Time Out Of Joint (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

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Una storia appallottolata come il filo di una matassa e che sbrigliandosi va a costruire un'originale trama fantastica. As always when examining a quotation, it's important to know the precise context in which it was uttered. In the case of this particular quotation from Act 1, Scene 5 of Hamlet, the title character speaks these words just after his encounter with the ghost of his father, who's told him how he was murdered by Claudius. No one takes the immaterialist philosophy of the 17th century Bishop Berkeley seriously today - that being is a result of being perceived. But perhaps we should. Isn’t this what quantum theory suggests, that only when something is noticed or measured does it become definite? And, at a more quotidian level, isn’t Berkeley’s kind of immaterialism the foundation of advertising in all its forms, from retail selling, to political campaigning, to the generating of national feeling? The only thing real is what is perceived to be real by enough people. Genius. Visionary. The master of science fiction. Did this man have a crystal ball? Could he see into the future? Iniziato come semplice gioco è ormai diventata un'occupazione a tempo pieno che frutta denaro ed anche fama essendo oramai un affermato vincitore seriale.

Ma abbiamo anche un intrigante sguardo sul futuro, tra strani abbigliamenti e slang, vita post-bellica e guerre civili inimmaginabili. Rossi, Umberto, “The Harmless Yank Hobby: Maps, Games, Missiles and Sundry Paranoias in Time Out of Joint and Gravity’s Rainbow”, Pynchon Notes #52–53, Spring-Fall 2003, pp.106–123 They", a 1941 story by Robert A. Heinlein about a man surrounded by persons whose job is to convince him that he is insane rather than one of the few genuine people in his world. Marvelous, terrifying fun, especially if you ve ever suspected that the world is an unreal construct built solely to keep you from knowing who you really are. Which it is, of course." Rolling StoneTempo fuori luogo” è un'ucronia che sicuramente ha dato più di uno spunto alla narrativa di genere che ne è seguita benché non colpisca certo con una brillante cifra stilistica.

This story was written in 1959. His character Ragle Gumm is an ordinary man leading a fairly ordinary life. The book is about Ragle Gumm, an unemployed middle aged man who lives with his sister, her husband and their small kid. Ragle is a local celebrity in his small American town on account of the fact that he keeps winning a newspaper contest that requires extraordinary skills in mathematics. When he is not working hard at the contest, he is swilling beer and lusting for his neighbors wife. But Ragle senses that something is not right with his existence. Small clues lead him to question the very nature of his reality and what he believes to be true. Ragle could be at the centre of a sinister plot by the government to hide the truth about space travel and its benefits from the citizens. What I most enjoyed in the book was the philosophical speculation about the nature of reality and the meaning of words. When Ragle initiates a conversation with his brother-in-law about philosophy, he cites George Berkeley ~ the Idealist philosopher who proposed that nothing actually exists except as ideas in the mind of God. “ How do we know that piano exists?” says Ragle and Vic replies “ I’m sorry, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s just a bunch of words” (49). What I was trying to do in that book was account for the diversity of worlds that people live in. I had not read Heraclitus then, I didn’t know his concept of idios kosmos, the private world, versus koinos kosmos, which we all share. I didn’t know that the pre-Socratics had begun to discern these things. There’s a scene in the book where the protagonist goes into the bathroom, reaches in the dark for a pull-cord, and suddenly realizes there is no cord, there’s a switch on the wall, and he can’t remember when he ever had a bathroom when there was a cord hanging down. Now, that actually happened to me, and it was what caused me to write the book. It reminded me of the idea that Van Vogt had dealt with, of artificial memory, as occurs in THE WORLD OF NULL-A where a person has false memories implanted. A lot of what I wrote, which looks like the result of taking acid, is really the result of taking Van Vogt seriously! I believed Van Vogt, I mean, he wrote it, you know, he was an authority figure. He said, people can be other than whom they remember themselves to be, and I found this fascinating. You have a massive suspension of belief on my part." I read Time Out of Joint right after going through the amazing PKD life story, and it definitely affected how I saw the book.Armed with this information, Hamlet now sees the world in a whole different light. To him, the current state of affairs in the kingdom of Denmark has become “out of joint”, in much the same way as a dislocated shoulder. A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. Central problem in philosophy. Relation of word to object . . . what is a word? Arbitrary sign. But we live in words. Our reality, among words not things. No such thing as a thing anyhow; a gestalt in the mind. Thingness . . . sense of substance. An illusion. Word is more real than the object it represents. Word doesn’t represent reality. Word is reality. For us, anyhow. Maybe God gets to objects . Not us, though” (50). The philosophical foundation of Time Out of Joint is the Platonic distinction between the true nature of reality and the illusion that we usually mistake for reality. Once Ragle sets out to discover the truth, it is Immanuel Kant that he cites. Kant’s philosophy distinguishes between the world of our perceptions and the world as it truly is. “ The Ding an sich, as Kant said” (170).

