I just read Philip K Dick’s 1966 novel The Unteleported…

I just read Philip K Dick’s 1966 novel The Unteleported Man.

It’s crazy!

I saw a copy of this book 5 years ago and the title caught my eye, but I didn’t buy it. When I later went to buy it off of Amazon I realized it was out of print. I was surprised it was out of print, as I didn’t think any of his novels were not available. So I looked into it.

Apparently The Unteleported Man is an incomplete version of Philip K Dick’s novel Lies Inc. Problem was, that title didn’t interest me.

From what I figured out (thanks internet) PKD wrote a 40,000 word story called the Unteleported Man in ‘64, and his editor decided it was good enough to be an entire novel and asked for an expanded version. PKD turned in another 40,000 words which the editor didn’t like so he published the 1/2 sized (but complete) novel in a split book (with another story by another author).

Much later PKD got more successful and his new editor’s were convinced to publish the full sized novel. Except PKD lost about 4 pages of material. And he hadn’t really massaged the original text to make sense with the expanded material. So he set about rewriting short aspects of the book, and rewriting the 4 missing pages. He also renamed it, Lies Inc. Before he wrote the 4 new pages he died.

They published the book anyway. It contained 3 noted gaps in the text, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. This version was still titled The Unteleported Man and this is the version I bought.

Then years later someone found the 4 lost pages and they finally published Lies Inc.

Despite knowing this full story I decided to get the Unteleported Man version. That is the title that caught my interest after all.

The concept of the book is that due to overpopulation Earth has been searching for a new planet to expand to. They finally find one but it’s light years away, and can’t be reached by conventional spacecrafts in less then 18 years. And then a German company finally discovers teleportation. This puts a company, owned by our hero Rachmael, that was developing interstellar space travel out of business, and everyone stars teleporting to this new world.

No one ever returns from the new world.

Video feeds seem to show that no one wants to come back. Everyone is happy. Which is good news, because due to the expanding universe the technology only works in one direction. Of course, shouldn’t one person out of the 40,000 emigrants not be happy?

So Rachmael decides to fly to the new planet to see what is really going on out there. It will take him 18 years, but he doesn’t care.

I love that idea! Simple, mysterious, and sort of tragically pointless. If something bad is happening he won’t get there for 18 years, so it will likely be too late. But he goes anyway.

But then things get crazier.

I should say from here on out I will slowly spoil lots about this book. So stop reading if now if you have any interest in reading The Unteleported Man. Or Lies Inc.

First off the teleportation company doesn’t want Rachmael to fly to the other planet so they try to repossess his remaining ship. So Rachmael hires Lies Inc to steal the ship. During this period the pilot that plans to steal the ship and the owner of the teleporation company meet with Rachmael and try to kill each other. Using skin contact poisons delivered by handshakes, cigarettes with little DNA targeted missiles, and gas pumped into the ship that one side was inoculated for.

But Rachmael gets away, unfortunately without any deep sleep technology, so he will not be able to sleep the 18 years away.

So the owner of Lies Inc. decides he can’t wait and teleports to the new planet with all his best troops to take over the new planet. He gets there and the planet is a concentration work camp. Also did I mention the teleportation company and the UN are both mainly run by Germans? Yep!

Lies Inc. gets one message out to Earth to warn everyone.

So Rachmael gets called back to earth. No reason to fly there now, the Earth has found out the truth. But he decides to teleport over there and try to save everyone. So the unteleported man is going to teleport.

During this section there is a digression about a guy who wanted to teleport to the new planet because everyone at his company has been replaced by pigeons. Actual pigeons.

Rachmael teleports to the new planet armed with a secret time warp weapon but gets hit by an LSD dart. That’s what the troops on the new planet are armed with.

This is about the area where PKD’s expanded material starts. It’s also where things get really crazy.

Rachmael starts tripping for a couple of chapters. And sees horrifying things. Some of which might be true. The teleporter has a side effect that lets you see alternate worlds or paraworlds as they are called. In one of these paraworlds the teleportation company is run by one eyed aliens. So some of his confusion is because he is not sure if he is just tripping or seeing the worlds that the teleporter disease causes.

In the course of this drug trip Rachmael meets the owner of Lies Inc. who has turned into a blob that eats his own eyes for nutrition. This blob gives him a book that tells the future. And the past. But it might be fake. It might be written by really smart scientists (or alien scientists) to manipulate you into doing what the book says. Also the book is alive. Every character in the book starts finding this book and reading it.

In a way to battle the evil germans who are actually (maybe) one eyed aliens the less evil german UN use a clone of the owner of the teleporation company to create a person who they can send into the past to stop teleporting from ever being invented. This doesn’t seem to work, but it messes with the teleporter’s inventor enough that he starts losing his mind as he can only think about his friend Charley Falks and Charley’s son Martha.

Eventually Rachmael realizes he still has his time warping weapon (it was well disguised as a tin of alien food). He uses it and goes back in time to when the was hit by the LSD dart, and he dodges it. He uses the weapon again and goes back to when he almost received some deep sleep tech for his ship.  Except the future telling book exists in the past so it might be too late. Either way he decides to fly to the new planet anyway, because it might be the only way to get to that planet and not get sucked into the paraworlds. So he is once again the unteleported man.

This book was not what I expected. So on one hand I am sort of disappointed. I wanted to read about the seemingly pointless attempt to the save the world 18 years too late. Instead I read a book about multiple realities, aliens, time travel and drug trips.  But it was so crazy, and well written crazy, that I still really enjoyed it.

I didn’t even mention the guys who flew flies, or the thingisms, or the talking blimps that hound debtors.