The Crack in Space by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Not one of Dick’s better books, but still an interesting read and, occasionally, a fun one at that. I found it a bit shocking that in the 1960s, Dick was writing about issues that are very relevant today, such as abortion, a black president, etc. Before either was possible, in other words. The book is about a parallel earth, and our attempts to populate it with 70 million bibs, or people who had been frozen due to overpopulation. Most of them are black. As far as a standard Dick novel, I thought it moved a little slowly, and there were some things I wasn’t happy with. For instance, there were far too many characters to keep track of — it seemed like dozens! I kept getting them all mixed up. Then some would just disappear from the text, never to be heard from again (Myra Sands). It can be a bit confusing. Additionally, Dick usually throws a few more wrenches into his works than he did in this one, leaving us with the alternate earth and not much more. I kept waiting for standard PKD surprises to knock me over, but that rarely happened. Still, even though this isn’t one of his stronger works, I’m giving it a solid 4 out of 5 stars, as I think most anything Dick writes is better than the best that most other authors publish….
hankrules2011 