OUR FRIENDS FROM FROLIX 8 by Philip K. Dick
Ken and I discovered Philip K. Dick sometime around our junior year of high school - 1998 or so. We read anything by him we could get our hands on, which was a fair amount, but there were several of his novels that were (and probably still are) out of print, novels we knew by title alone, having run across them on sprawling, poorly-constructed fansites in the days before the Wikipedia and CSS and an Internet where decent content is more distinguishable from the background noise of total crap than it used to be.
Our Friends From Frolix 8 was one of those novels (as was The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, which has one of the best titles of any novel, ever). So when I ran across a copy at a Half-Price Books recently, I had to buy it, knowing that it probably wasn’t going to be very good, because how often do you find a cheap used copy of a book you’ve been meaning to buy for the last ten years? (Okay, so I haven’t been actively looking for it, or I’d have just ordered it from Amazon - they have plenty of cheap used copies.)
Anyway. It’s not a very good novel. No, scratch that, it’s a terrible novel. It’s one of the worst novels I’ve read in a long time.
The novel’s most egregious fault is its lack of a coherent plot. There are at least three sequences of events that could be called “plots,” but despite the fact that they occur simultaneously and involve the same characters, they don’t work well together. Worse, Dick can’t seem to decide which is the real plot, and which are subplots. Worst, none of them are brought to any sort of conclusion; the novel ends with a tangled clusterfuck of loose ends. There are at least a half-dozen nontrivial characters who simply disappear mid-novel, and two of the most important characters drop off in the last chapters, right before they confront one another in a scene that ought to have been the climax of the novel.
The novel read like a really half-assed amalgam of scenes and characters that Dick did really well in other novels - like someone with a basic knowledge of English found a box with falling-apart copies of Solar Lottery, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, maybe The World Jones Made or The Man in the High Castle, and a collection of short stories, took 180 pages at random, translated them into Urdu or Romanian or something, and then had them transalted back into English by someone who didn’t really know either language, and then published it without any editing. It’s bad.
A look at Dick’s bibliography offers some insight: Our Friends From Frolix 8 was written in 1969, after an extremely prolific decade. He only wrote six more novels before his death in 1982: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; A Scanner Darkly; Radio Free Albemuth; and the VALIS Trilogy. It’s almost as though Our Friends was written as a coda to a variety of ideas and themes that characterized Dick’s work up to that point; his last six novels differ in significant ways to his previous work (though there are, certainly, significant similarities as well). That still doesn’t make it a good novel, but it might explain why it seems so lazily-cobbled-together.
It seems somehow wrong to criticize so harshly a novel by a man whose novels I tend to find visionary and disturbing, but this novel isn’t worth reading, unless you happen to be writing a book abut his work, or you’re a masochist. Otherwise, don’t waste your time.