This is one of PKD's earlier and lesser works. The protagonist discovers his mundane existence is a actually an elaborate hoax that covers up a much darker reality. Frankly, the author has explored this idea with much better results in later books, so that the book almost reads like a cheap knock-off of PKD himself, which was probably unavoidable since he wrote so many books just to pay the bills. I'd stick to his more famous works.

I think the makers of The Truman Show may have copied the idea of a person's life as a staged TV series from this book. Dick had so many ingenious ideas during his career as a writer. The idea for this book might be the best one that Dick ever had. But it is not his best book. It is not as funny as A Scanner Darkly or Valis - both of which came later. And the social commentary is not as incisive or trenchant, like in his later work. But there are instances in the book which give us an idea of wh...

Philip K. Dick's Time Out of Joint may very well have influenced the producers of the film The Truman Show. Orson Scott Card may also have gotten some ideas for Ender's Game. PKD tells this one close to the vest for the first half of the book, slowly developing the action and leaving some M. Night Shyamalan type clues along the way for the reader to pick up. This was published in 1959, one of his earlier novels and an observant reader of PKD will notice a more subtle approach than some of his la...

Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick THE TRUMAN SHOW meets THE MATRIX Synopsis It’s 1959. Ragle Gum lives with his sister and her family. He’s having an affair with the woman next door. He’s the champion of the newspaper contest, “Where Will the Little Green Man be Next?” Oh yeah, and he’s going sane. It starts with what he thinks are hallucinations—a disappearing soft drink stand, leaving nothing in its place but a piece of paper labeled SOFT DRINK STAND. But then he hears pilots talking about h...

The right frame of mind for reading Time Out of Joint would be to consider it a newly found episode of The Twilight Zone. Imagine Rod Sterling in his skinny suit, skinny tie, and deadpan voice: Imagine if you will a man, an ordinary man who enjoys solving the daily newspaper puzzle. But while this man’s attention is focused on this one task, the puzzle of his life remains unsolved. This man presently resides in the The Twilight Zone…do.di.do.do...do.di.do.do... From there the story proceeds to...

"Time Out of Joint" was first published by Lippincott in hardcover - 59-7775, in 1959, running 221pp, and sold for $3.95, when they were going to start a science-fiction line. Dick’s fee was $750.Mr. Dick says of the book in an interview with Charles Platt - " I wrote TIME OUT OF JOINT in the 1950s, before I had even heard of LSD. In that book a guy walks up to a lemonade stand in the park, and it turns into a slip of paper marked Soft Drink Stand, and he puts the slip of paper in his pocket. Fa...

Although many people say this book inspired the film "The Truman Show", Expect far more than that in this book. Ragle Gum is not merely another Truman Burbank. He is contained in a world of illusion not for the purposes of keeping others entertained, he has something dreadfully important to do, something somehow wrapped up with the daily puzzle he solves in the newspaper.This book is about turning around the perception of the protagonist (Ragle Gum) and that of the reader again and again. Is Rag...

This is my third of Dick’s six 1950s novels. The other two were The Cosmic Puppets and The World Jones Made. On the surface, Time Out of Joint reminds me of The Cosmic Puppets. Both are linear narratives, both are set in the 50s, and most importantly, both pose questions about the nature of reality, playing with the idea that things are not what they appear to be. The novels differ primarily in how they resolve their mysteries. This is where Time Out of Joint misses its mark. Some of the most in...

I really liked this. In typical Dick fashion, for the first 60 or 70 pages you have no idea what direction the story is going in. You get a few hints, but they don't ammount to much, maybe like repetition of some terms or incongruencies in dialogue. And then, out of nowhere, you turn the page and BAM, there's the real plot, and there's the line you're supposed to follow. Apart from one moment in the book where I really felt like the dialogue/situation was forced in order to give the story the mo...

