Product Description

Time Out of Joint is Philip K. Dick’s classic depiction of the disorienting disparity between the world as we think it is and the world as it actually is. The year is 1998, although Ragle Gumm doesn’t know that. He thinks it’s 1959. He also thinks that he served in World War II, that he lives in a quiet little community, and that he really is the world’s long-standing champion of newspaper puzzle contests. It is only after a series of troubling hallucinations that he begins to suspect otherwise. And once he pursues his suspicions, he begins to see how he is the center of a universe gone terribly awry.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #270425 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-14
• Released on: 2002-05-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

From Library Journal
Written in the late 1950s and early 1960s, these titles follow Dick's familiar theme that things and people are not quite what and who they seem, basically challenging reality. Though dead for 20 years now, Dick still is hugely popular among sf readers and Blade Runner nuts, so pop for these.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
?Dick was one of the genuine visionaries.... His best novels constitute as significant a body of work as that of any writer in this country in the last thirty years.?? L.A. Weekly

?Dick was sf?s greatest extrapolator of modern angst.? --New York Daily News -- Review

Review
“Dick was one of the genuine visionaries.... His best novels constitute as significant a body of work as that of any writer in this country in the last thirty years.”– L.A. Weekly

“Dick was sf’s greatest extrapolator of modern angst.” --New York Daily News

Customer Reviews

SF NOVELS OPUS SIX
As a former reviewer has pointed it out, Philip K. Dick's TIME OUT OF JOINT has greatly inspired the authors of the screenplay of Peter Weir's THE TRUMAN SHOW. Ragle Gumm, the hero of TIME OUT OF JOINT, is questioning the reality he is living in, like in fact the majority of the characters created by Philip K. Dick during his literary career.

Ragle Gumm's efforts to discover the "hidden" side of the world he has been thrown into is, in my opinion, the most interesting aspect of the novel. The science-fictional explanation of the reasons why Ragle Gumm has to play everyday is not very convincing and the analysis of the origin of the war between Lunatics and Terrians way too simple for an author such as PKD.

However, TIME OUT OF JOINT provides the kind of pleasure the Philip K. Dick fan searches in vain in today sci-fi production. So don't hesitate to add this book to your collection if you are already familiar with the world of this writer.

Disguise Is the Nature of Nature
Somewhere I read Philip K. Dick say that the one most important piece of knowledge he had picked up from philosophy is that, "The nature of reality is to disguise its true nature" (which he claimed to have read in Heraclitus, though it's difficult to be sure if Heraclitus actually said that).

TIME OUT OF JOINT is one of Dick's earlier novels that treats the theme of "The World Is Not What We Think It Is" explicitly. It's a novel about knowledge and recognition. The characters play parts in a detective story where the mystery involves piecing together missing parts of the world. Some of the clues include finding light switches on the wrong side of the door, finding a note where a lemonade stand used to be, finding pictures of some actress nobody's ever heard of, and seeing visions.

A number of PKD's later books involved more significant permutations of this theme of Nature-In-Disguise. This story is like a one-trick pony in comparison to books like PALMER ELDRITCH, NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR, UBIK, MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, MAZE OF DEATH, or VALIS. But the gradual accumulation of evidence, the dawning of recognition in the main characters, makes for pretty fascinating reading.

For good or ill, several modern film makers have really taken this motif to heart (e.g., Dark City, The Matrix, The 13th Floor, The 6th Sense, etc.).

I hope that the writers of "The Matrix" credited PKD
IF you have seen the movie "The Matrix" then you've seen Time Out of Joint pushed forward to a timeframe of 1999/2200 rather than 1956/1996. Right down to the nagging sense of something out of joint in 'the real world'... the difference is in "The Matrix", humans are enslaved by machines. Dick hits on something more insidious: Humans voluntarily enslaved to a cause. No sooner do they submit to this, than they begin to fight it subconciously. This was my first PDK novel many years ago and had a profound effect. A must-read.