Boy, this thing is a mess. Philip K. Dick never had much discipline in his writing; he churned out text at warp speed so he could keep himself in food and lodging, so some of his books are kind of junky, but really, now.

It's not going to be easy to summarize this plot, just because it's so all over the place, but let's see how we do. In Frolix 8, the world has fallen into a sort of two-party tyranny, alternately under the control of the New Men - mutant geniuses - and the Unusuals - telepaths, precogs and the like. No one lacking one talent or the other has any access to power whatsoever.

All this suppression has, of course, given rise to a rebellion calling itself the Under Men. One of the rebel leaders, Thors Provoni, has been traveling in space for some years looking for extraterrestrial help.

Into this circumstance comes Nick Appleton, one of PKD's plebian main characters. He begins his adventure as a law-abiding if unsatisfied citizen. He shortly finds himself involved with the Under Men, caught with forbidden rebel literature and on the run with a teenage girl named Charley.

Pretty soon you, the reader, have to keep in mind Nick Appleton's battle with the planet's telepathic ruler for Charley's attention; the disintegration of his marriage and his flight from Charley's alcoholic boyfriend; Provoni's philosophical dialogues with the mammoth alien enveloping his ship as he heads back to Earth; and a partridge in a pear tree, presumably. PKD could barely juggle that much material when his Ace Books editors only permitted him 180 pages. Stretched over at least a third again that much space, it can't help but disintegrate. And his conclusion makes it all too plain that the man simply didn't know what to do next - it's the worst kind of last-minute twitch. He really should have set this one aside for a few months and let it settle, but he probably couldn't afford it.

Indeed, the whole book seems tired. It's got a lot of PKD's great themes, plot points and characters, but in a worn out state.

Nick Appleton, for instance, is a solid PKD working class hero, like the television salesmen and electricians and grocers and such who people his earlier books. Appleton, however, is a tire regroover. He likes to think of this task as a form of art, but in truth it's a cheat and possibly deadly, as he himself comes to realize.

PKD had also dealt before with world dictators, some cruel, some ill, some alien. Willis Gram is maybe the worst of the bunch, a man who uses his enormous power for his own petty ends. This might even add some spice to the story, but Gram emerges as a flabby arrested adolescent who conducts pretty nearly all the planet's affairs from his bed.

In his middle period, PKD loved to set several plot strands going at once and bounce around amongst them. Most of the strands in Frolix 8 simply fizzle out - we never learn what happens to Appleton's wife and son, the gigantic alien leaves off philosophy the minute it lands on Earth and starts behaving like a mindless weapon, and all the threats disappear without another thought.

PKD's gift for sympathetic characters seemed to almost desert him in this piece. There's a lot of talk among these characters about saving the world from the purest of motives, but the actual desires on view seem uniformly petty - sexual gratification, alcohol dependence, the will to power. These people are unattractive even in a physical way, let alone in any other.

He missed a couple of his most fertile themes this time round, too, especially the unsteady nature of reality and the effect of drugs on one's perception of that reality. What little there is in Frolix 8 on those topics feels like an afterthought. Could have been removed without any impact, and maybe should have been.

And finally, he evidently couldn't even bring himself to remember his details from page to page. Provoni has been traveling anywhere from ten to fifteen years, for instance - the number changes periodically. There's anywhere from 10,000 to several million New Men and Unusuals on Earth - that changes, too. And other examples abound.

Now, this is PKD, and even his failures provide more food for thought than many another author's successes, but taken as a whole Our Friends from Frolix 8 is for PKD completists only. If it wasn't for one thing I'd be tempted to dismiss it as an utter waste of time, but wait until you see what ultimately happens to the New Men and Unusuals. Not only does it redeem the exhausted, washed-out feel of the rest of the book, it looks ahead to what PKD was about to become.

