Philip K. Dick, “Clans of the Alphane Moon”
The other thing I noticed when I was looking at my shelves for the last review was that if an author writes something I like, I end up buying everything else they’ve ever written.
Just to give you an idea, here’s what my “to read” shelves look like.
- Six books by Charles Bukowski (and another waiting for me to purchase at work).
- Five by Neil Gaiman (plus one waiting at the store).
- Five by Warren Ellis.
- Four by Philip K. Dick.
- Four by Jim Thompson (and four waiting).
- Three that are Daredevil related (two more at work).
- Three by Steinbeck and Noam Chomsky (and three more titles by both authors waiting).
- Three by Kerouac. (But no more after that, praise God!)
- Three by Alan Moore (and one more at work, so thank Christ I just finished two others by him!)
- Two each by Hemingway, Monty Python, Bob Woodward and Frank Miller.
You get the idea. For your sanity and mine, I’ve attempted to let a fair amount of time pass before I review an author that I’ve talked about in the last two months. But it’s getting harder to do, hence the doubling and tripling of titles by some authors in the graphic novel collections in recent reviews. Part of this is because I don’t want to summarize a story line over and over again, but I’m also concerned of running out of things to say.
For instance, on the Rushkoff review from a few days back, I was POSITIVE I had written about the MTV guy before, and spent two hours trying different keywords to search through the archives. As it turned out, I hadn’t written about him, but I still didn’t like writing the review because it FELT like something I had talked about before.
Which brings us to this book. I’ve already mentioned in previous reviews that Philip K Dick was a loony toony, and I’ve stated that for the most part, science fiction isn’t my bag. And with Clans of the Alphane Moon, the first thing I want to say is that Philip K. Dick is loony toony, and science fiction just really isn’t my bag.
It’s not that he’s recycling material as some authors do; in fact, this isn’t anything like any other book I’ve read by him. But it’s simply not that good. Worse is that it’s disjointed with a story that involves two worlds, three governments, six species, and a passing reference to connect them all together. Right about the time that I’m starting to get into the story, he switches gears, planets, and comprehension and I have to start all over again. This happened four times.
Four times! A book shouldn’t be this hard.
And so the end result is that I don’t care if I’m repeating myself. Philip K. Dick is loony toony. And science fiction ain’t my bag. And I still have four more books of this nonsense to finish.
