Solar Lottery, a novel by Phillip K. Dick

This is, I think, a pretty terrible novel. But it isn't what one would call a minor novel.

This was my second by PHD, after The Man in the High Castle, and I picked it up more or less at random, so I've no evidence on which to base my belief that this must have been a terribly early period in the author's life, as it reads more or less like juvenalia.

The book posits a world in which, like ours, I guess, a master narrative of equal opportunity hides the conditions on the ground - that the game, of course, is rigged. Here they have a better, or at least more advanced, narrative, though, where success is supposed to come at random, unpredictability guaranteed by the uncertainty of subatomic particles.

There are a bunch of other things going on, the world has several Shocks, but thats the basis, and its not a bad one. It's just that this author, as opposed to the one who wrote High Castle, doesn't write especially well. The sequence of events is constantly in question, and one feels unmoored in the prose to the extent that actually sort of works in the books favor, as a reader constantly sort of has to remind themselves about causality and sentence structure. It doesn't feel intended, but it makes for a pretty fascinating, if halting, read.

Other flaws seem less justifiable. The moralistic, lets-hash-out-what-we-learned endings (there are two), obviously, but the stranger thing is the women. Every once in awhile the book transforms from normal-mode to sex-mode and there isn't especially any warning. The main character, Benteley, will be carrying on a perfectly normal conversation with a female and then all of a sudden the narrator starts telling me about all her parts - her lips, the inward curve of her hip, the specific color of her lithe form - and then sometimes they have sex and sometimes they don't, and then it goes back to being a book that doesn't care about anyone's parts. I guess it's possible that this is about radical subjectivity, but it feels very much about the author occasionally remembering how awesome it would be for his protagonist to be surrounded by beautiful women.

There are a bunch of impressive set-pieces, that give one an inclination of why so many of his novels get attempted, at least, as movies. The description of what it feels like for a telepath to sense the death of another telepath was a little bit breath-taking. There's an awful lot of clumsy exposition, but usually the things that are being exposited are kind of interesting.