PKD wrote Our Friends from Frolix 8 in 1970, at the tail end of a time when he could complete up to five or six novels per year. No wonder he was burned out. Clearly, he realized that something needed to change, and it sure did. Tired and messy as this book is, the compassion at its close leads directly to the conclusion of his next novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, maybe the most touching evocation of human despair since the novel was invented. Out of this transformation of his creative process, he produced A Scanner Darkly and the VALIS trilogy. Now, that's the way to conclude a career.

In 1970, PKD had only a few years to live, but he used them well. If he needed to plow through Our Friends from Frolix 8 in order to do that, I say it was worth it. Suppose we look on this novel as his way of clearing the decks and let it go at that.

Benshlomo says, Every so often you have to throw the past overboard.

This novel had some potential, but ultimately left me unsatisfied. The elements for a decent story are here: there are essentially three interwoven subplots, but even while reading it the connection between two of them felt especially forced, contrived, and unrealistic. I was able to suspend disbelief, but just barely.

On the bright side, there are a few amusing parodies peppered throughout, such as a satire of drug culture (substituting subversive literature for drugs) and an interesting characture of messianic expectations. I liked his dystopian setting, too.

On the down-beat, PKD's attempt to create "new" slang was very annoying, and since most of them were variations of '60s counterculture lingo, it ironically ended up coming across as dated. That can probably be overlooked/forgiven by most readers, but the ambiguity of the ending was much harder (for me) to swallow. Although I suspect PKD figured this ended on a "happy note" I'm not convinced that's actually the case... some sense of closure that "everything works out for the best" (or not!) would have helped. [explaining/justifying that, though, is a major spoiler, so sorry for the vagueness.]

Overall, if you're new to PKD, don't start with this one. If you're a PKD completionist (like I am) then give it a go, but keep your expectations reasonable. This isn't on the par of UBIK, High Castle, etc. but at least it's not as bad as Zap Gun or Cosmic Puppets. In all honesty, if anyone other than PKD had written this, I'd score it much lower.

Another fine work from my favorite guy that's got great action, pacing and, above all, characterizations. The people in this story were very real to me and the society in which they live seemed very plausible. The meandering and intersection of the characters' fates is set against an impending climax that we know is coming from the beginning of the story and when it arrives, it's thrilling and very moving. I loved this one.

One of Dick's less ambitious novels, this story is a bit thin compared to the density and dazzling complexity of his books of the early 1960s, and perhaps a bit of weariness with the standard conventions of science fiction is showing. The author seems very casual about controlling the plot and characters; both seem pretty random much of the time. We may not prize this novel as a masterpiece of structure, but it is typical Dick, involving and entertaining. The story is set in a world controlled by superintelligent "New Men" and telepathic "Unusuals," who reign despotically together over the "Old Men," or ordinary unevolved humans. In due course Thors Provini returns to Earth with a "friend" for the Old Men in the form of a telepathic, protoplasmic alien with extraordinary powers. This semi-divine intervention overturns the predictable order of the world and replaces it with a vision of the evolution of consciousness of every living thing on the planet toward some unimaginable fulfillment. In this preoccupation, it is congruent with Dick's other interesting novels of the late 60s such as A Maze of Death and Galactic Pot-Healer.

this book is excellent and definetily underrated. i felt it is so much better than many PKD "classics" like UBIK or even Martian Time-SLip. To understand the art of PKD is to understand that all his best works deal with the quest for identity of Human and understanding of Absolute. The message of this book is most strongly felt in last pages, when two evil characters are transformed by the mysterious power of "friend from frolix8" and proceed to explain to the reader first the meaning of human life and then the idea of God. The beauty and subtelty of the way in which PKD expresses his complex views on life can be somewhat surrealistic & challenging for general reader ("incomprehensible weirdness" etc), but some people (like me) will just be unable to forget these wonderful passages that emerge from and illuminate PKD's strange stories of Everyman in the evil technocratic world, searching for salvation. Must-read!

Also essential: "Do androids dream of electric sheeps?", "Divine invasion", "Three stigmata of Palmer Eldrich" and of course his self-confessed masterpiece "Scanner Darkly".