3.5 stars

Despite being published after DADOES the manuscript for this novel was written beforehand in '62. With that in mind, it explains why one can feel the sense that it sort of acts as a loosely connected precursor to the Blade Runner book. I like that PKD can weave such strange elements into a story together and make it feel pedestrian one moment and bizarre and surreal the very next.

I'll leave you with a quote I had to write down immediately:

“And, as I watched the Lincoln come by degrees to a relationship with what it saw, I understood something: the basis of life is not a greed to exist, not a desire of any kind. It’s fear, the fear which I saw here. And not even fear; much worse. Absolute dread. Paralyzing dread so great as to produce apathy. Yet the Lincoln stirred, rose out of this. Why? Because it had to. Movement, action, were implied by the extensiveness of the dread. That state, by its own nature, could not be endured.

All the activity of life was an effort to relieve this one state. Attempts to mitigate the condition which we saw before us now.”