glenncolerussell 's review for:

Eye in the Sky by Philip K. Dick

5.0

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“Anti-cat is one jump away from anti-Semitism.”
― Philip K. Dick, Eye in the Sky

For liberal, open-minded men and women, dealing with religious fundamentalists can be most unpleasant. From my own experience, I recall several nasty cases: a Sunday school teacher giving us kids a pep talk on the virtues of racism and segregation; accompanying a college buddy to his church and listening to the minister browbeat the congregation with threats of hellfire; having to deal with aggressive bible thumpers at my front door; a loudmouth bully manager using the Bible as a billy club to manipulate subordinates.

Looking back on my boyhood, I got off easy. There are many young boys and girls who have been emotionally traumatized and even physically abused and beaten in the name of fundamentalist-style religion.

Although PKD had a liberally inclined upbringing (his mother sent young Philip to a Quaker school), I’m quite certain he had his own brushings with fundamentals in one form or another. Anyway, unlike a book attempting to counter narrow-mindedness with well-reasoned, heartfelt advice on tolerance, compassion, awareness or presence, written by, say, the Dali Lama or Eckhart Tolle, PKD’s Eye in the Sky is a searing, no-nonsense, tell it like it is novel addressing fundamentalist religion with all its rigidity, brutality, suffocation and kitschy ugliness.

Indeed, one of the most entertaining, inventive works of science fiction you will ever read. Did Christopher Hitchens read Eye in the Sky? If so, undoubtedly many a time Hitch chuckled and nodded his head in approval.

But the novel’s pointed black as midnight humor and blistering satire has a wider target than religion; after fundamentalism, PDK shifts his focus to a frumpy woman who holds an antiquated vision of life that is saccharine, shallow and out-and-out dishonest. Then, more swings and moves!

And, when each character’s distorted, cartoonish view of life becomes the reality of the external world, the story clicks from one universe to another, and with each click, PDK vividly portrays how intolerance and mean-spiritedness of any stripe or flavor is a nightmarish reality.

Thus, on one level, Eye in the Sky can be read as a philosophical meditation on how human perception shrinks the world into its own stultifying vision. And, on another level, the implications of solipsism, that is, a view of the world having no extension or externality; rather, the entire universe living in the head of the solipsist. All in all, a book that’s vintage PKD, a book that, in my modest view of the universe, should be required high school reading.