Time Out of Joint

by Philip K. Dick

Paperback, 1979

Status

Available

Call number

813.54

Publication

Dell Pub Co (1979), Paperback

Description

Ragle Gumm thinks that it is 1959, that he lives in a small town, and that he is a whiz at newspaper puzzle contests. A series of hallucinations make him begin to doubt all of these things.

User reviews

LibraryThing member isabelx
Hallucinations. Yes, he thought. Insane. Infantile and lunatic. What am I doing, sitting here? Daydreams, at best. Fantasies about rocket ships shooting by overhead, armies and conspiracies. Paranoia.
A paranoiac psychosis. Imagining that I'm the center of a vast effort by millions of men and women,
Show More
involving billions of dollars and infinite work . . . a universe revolving around me. Every molecule acting with me in mind. An outward radiation of importance . . . to the stars. Ragle Gumm the object of the whole cosmic process, from the inception to final entropy. All matter and spirit, in order to wheel about me.

Many of Philip K. Dick's books concern paranoia about the nature of reality, and in "Time Out of Joint", both Ragle Gumm and his brother-in-law Vic, start to have grave concerns about their lives. Ragle becomes paranoid because that everyone seems to know who he is, due to his fame as the long-term winner of a newspaper contest called Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next? and when he starts to hallucinate that objects disappear and are replaced by strips of paper with the name of the object written on them, he fears that he is insane, since the paper strips seem too be real and he keeps a collection of them in a box. Vic starts to wonder when he has a strange experience with a bathroom light cord that doesn't exist and later has an odd experience on a bus when self-hypnosis lets him see the truth behind the illusion. Thin support struts, the skeleton of the bus. Metal girders, an empty hollow box. No other seats. Only a strip, a length of planking, on which upright featureless shapes like scarecrows had been propped.

My first clue that this not our world's 1950s America came with the discussion about radio stations all going off the air once television came in, but there may have been earlier clues that Americans or people who remember the 1950s would catch. That reminds me of a big plot hole; at the end Ragle suggests that the significance of Sammy's crystal set was overlooked because the person who should have seen it as a threat was distracted by playing poker and didn't remember that radios were not allowed. But I looked back at that scene and the crystal set wasn't just present in the room, as Sammy put it on the table next to the poker strips and the adults were all involved in a conversation about what Sammy might be able to pick up on it since no radio stations were still broadcasting.

All in all, it was a more straightforward story than the author's more famous later works, and I felt that the ending was too simple and fell, but I enjoyed working out what was really going on, as the story progressed and my original thoughts about alternate histories and time travel were proved wrong.
Show Less
LibraryThing member bcquinnsmom
I would recommend this to anyone -- the "science" of the science fiction isn't so in your face; in fact, when you start reading it you'll say "this is sci-fi?" The writing is very good, the characterization is excellent and the story itself is wonderful.

basic plot
If you read the afterward in this
Show More
book, you'll see that this is one of PK Dick's early attempts to break away from the grind of writing according to what the public wants in a sci-fi novel and branching out into his own turf, with moves away from the traditional sci-fi fare of the 1950s. I really had trouble believing that this was written in the late 1950s -- time hasn't hurt or dated this novel.

Ragle Gumm, his sister Margo, her husband Vic and her son Sammy all live together in a house in what could best be described as stereotypical suburbia. Vic is a grocer, but Ragle doesn't work -- instead he fills his days by solving an ongoing newspaper contest. Everyone knows Ragle because of his continuous winning streak. Life is pretty much picture perfect in this town. But the author right away alludes to some strange contradictions: there are no radios anywhere in the town; Uncle Tom's Cabin is featured in the Book of the Month Club, Margo is envious watching a friend drive her Tucker automobile, Marilyn Monroe is featured in a magazine but nobody's heard of her. While on an outing one day, Ragle goes to the soft-drink stand, puts his money on the counter and watches while his money disappears into the wood, then where the soft-drink stand was, he sees only a slip of paper that says "soft-drink stand." He thinks he's going crazy and takes the slip of paper, adding it to several others he has collected and stored in a metal box he carries around. It's not only Ragle, either. Vic notices some odd occurrences; together the two decide to investigate what's going on.

I have to say that I thought the outcome was a little bit of a letdown - but it was so well written and such an amazing story that I can overlook it. The book looks at such themes as what does it mean to be sane/insane, paranoia, what really constitutes reality and what is only a signifier, etc. I highly recommend this one and now am ready to plow through the rest of my books by Philip K. Dick.
Show Less
LibraryThing member stevecornforth
This is my first Phillip K Dick novel. He is most famous for works such as Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly and most famously Do Androids Dream of electric Sheep aka Bladerunner. This is an early novel written in the 1950s.

This was an excellent introduction. We are introduced to Ragle Gumm and
Show More
his very mundane suburban existence. He is a serial competition winner who lives in an ordinary house with his sister and her normal family. Things however are not all that they seem. Is this world real or simply a faade? What is going on underneath and why does the man who wins a newspaper competition, apparently become the most important in the world. Or is this just paranoia? The sense of mystery is gripping and I finished it in a day.

Things indeed are not all they seem and a chase for escape and reason begins. This is in many ways a forerunner of other books and films based on this theme e.g. Truman Show. It was a great read and I will be trying some of the others.

