Book Review: Lies, Inc

Reviewed By: Harriet Klausner

Lies, Inc     Amazon US PB Amazon Canada PB
Philip K. Dick
Class/Genre:   Science Fiction
Vintage, Mar 2004, $12.00, 202 pp.

To control the aggressiveness of citizens living on top of one another in crowded file cabinets like anthills in overpopulated urban regions, Lies Incorporated uses computer software to keep people sublimely quiet. A metropolis is simply an industrial work zone with contented “prisoners”. The only escape from this drab existence is through the services of Trails of Hoffman, Inc. who can teleport a person to the paradise colony planet Whale's Mouth, but this is a one way ticket.

The Lies Incorporated SubInfo computers perform an unnatural act for them by transmitting a ton of data on the Oakland, California rat population to Rachmael ben Applebaum, who knows something is not right. Rachmael begins questioning “truths” now that he sublimely has become the rat expert. He wonders about the Utopian alternative and soon has evidence that the happy crowds are a sham, a galaxy con game. He plans to become THE UNTELEPORTED MAN and illegally take a spaceship to the planet to ask who wants to come home.

This futuristic dark vision that is mindful in many ways of 1984 is actually a rewriting of Philip K. Dick’s 1960s novella. THE UNTELEPORTED MAN. The deceased author paints a future with little hope except for the utopian colony that proves to be even more dismal than the hopelessness on earth. The vivid descriptions such as bits of a cheeseburger not a whole cheeseburger provides quite a landscape. Rachmael is a terrific champion while the intergalactic con game is brilliantly done. Fans of exciting but bleak science fiction thrillers know that Philip K. Dick has been one of the greats and that is no lie or computer generated “truth”.

Harriet Klausner

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Harriet Klausner