MARTIAN TIME SLIP

Num	N	S	Writing Date	Pub. Date	Previous	Next	Notes
117	28		<Oct 1962	Apr 1964	WE CAN BUILD YOU	DR. BLOODMONEY	See: "All We Marsmen"

HISTORY

MARTIAN TIME-SLIP started life as GOODMEMBER ARNIE KOTT OF MARS. The manuscript reached the SMLA on Oct 31, 1962 – less than a month after the Agency received the manuscript for WE CAN BUILD YOU -- and the story was first serialized as "All We Marsmen" in Worlds Of Tomorrow, Aug, Oct, Dec 1963. Prior to serialization the manuscript was sold to Ballantine in June 1963 after being rejected by Ace, Berkley and Pyramid publishers, and the first paperback edition under the title MARTIAN TIME-SLIP came from Ballantine in April 1964.

Biographer Lawrence Sutin sees the fact that MARTIAN TIME-SLIP was accepted as science fiction and not as a mainstream or hybrid-mainstream novel like THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE as a ‘defeat’ for Philip K. Dick. Sutin notes that the novel’s reception as science fiction was itself problematical: Don Wollheim at Ace Books turned down MARTIAN TIME-SLIP because it took place in 1994.Wollheim says:

"It offended my science fiction sense. {…} There couldn't have been a Mars colony when he put it -- if he'd thrown it ahead a hundred years, I would have liked it."

I enjoyed writing all of them, but I think that if I could only choose a few, which for example might escape WW3, I would choose ... MARTIAN TIME SLIP...

it is generally agreed by fans and critics alike that he was not serious with this comment. Greg Lee, for instance, publisher of Radio Free PKD, sees in the fan poll run by the zine For Dickheads Only that:

I think this is the closest Dick came to melding his SF sensibility with his growing "mainstream" (whatever that means, I hate the word) skills. Real people with real problems; the exploitation theme is highly relevant to today's age.

Paul Williams, publisher of The Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter sees the themes in MARTIAN TIME-SLIP as anticipating "R.D.Laing and many other gurus of the 60s and 70s."

But it must be noted that not everyone was content with MARTIAN TIME-SLIP. His wife, as PKD recalls, once said to him:

"I'd rather be a whore and walk the streets than live off money earned by stuff like this."

In the hospital I had the occasion to reread my '64 novel MARTIAN TIME SLIP. I found it weak dramatically (weak in plot) but extraordinary in its ideas. I stripped the universe down to its basic structure. I guess I always do that when I write: analyze the universe to see what it's made over. The floor joists (sp?) of the universe are visible in my novels.

The story of a hard-scrabble colonial society on Mars revolves around a small boy, Manfred Steiner, who is autistic. The character of Manfred is, according to Rickman,

drawn from Bruno Bettelheim's 1958 Scientific American article "Joey The Mechanical Boy," later incorporated into his The Empty Fortress.

And Sutin says that Dick was influenced in the depiction of Manfred by the autistic son of his old friend, Vince Lusby. Phil and Kleo had babysat the boy.

As for the psychological theory behind Dick’s description of autism and schizophrenia, Sutin writes:

The key source for Phil's ideas on schizophrenia -- in TIME SLIP and throughout his last two decades -- was Swiss analyst Ludwig Binswanger, whose study of a schizophrenic, "The Case of Ellen West", terrified Phil when he read it in the early 60s. Phil used Binswanger's term tomb world (schizophrenic self-entrapment) in several 60s sf works…

Sutin also notes the influence of Durkheim’s sociological interpretation of Kant’s theories on Dick’s depiction of the Bleekmen in MARTIAN TIME-SLIP.

The Binswanger concept of the ‘tomb world’ finds expression here as the gubble, gubble world of Manfred (and also in Mary Ann Reynold’s personal hell in MARY AND THE GIANT and the post-atomic urban wastelands of DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?).

And on the ‘gubble, gubble’ world PKD had this to say in a letter to Australian critic Bruce Gillespie:

I’m glad you liked All We Marsmen (also called MARTIAN TIME-SLIP). Remember the part near the end when the man is reading the newspaper and the gubble-gubble words appear. It is entropy at work, decay of the meaningful (form) into the meaningless (entropic formlessness). This force, intruding itself, is objectively real; this is not the hallucination – and much of what in my books are regarded as hallucinations are actually aspects of the entropy-laden koinos world breaking through into the little warm living room with the dog sleeping before the fire, the wife sewing, the husband reading the newspaper – which begins to say, "Gubble, gubble", all at once. Kant’s space-time-etc structuring mechanism of the psyche has begun to fail.

