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    Clans of the Alphane Moon
    Clans of the Alphane Moon
    Clans of the Alphane Moon
    Audiobook7 hours

    Clans of the Alphane Moon

    Written by Philip K. Dick

    Narrated by David de Vries

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    From Philip K. Dick, the Hugo Award-winning author of The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—the basis for the film Blade Runner—Clans of the Alphane Moon explores the meaning of mental illness through the actions of people with clinical disorders and those of the doctors tasked with curing them.

    For years, the third moon in the Alphane system was used as a psychiatric hospital. But when war broke out between Earth and the Alphanes, the hospital was left unguarded and the inmates set up their own society, made up of competing factions based around each mental illness. When Earth sends a delegation to take back the colony, they find enclaves of depressives, schizophrenics, paranoiacs, and other mentally ill people coming together to repel what they see as a foreign invasion.

    Meanwhile, back on Earth, CIA agent Chuck Rittersdorf and his wife Mary are going through a bitter divorce, with Chuck losing everything. But when he is assigned to clandestinely control an android accompanying Mary to the Alphane moon, he sees an opportunity to get his revenge.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateApr 16, 2013
    ISBN9781469251837
    Author

    Philip K. Dick

    Over a writing career that spanned three decades, PHILIP K. DICK (1928–1982) published 36 science fiction novels and 121 short stories in which he explored the essence of what makes man human and the dangers of centralized power. Toward the end of his life, his work turned to deeply personal, metaphysical questions concerning the nature of God. Eleven novels and short stories have been adapted to film, notably Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly, as well as television's The Man in the High Castle. The recipient of critical acclaim and numerous awards throughout his career, including the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards, Dick was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2005, and between 2007 and 2009, the Library of America published a selection of his novels in three volumes. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

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    Reviews for Clans of the Alphane Moon