The title of the book is a reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet : "The time is out of joint; O cursed spite!/That ever I was born to set it right!" [I.V.211-2]).Despite their self-perception, Americans in the 1950’s lived in an arguably totalitarian state. Their perceptions of freedom was their reality. The uniformity of opinion, the banality of life, the striving to get on, the universally concealed envy, attachment to celebrity, and the vague anti-intellectualism were all part of what they meant by freedom. The shared fear of Communism and the H-bomb was a unifying perception created and sustained by government propaganda. Bishop Berkeley had been right, and America proved it. I still love the book, but now, having read PKD's biography, I understand a little bit more about his relationships with women. He really sees his ideal partner as a stupid and dependent young female. PKD had a lot of problems, and his emotional immaturity is quite visible here, but hey, we all have our mistakes, and PKD is still an excellent writer. So, for me, three and a half stars rounded up. The Incident, a 2014 Mexican film in which the book notably appears, about people trapped in an infinite loop. He offers us scenes from small town American life to underscore the absurdity of our mundane existence. But ultimately, Time Out of Joint is a novel that emphasizes the marvel of space travel ( or migration and travel) as one of man's most primitive instinct.

Some friends and I were just mentioning this book in the context of it perhaps inspiring the producers of the 1998 Peter Weir film The Truman Show starring Jim Carrey. Without giving too much away, it wasn’t exactly like the film, but there was enough going on to suggest that there may have been a connection. Ubiquitous PKD themes like unreality, questioned sanity, conspiracy theories and mass psychosis and delusions are also present in this very enjoyable 1959 publication and the then 31 year old writer played the SF down, telling this fairly straight, in a way that would make our modern writer Blake Crouch proud. Abbiamo la guerra civile, e l'istinto dell'uomo per spingersi oltre, esplorare, trovare nuove frontiere. Ha una coppia di vicini entranti e assillanti, spesso presenti in casa sua, e una mezza storia con la bella ma infantile vicina, chiaramente osteggiata dalla sorella visto il carattere della donna e il suo essere sposata. Then we have the last part of the book, which is a political thriller. Yeah, the whole buildup ends in quite a disappointing revelation.I have a copy of Time Out of Joint languishing in my house for over ten years. I have no idea where it came from, I am pretty sure I never bought it. Is that weird? No, I guess not. I could tell you how I suddenly decided to read it after having ignored it for ten years, but that would be a spectacularly uninteresting anecdote so I will leave that out. Imagine if you will a man, an ordinary man who enjoys solving the daily newspaper puzzle. But while this man’s attention is focused on this one task, the puzzle of his life remains unsolved. This man presently resides in the The Twilight Zone… Central problem in philosophy. Relation of word to object ... what is a word? Arbitrary sign. But we live in words. Our reality, among words not things. No such thing as a thing anyhow; a gestalt in the mind. Thingness ... sense of substance. An illusion. Word is more real than the object it represents.” Under everything else,’ Ragle said. ‘The word. Maybe it’s the word of God. The logos. ‘In the beginning was the Word‘”(170). The bulk of the plot is a spoiler, so to say as little as possible about this book: A man called Ragle Gumm lives an ordinary life next door to some great neighbors and in a seemingly ordinary town in the same house with his sister and his brother in law. He makes a living, oddly, by winning big prizes from newspaper competitions. Ragle starts searching for answers when a soda-pop turns into a slip of paper with Soda-pop written on it before his eyes, and he slowly notices other objects turning to slips of paper. He sets out on a journey for the truth along with his brother in-law and the curtains slowly unravel as the pieces of the puzzle are put together.