After publication of MARTIAN TIME-SLIP, the story was proffered to the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) by Brian Aldiss for consideration as a five-part television mini-series. The adaptation to be written by Aldiss himself. I’m not sure whether this was done but I think it was and was produced circa 1985.

The novel also influenced editor Mark Hurst to write to PKD in 1974, thus starting a correspondence which lasted until Dick’s death in 1982. In 1974 Hurst also wrote to Judy-Lyn Del Rey to ask Ballantine, where Del Rey was editor, to reissue MARTIAN TIME-SLIP. This was done in 1976 and a new dedication to Hurst was included at that time.

After his visionary pink beam experiences in 1974, Dick considered many of his novels and stories as supportive of his changed world-view. MARTIAN TIME-SLIP was one of these:

In fact, schizophrenia could be considered evidence for my system; it is an instance of the malfunction of that system, & with my system in mind, can be readily understood (in MARTIAN TIME SLIP I saw it as a breakdown of proper time functioning, which was close)...

The idea of dysfunctions such as bounce back and bounce forward are possible, here, but these would serve no teleological purpose; they would be time-slips, as in my novel MARTIAN TIME SLIP. Yet, if they were to occur, they would serve a purpose for us, the observer or listener; we would suddenly learn a great deal more about our universe. I believe these ontological dysfunctions in time do occur, but that our brains automatically generate false memory-systems to obscure them, at once. The reason for this carries back to my premise: the veil or dokos is there to deceive us for a good reason, and such disclosures as these time dysfunctions make are to be obliterated that this benign purpose be maintained.

Here’s a good description of MARTIAN TIME-SLIP courtesy of Steven Owen Godersky:

The unions control Mars, the colonial world of speculation, and Arnie Kott the plumber is at the top of the heap. Arnie wants to use the time-warping abilities of Manfred, a schizophrenic child, to control Martian real estate. Kott sets Jack Bohlen the task of building a machine to communicate with Manfred. Instead, Manfred catches them up in a degenerating time-loop, fearing the vision of his own future. Only the Martians can communicate telepathically with Manfred and aid him in escaping from a future that is gradually spreading back to obliterate the past.

MARTIAN TIME-SLIP is indeed an exceptional science fiction novel and down in the hovels they give it óóóóó

OTHER ENGLISH EDITIONS: Click Here For Cover Pix:

FOREIGN EDITIONS:

Addressing himself to the remaining men, Arnie soaped himself all over and said, "You know I got to protect my mineral rights; I can't have some smoozer coming in here from Earth and making those mountains into like for instance a national park for picnickers..."

NOTES

PKDS-2 10

PKDS-2 13:

I enjoyed writing all of them, but I think that if I could only choose a few, which for example might escape WW3, I would choose ... MARTIAN TIME SLIP... {PKD 1968}

PKDS-6 12:

(PKD:)I don't care for MARTIAN TIME SLIP
(Apel:) That's talked about as one of your major works...
(PKD:)I know.
(Apel:)... but I'd have to agree with you. I didn't find it very original.
(PKD:) I think its a very dull book, too... {PKD-A&B 1977}

PKDS-12 7:

PKDS-13 15:

The PKD Estate has granted permisssion for the Broome Street Theatre in Madison, WI to present an experimental drama based on MARTIAN TIME SLIP, Directed by Joel Gersmann.

PKDS-22 12:

PKDS-24 11:

Gollancz has issued MARTIAN TIME SLIP as a paperback (L3.50) in their VGSF Classics series.

PKDS-28 10:

Brian Aldiss has strong support from BBC-TV for what is planned to be a five-part mini-series, 240 minutes long, that will be a faithful-to-the-original film adaptation of MARTIAN TIME SLIP, adaptation to be written by Aldiss and produced by his production company, Avernus. This is not a sure thing yet...

PKDS-28 16:

John CLute has a full-page piece in the Washington Post Book World (Aug 25, 1991), titled "Modern SF; A Reader's Guide." He singles out 29 books written in the last 30 years, including 4 by Dick.
Clute's excellent piece goes on to cite MARTIAN TIME SLIP and DR.BLOODMONEY as "two of the best novels published in the 1960s, in or out of the genre, hilarious, unsettling, convoluted, surreal, nervy, paranoid and wise."

From a magazine rack he took a copy of Motor World, and heard, with his trained ears, a switch click. The school had noted his presence. It noted which magazine he selected, how long he sat reading, and what he next took. It measured him.

