my idea of] the standards of the late-50s.
Props to SF Masterworks for making such a great presentation. I always try to find their prints of books whenever possible.
This is the one where he goes to flick a switch and it's not in the same position as he remembered it.
Sort of. One of the MCs goes to pull a light cord and realizes that it's a switch and that the bathroom has never had a light cord, giving them the idea that the reflex must have come from some repressed memories of a past life. Dick puts a lot of stock in Freudian psychology in the setup chapters.
Ah yes, it's been a while and the bathroom switch was pivotal to his doubting his reality. Like he entered a trip (which undoubtedly PKD was experiencing a lot of the time).