I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of books that I have failed to finish in the last few years. Mainly this has been through sheer stubbornness – I can’t imagine any other reason why anyone would work their way through the nine volumes – nine! – of Samuel Richardson ‘Clarissa’, or get beyond the first few pages of F R Rolfe’s hilariously bad ‘Hadrian 7‘. But I didn’t finish, or get beyond halfway, Philip K Dick’s ‘Lies, Inc’.

‘Lies, Inc’ was originally a short story, ‘The Unteleported Man’. It’s a perfectly ordinary sci-fi story about the establishment of a space colony. For reasons known only to himself, Dick decided to turn the story into a novel. Instead of expanding the plot, adding characters, etc, he injected (deliberate choice of verb) a long middle section involving a drugs trip. Characters turn into rats, the plot collapses, and frankly it becomes utterly unreadable.

Don’t just take my word for it. I turned to Goodreads to try and find out whether I was missing the point somewhere, and there is a strong consensus that this novel is an utter car crash. One reviewer advised that even PKD completists should avoid it, reserving it only for ‘PKD masochists’.

Which is all a great pity, because Dick is not a bad writer, far from it, and the original short story had some interesting ideas that probably could have benefited from being expanded upon. The story is set in the early 21^st century. Earth has become overcrowded with over 7 billion inhabitants (i.e where we are now!) and has begun to look toward space as a potential new home (rather than say Canada or somewhere like that. Fun fact – Canada is the second largest country in the world by area, but has only a population half that of the UK, 90% of which live within 100 miles of the US border – i.e. there’s lots of space).

Only one habitable planet has been found, named with fairly unsubtle prescience ‘Whale’s Mouth’. Rachmael ben Applebaum’s company has developed a spaceship that will take settlers there, but the trip takes 18 years each way. Just as the journeys are about to start a new company – Trails of Hoffman, Inc., – develops teleporting technology that will get settlers to Whale’s Mouth in 15 minutes. The catch is that it’s a one-way trip — once you leave, you can’t come back. Ben Applebaum, ruined by this new technology, thinks there’s something dodgy about this. With the help of a company called Lies, Inc., he sets out on the 36-year round-trip to investigate and inform the world about what’s happening in Whale’s Mouth.

So far, so conventionally sci-fi. However, just as ben Applebaum sets out, things get really weird. He gets hit by an LSD-coated dart and most of the rest of the story is one big acid trip for him and the reader. The plot jumps around chaotically in time and space and I quickly gave up. Drugs trips are really boring. The drugs section was taken from a completely different text and shunted in here with little attempt at continuity. It doesn’t work, is very obviously a late edit of the original short story, and feels like a publisher’s cynical attempt to cash in on Dick’s post-Bladerunner popularity.

Dick is actually an excellent sci-fi writer, and this farrago does his legacy a dis-service.  I once wrote that I read these novels so you don’t have to – I can’t say that here, but I still recommend avoiding this one at all costs.