OAR 181:

25. MARTIAN TIME SLIP (original manuscript title Goodmember Arnie Kott Of Mars, serialised as All We Marsmen; received by SMLA Oct 31, 1962; sf, published 1964.

OAR 92:

{Paul Wiliams:} In my 1975 Rolling Stone article, Phil and I talked about what (we thought) happened next:

In 1962, after THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE was published in hardcover and greeted with loud hurrahs, Phil wrote a novel called MARTIAN TIME SLIP which was just as good if not better. It's a novel about schizophrenia and contemporary life, autistic children, drugged housewives, power-crazed plumbers (on Mars), and the fragility of the systems of shared assumptions that hold human society together. The writing is humorous, painful, awesome in its effect on both mind and heart; the themes of the book anticipate R.D. Laing and many other gurus of the 60s and 70s; the quality of the prose; paragraph by paragraph, is exquisite. There are few modern novels to match it. But for the author, the book was, in his own words, "a crucial defeat..."

"With HIGH CASTLE and MARTIAN TIME SLIP, I thought I had bridged the gap between the experimental mainstream novel and science fiction. Suddenly I'd found a way to do everything I wanted to do as a writer. I had in mind a whole series of books, a vision of a new kind of science fiction progressing from those two novels. Then TIME SLIP was rejected by Putnam, and every other hardcover publisher we sent it to."

"My vision collapsed. I was crushed. I had made a mis-calculation somewhere, and I didn't know where. The evaluation I had made of myself, of the marketplace, went poof! I reverted to a more primitive concept of my writing. The books that might have followed TIME SLIP were gone."

MARTIAN TIME SLIP was eventually published by Ballantine as an original paperback in 1964. It has been out of print for seven years.

An interesting thing happened on my way to fleshing out the story of Phil's career for this book. I came across very convincing evidence that the above quoted account is incorrect in some key details. MARTIAN TIME SLIP was never submitted to Putnam. There was another novel that Phil's agent, if not Phil, saw as the appropriate work to follow in the footsteps of HIGH CASTLE. It was called THE FIRST IN YOUR FAMILY.

These cards {in the SMLA file} clearly indicate that the first recorded receipt by the Agency of a manuscript from Phil following HIGH CASTLE was a novel called THE FIRST IN YOUR FAMILY (finally published ten years later as WE CAN BUILD YOU), received Oct 4, 1962.

This novel was submited the same day to Putnam, which had just published HIGH CASTLE. Over the next four months it was rejected by Putnam, Doubleday, Simon & Schuster, ballantine, and Crown, all hardcover publishers except Ballantine. It didn't ultimately find a publisher until Amazing Stories magazine serialized it in 1969, and then Don Wollheim, who had bought all of Phil's early novels at ACE, published it in 1972 through his new paperback imprint, DAW Books.

Later that same month, on Oct 31, 1962, Scott Meredith received from Phil another ms, this one entitled GOODMEMBER ARNIE KOTT OF MARS. Even given Phil's notorious dificulty with titles, it's hard to believe he intended this to be the book he would sell to Putnam to follow HIGH CASTLE -- it seems much more likely that he made this one sound pulpy in order that it not be confused with his new "serious" work, THE FIRST IN YOUR FAMILY. In any event, GOODMEMBER ARNIE KOTT OF MARS was indeed the book that Ballantine would later call MARTIAN TIME SLIP, and Scott Meredith's first move was not to submit it to a book publisher at all but to send it to a science fiction magazine to have it serialized.

GOODMEMBER sold for serialization in Dec 1962, and the Scott Meredith began marketing it to book publishers. The first three they tried -- ACE, Berkley and Pyramid -- were paperback science fiction publishers. They then tried Doubleday's hard-cover sf line, and finally sold it to Ballantine in June 1963.

Clearly the Agency never saw MARTIAN TIME SLIP as anything but a new sf adventure, and there's no reason to believe Phil thought any differently at the time. He may well have known how good it was (or, possibly, he may not have), but the evidence is that neither he nor his agent thought of it as having any chance outside of the hard-core sf market. {See WE CAN BUILD YOU}

DI 82

Of all the old Art Music crowd, Phil remained closest to Vince Lusby, who, by a recent marriage, had an autistic son. Phil and Kleo babysat for the boy, and he strongly influenced the character of Manfred in MARTIAN TIME SLIP (an autistic boy trapped in a schizophrenic "tomb world")

DI 103:

The Kant-Durkheim theory {Kant's theories as applied by Durkheim to the culture of the Australian Aborigines} shaped Phil's depiction of the Martian aboriginal tribe of Bleekmen in MTS.