    3.5/5

    310 ratings11 reviews

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    • 3/5
      A struggled, yet eventful, reading. Overall, this Dick novel suffers from stopping and starting many times in the flow of the book. The first quarter is a little tedious until the real story comes into play. From there, it picks up until it drops off again-- then finally finishes in a swooping conclusion. Despite this not being the greatest novel of Dick's, it's use of schizophrenic mind readers and other science fiction devices is particularly interesting. This is Sci-Fi, and Philip K. Dick, pulling out another story fueled by his own personal life and then into the realms of the scenarios that he had played out in his mind.3 stars: still worth reading.
    • 3/5
      The actual potential, some of it realized already, of science is mind boggling & dizzying, and SF and TF both provided dazzling and wondrous possibilities to people's minds, especially young people's minds. When Phil Dick was writing there was a great deal more wonderment, and a great deal less expectation, in TF. Although there is more wonderment now in one sense, in that science and technology are making the stuff of SF real almost as fast as SF or TF writers can imagine it. Phil Dick's futurologies were quirky and although quite science/techno fictional, did not seem to care much for prediction. He must have known that by 1992 there wasn't going to be anything remotely like his futures, but he chose to do it that way anyway. I think he was trying to get at the present using SF, but not any kind of predictive techno fiction.“Clans of the Alphane Moon” is about a world where the lunatics have taken over the asylum and the "Clans" refers to the tribes that, sort-of, self-organize according to whatever major class of mental illness they are suffering from. That characters from such an alternate reality wouldn't conform to today's rigid and non-flexible ideological demands is hardly surprising: most mentally ill people don't. It's one of the reasons they're designated as mentally ill. I think you can make a strong argument that the writing style employed by figures like Phil Dick is actually very sophisticated, in its own terms, at doing what it is trying to do, which is create a sense of a strange, ugly, disorienting, “science fictional” world. “Literary” fiction has its own set of different aims and criteria for success and I think it is a mistake to merely consider science fiction as a necessarily inferior subset of that.(Bought in 1997)I would go on to say that the general assertion that certain kinds of writing are inherently superior to others is an innately politicised value judgement. It is therefore not surprising that we might find more comfortable or pleasant the more domesticated contemporary forms of science fiction, which perhaps do not concern themselves with directly questioning (our) humanist/rationalist/bourgeois/liberal assumptions and values about persons, bodies, sexual relationships etc. It seems to me the value of this sort of thing lies exactly in its difficult ugliness (not despite it). But Phil Dick didn't go to an elite university, so the special magic critical goggles that enable scholars to see how Thomas Pynchon is reworking idioms from popular fiction, theology and grade-school math weren't issued when Dick's books were coming out, three a year with wonky covers. Pynchon gets the benefit of the doubt and endless critical exegeses. Apply the same toolkit to Dick's work and it's equally interesting, with better jokes. Although endless key presses have gone into defining SF, I believe the element of it that was there from the beginning, but grew ever more important, is what one might call tech-fi. In its origins SF was TF, but it was more inspired by science itself and the drastic mental changes that were forcing themselves on people. An end to metaphysics and theology, for some at least if not everyone. Man's place in the cosmos and the cosmos itself as mental constructs were changing drastically, perhaps even disintegrating, in varying degrees and were changing society in varying degrees. Much of those changes also came about by applying science, technology, to our lives. Medicine, industrial organization, advances in warfare and communications that made e.g. the British Empire into a unique world machine on a scale never seen before or after. SF was almost required. As time went on, and certainly now, it became a more and more relevant form of techno fiction, not just about the way the future would be because of this or that device, but also about the device itself. Once created and existing in a sufficiently large mass market that also grew and diversified, sf grew and diversified according to individual tastes as well as market forces. But techno prediction is no longer about future shock, we all expect those futures, demand them, and eagerly anticipate them. We all, most of us at least, want to buy/have tomorrow's whatever, today.SF = Speculative Fiction.TF (aka Tech-FI) = Technological Fiction.
    • 4/5
      Very solid outing by Dick. It's not one of the greats, but it is quintessentially him. It has all the mental illness, paranoia, fear of women, obsession with women and things just beyond our ken you would expect from him.
    • 3/5
      This book had some good ideas, but PKD asks the reader to make too many leaps of logic to be able to give this book a decent score.CIA agent Chuck Rittersdorf splits from his psychiatrist wife, Mary, who's a marriage counselor. She prompts this and she's really portrayed as an evil bitch, so I have no idea why he was so intent to get back together with her later in the book. Meanwhile, Chuck picks up a writing gig with famous TV comedian Bunny Hentman, and starts taking uppers to hold both jobs down at the same time. These drugs are supplied by an alien slime mold who has telepathic powers and apparently wants to help Chuck as he orients himself to a new lifestyle in a downgraded conapt (apartment). He even sets Chuck up with a love interest, of sorts.Well, Mary is hired by the feds to go to Alpha III M2, a moon of some type, to start therapy on groups of former psychiatric patients who were abandoned many years ago by Terra (Earth) during their war with Alphane, now over. These former patients have set up clans on the moon, made up of various psychiatric types -- ie, Deps (depressives), Mans (manics), Paras (paranoid schizophrenics), etc. However, the CIA is interested in this venture, so they create a simulcra to go to the moon with Mary and others on this mission, and Chuck will be controlling it from Terra. So he decides to kill his ex-wife through this android-type being.Crazy, yes? Well, that's standard PKD fare. It starts getting out of control when Benny, his new employer, has a brainstorming session with the writers -- and Chuck -- during which time they decide to write a new act about a CIA agent who is going to kill his ex-wife through a simulcra on another planet. Just like Chuck has planned. Bizarre coincidence, or is it?The CIA finds out about Chuck's drugs and fires him. As soon as he's fired, so does Benny, presumably because he no longer has Chuck as a CIA insider to work with. However, the CIA goes after Benny for his doings with Alphanes, and he escapes on his own rocket. Chuck finds himself on the moon, where Mary is. Coincidence? Easily done? Yes. Here's one area that was really too hard to buy -- the Para leader is given an ultimatum by Mary (with all of the clan leaders) to return to their former lives or face military action by Terra within four hours. So of all of the alternatives they come up with, the ONLY one is for him to *obviously* go to Mary's spaceship and seduce her and talk her out of it. Huh? Excuse me? WTF??? What kind of warped idea is that? But that's the obvious choice, and I'll be damned if he doesn't go and seduce her on her ship. But she turns out to be more than he bargained for and turns into a sexual beast who nearly kills him in her passion. Only Dick can write this stuff. When he wakes up from his sex-induced coma, she's gone and Terra is on the attack.I'm not going to give away the ending, but it's surprisingly upbeat. Maybe that's because Dick was probably struggling with all of these issues in his own life -- his marriage woes, job and finance woes, his worries of mental illness -- so he wrote a good ending so he could expect one in his own life. That's my two cents, anyway. It's not a bad book, but it just leaps to conclusions that no rational person would draw too many times and I just can't eagerly recommend it. If you're a fan, you'll probably like it. If you're new to the author, I wouldn't start with this one.
    • 4/5
      If computers were around in 1964 - this book could have been written today. In this book, a moon around Alpha Centauri with a Mental Health Hospital was abandoned... including its residents. This is the story, 25 years after, when the world suddenly takes and interest in them. The clans of the moon just want to be left alone and insist that they are doing fine. The Earth has other ideas... and the Alphanes themselves, well they have an interest in this moon too.
    • 4/5
      My raw reactions on reading this book in 1990.This was an enjoyable Dick read. It’s bizarre story of a vicious marriage was enjoyable, skewed, and, at times, horrific. This broken relationship, desperate writer, scheming plot (perhaps too much), insane character novel is typical Dick. True, Dick doesn’t do enough with the very interesting idea of a moon of insane people, intrigues too much with Bunny Hentmann and the CIA in the middle part of the novel, but the slime mold, the obsessive ideas of murder and sadism, and a working society of madmen make a delightful read.
    • 5/5
      This is one of my favourite Philip K Dick novels, and is one in which his humour comes to the fore more than is usual. It contains the usual Dick trademarks of fakes, levels of subjective reality, artificial humanoids and waspish vindictive women. There is an overall lack of any scientific sense, but then Dick was never a writer who let scientific accuracy get in the way of a good story. The overarching theme here is the nature of madness and whether sanity is just a subjective view. It's a fascinating, complex novel, and one I've read many times. It also has one of my favourite SF characters ever, Lord Running Clam, a telepathic Ganymedian slime mold. What's not to love?
    • 3/5
      Classical Kindred Dick brightness in the core idea (a "mad" society), it even resembles Foucault somehow, by its surprising hypothetical reversals, I guess. Anyway, this book is brilliant, though I am not sure why all these agent-agent-agent-run-run-run concept injection to the body of the work exists really. Action? Maybe.
    • 5/5
      This novel really surprised me. I must say I was not expecting to enjoy Clans of The Alphane Moon because I have heard that many of Dick's lesser known works can be unreadably bad. I loved the interplay between the colonies and there caste system style divisions based on their particular mental afflictions. But, the most fascinating part of the novel, for me, was the development of the story-line dealing with the failed relationship between the Ritersdorf's. The novel continued to thrill through the inclusion of crazy characters and wild events that really added to my enjoyment of this story. One of Philip K. Dick's better efforts, as good as Time out of Joint, and better than DADES.
    • 3/5
      One of the best books every written that has a talking slime mold as a major character.
    • 3/5
      Not one of PKD's finest...but a neat concept.