The only slight criticism is that the ending is all a bit sudden. It comes almost as if it is grafted on to explain the mystery. But it takes nothing away from an excellent read.
Show Less
LibraryThing member ericj.dixon
I enjoyed this more than DADES. I found the final chapter particularly moving. Dick has the ability to convey through his prose a feeling of uneasiness and surreality equal to the best authors of magical realism.
LibraryThing member daviddonnelly
Good suspenseful buildup in first half is disappointingly lost as plot unfolds, still a great imaginative plot though.
LibraryThing member Redcloud0
If you have never a read PKD "Time Out of Joint" is a great place to start. The recurrent theme of finding yourself in a false reality is presented, but in a less abstruse manner than in some other PKD works. At the end of the novel it is made clear what is real and what is artifical - a bright
Show More
line that is none too clear in some of PKD's more well known novels. One of the most original and entertaining passages is where the main characters ostensibly from 1959 encounter teenagers from 1998- enjoy nectie-fellows!
Show Less
LibraryThing member delta351
Not my favorite PKD book, but the final chapter saves the day. I read the Carroll & Graf version from 1984, and there was a very good essay at the end of the book by Lou Stathis. He gave a brief synopsis of PKD's life, and some background on the time in his career that he wrote TOOJ.
LibraryThing member Estramir
It is always fascinating to see how a writer from the 1950's imagines the future, and it's weird to read such a story from the perspective of 2016. There is a beautiful portrait of the carefree suburban '50s USA. (the place the conservatives always want to take us back to). But hovering over this
Show More
utopia is a sense of unease and disquiet which is masterfully drawn out by the writer. The story, about a world that is not what it seems, is a favourite theme of PK Dick, and it has inspired many similar films and books since. This one is the original, and it's a true classic.
Show Less
LibraryThing member DanielSTJ
This was a bit of a letdown for me. It started up strong, the premise was solid, but then it seemed to get lost on its own momentum and ultimately the conclusion, to me, was a letdown. The afterword in the edition that I read explain much of the manuscript's process and Philip K. Dick's process in
Show More
writing this particular title, and his others, which illuminates how he wrote and the background surrounding the book. That was almost more interesting than the book itself, which seems to veer off course until it ultimately crashes.

2 stars.
Show Less
LibraryThing member baswood
Time Out of Joint is now recognised as the first science fiction novel by Philip K Dick that explored the themes that many of his later novels would take further. It is a noticeable break from his earlier efforts of pulp fiction and was published in 1959. It was not an immediate success, his
Show More
breakthrough novel was Man in the High Castle which won the Hugo award for best novel in 1963. The themes that Dick introduced in his writing like: the nature of reality; how ordinary people have their lives unravel around them, all is not what it seams and characters who are made aware, that there are forces at work of which they are totally ignorant, psychotic events threaten their existence and delusions or surreal images menace their grip on reality. It can be powerful stuff and Time Out of Joint was the first step along this road.

Ragle Gumm who had been decorated for his service in the second world war has settled down in a quiet American town, living with his brother and his bother's wife. He is making a living by winning a daily competition in the local paper and has become something of a celebrity. The competition involves plotting the location of a randomly generated item in one of over a thousand locations. Ragle does this by charts, records and graphs that he works on and updates every day. He has won the daily competition over a two year period. A young couple (Mr and Mrs Black) have recently moved next door and Ragle is starting to feel constrained by the Blacks constant overtures of friendship, but he becomes attracted to Mrs Black and worries that an affair will interrupt his work and would cause trouble with her husband. One day Ragle while sitting on a bus feels the world dissolve around him, his fellow passengers appear as skeletons, this only last for a minute, but he is profoundly shaken. He becomes paranoid about Mr Black and after yet another unwelcome social visit he runs out the backdoor jumps in his car and drives off. He soon finds himself on an unfamiliar dangerous dirt road in the dark and has to abandon his car, he sees the lights of a house ahead.......................He must get help because he needs to be able to post his entry for the competition the next day and there is work to do.

Dick manages in the first part of the novel to create a scenario that is just about believable, there is something not quite right about the world that Ragle and his family inhabit, for example there is television, but no radios, and there is something off kilter in Ragle himself. It is a mystery with an overlay of menace that works well. When the mystery starts to unravel as Ragle pushes for answers to his dilemma; Dick holds back the information skilfully enough to keep the reader entertained. The resolution, even if was too fantastic did not disappoint this reader.

Philip K Dick's novels have been the subject matter for many films and Blade Runner is the most famous, but apart from Man in the High Castle, this is the only other novel from him that I have read. This is an early example of his work and I was impressed. It now appears in the S F Masterwork series and I would rate it at four stars
Show Less
LibraryThing member drardavis
Classic Philip K. Dick, packed full of wild ideas hidden behind short sentences, simple words, and familiar setting. It is a paranoid vision of a Ray Bradbury reflection on the good old days in America. Dick’s descriptions of details of the past are personally familiar, and his guesses about the
Show More
shape of the future are fascinating, if not always correct. The Heisenberg Unified Field Theory was a good example. As you would expect there are a “hodge-podge of leaks” in the protagonist’s reality. That reality for me was the one flaw. At this point in time it seems a bit cliche, and Dick’s description of it was superficial compared to the world of the story’s illusion.
Show Less
LibraryThing member kslade
Really good novel that is kind of like the movie, The Truman Show. Reality is not what it seems! A coworker told me about this one.
LibraryThing member ikeman100
I usually prefer the Dick's short stories but I'm now trying to go through the novels. This one was pretty good. It was one of the better Cold-War themed books of the Golden Age of SF. Written in 1959 it was ahead of it's time.

Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

1959

Physical description

255 p.; 17.8 cm

ISBN

0440188601 / 9780440188605

Local notes

Omslag: Ikke angivet
Omslaget viser en stor person, der kigger ned på en park, hvor en anden person går rundt. En seddel med teksten "Soft Drinks" ligger på en sti.
Omslaget er ikke krediteret og isfdb.org har også givet op
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi

Similar in this library

Pages

255

Rating

½ (496 ratings; 3.8)

DDC/MDS

813.54
Page: 1.0998 seconds