"In a civil war", Ragle said, "every side is wrong. It's hopeless to try to untangle it. Everyone is a victim."Written in 1958 when Phil was just 30, and published in '59, this is the earliest of his novels that I've read. He may not have always shown it over the course of his 45-novel career, at least in part because he wrote some of those novels in two-week amphetamine binges, but Time Out of Joint reminds me that not only did he have brilliant ideas, but that by this early point in his career...

While the rest of the world toils at their jobs, Ragle Gumm stays at home, his sole source of income a daily newspaper contest called "Where will the little green man appear next?" When odd things start happening, Ragle thinks he may be having a nervous breakdown. Is he or is it something much more sinister?Of course it is something more sinister. This is a Philip K. Dick novel.A Dickhead at work has been after me for years to read this. After mindbending reads like The Great Forgetting, Dark Ma...

“Relation of word to object . . . what is a word? Arbitrary sign. But we live in words. Our reality, among words not things. No such thing as thing anyhow; a gestalt in the mind.”..Time out of Joint is a sci-fi novel written in 1959 by Philip K. Dick and like many of his other books, it also explores themes of psychological mind trips and constant hopping back and forth through hoops of reality. .The bulk of the plot is a spoiler, so to say as little as possible about this book: A man called Rag...

Time Out of Joint is one of Philip K. Dick’s earliest novels (1959). For a science fiction story of that period, it is quite unusual and ahead of its time. The first half of the book is a sort of picture of America’s “Golden Age”: the blissful, apparently harmless and relatively uneventful life in a middle-class suburb, somewhere in California. Apart from the everyday tittle-tattle and ordinary cuckoldry between neighbours, there is nothing much going on. Except for that weirdo whose day job is

Why didn't I start reading Philip K. Dick ages ago?!?!WHERE HAVE I BEEN ALL MY LIFE

4.5 stars. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.

An early PKD novel, TIME OUT OF JOINT is not as trippy, surreal, or fractured as his later works. Yet some of the author's trademarks are in evidence here such as smoking cigars, snappy shoes, uncivilised civil war, disconnected discussions, and copious amounts of paranoia. The story contains strong echoes of the movie The Truman Show. I wonder if R.A. Henlein borrowed a story subplot here for his eponymous The Moon Is A Harsh Mistriss. This book isn't recommended for readers not familiar with P...

Below the Surface of Things Under the Hydrogen BombNo one takes the immaterialist philosophy of the 17th century Bishop Berkeley seriously today - that being is a result of being perceived. But perhaps we should. Isn’t this what quantum theory suggests, that only when something is noticed or measured does it become definite? And, at a more quotidian level, isn’t Berkeley’s kind of immaterialism the foundation of advertising in all its forms, from retail selling, to political campaigning, to the

“Finished with my woman 'cause she couldn't help me with my mindpeople think I'm insane because I am frowning all the timeAll day long I think of things but nothing seems to satisfyThink I'll lose my mind if I don't find something to pacifyCan you help me occupy my brain?” Cheers, Ozzy! That is Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, of course. Fits the bill for me!I have a copy of Time Out of Joint languishing in my house for over ten years. I have no idea where it came from, I am pretty sure I never bou

What a strange book. I wonder if this is where the creators of 'The Truman Show' got their inspiration. A really kooky story about an ordinary guy who thinks he's living in the 1950s and just doing ordinary stuff in an ordinary little town. But is he? Well, it's Philip K. Dick. Of course he isn't. It's all some really weird crap and nothing really makes any god damn sense -- at least not until the ending, but even that is just crazy stuff.

This is my new favourite PKD novel. It is quintessential Dick in that it revolves around the life of a quite ordinary person unravelling before there eyes. It begins ordinarily enough in small American town in the 1950's (when it was written), but from the beginning leads inexorably to its ultimate conclusion, which is an entirely different reality. If you happened to read it, not knowing this, it might even strike you for the first fifty or so pages as an oddly gripping account of a beer swilli...