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’.

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