DI 118:

But if Phil misremembered the details, his sense of defeat by the reception of TIME SLIP as sf was very real. Even its reception as sf was troubled: Wollheim at ACE -- who in 1969 had purchased Phil's two worst-ever sf novels VULCAN'S HAMMER and DR. FUTURITY -- turned down one of his best in TIME SLIP. Why? The novel was set in 1994. "It offended my science fiction sense," says Wollheim. "There couldn't have been a Mars colony when he put it -- if he'd thrown it ahead a hundred years, I would have liked it." Live by the sf sword, die by the sf sword.

DI 299

28. MARTIAN TIME SLIP, originally titled GOODMEMBER ARNIE KOTT OF MARS (written: 1962, published: August 1963 in shorter form as ALL WE MARSMEN in Worlds Of Tomorrow, Published 1964 by Ballantine.

... The key source for Phil's ideas on schizophrenia -- in TIME SLIP and throughout his last two decades -- was Swiss analyst Ludwig Binswanger, whose study of a schizophrenic, "The Case of Ellen West", terrified Phil when he read it in the early 60s. Phil used Binswanger's term tomb world (schizophrenic self-entrapment) in several 60s sf works; Jack Bohlen describes describes mental illness as "a moldering, dank tomb, a place where nothing came and went." In an Oct 1976 letter to Dorothy, Phil wrote: "In the hospital I had the occasion to reread my '64 novel MARTIAN TIME SLIP. I found it weak dramatically (weak in plot) but extraordinary in its ideas. I stripped the universe down to its basic structure. I guess I always do that when I write: analyse the universe to see what it's made over. The floor joists (sp?) of the universe are visible in my novels." Phil made contradictory claims for most of his works, but this assessment strikes me as just. Rating: 9.

He had broken a union ruling which was a basic law. In his opinion it was a foolish ruling, but nonetheless... vengeance is mine, sayeth the Extraterrestrial Repairman's Union, Martian branch.

TTHC 64:

In many of Dick's novels his protagonists struggle like Mary (in MARY AND THE GIANT), to escape what in DO ANDROIDS DREAM? is called "tomb world", the gubble-gubble world of MARTIAN TIME SLIP, the world of entropy and decay. Late in his life he called this world the world of the "Black Iron Prison," and identified it as the world we live in. Bit someday soon, he told us, the walls will fall and it will be as if the Prison never were...

TTHC 84:

Nancy Hackett: "All the experiences he seemed to describe seemed to be pretty negative, about school, about being a kid, and his mother working. I know he felt alone and alienated." Ann Dick compared his boyhood, as he related it to her, as akin to the autistic Manfred Steiner's in TIME SLIP. Charley Hume recalls in CONFESSIONS, "the sharp contempt" in the voices of authority: his teachers in school, his mother.

TTHC 135:

As we can see, Phil's problems with agoraphobia, like everything else, fed into his writing. Many of his characters have trouble staying on buses, even seemingly healthy ones, like Arnie Kott..

TTHC 194:

References to the progressive politics of the late 40s dot Dick's later fiction. There's a statue on mars of Alger Hiss, "the first UN martyr, " in TIME SLIP...

TTHC 200:

Ultimately Dick questioned psychiatry's function as soceity's "reality enforcer." Sometimes this critique is limited to the role of therapy in "adjusting" someone to an unjust society...
In other , later works, psychoanalysis is shown to be a servant of a larger false reality, an untrue Koinos Kosmos. As Arnie Kott's manservant Holiogabalus puts it in TIME SLIP:

"Entire psychoanalysis is a vainglorious foolishness."
"How zat, Heliio?"
"Question they never deal with is, what to remold sick person like. There is no what, Mister... Purpose of life unknown., and hence way to be is hidden from the eyes of living critters."

TTHC 411

(note 7:) The character of Manfred Steiner in MARTIAN TIME SLIP is drawn from Bruno Bettelheim's 1958 Scientific American article "Joey The Mechanical Boy," later incorporated into his The Empty Fortress. Autism was at the time Dick wrote TIME SLIP largely blamed on inadequate parenting, as it is in Bettelheim's work. More recent studies of autism do not follow Bettelheim on this.

In fact, schizophrenia could be considered evidence for my system; it is an instance of the malfunction of that system, & with my system in mind, can be readily understood (in MARTIAN TIME SLIP I saw it as a breakdown of proper time functioning, which was close)...

IPOV 143fn:

The terms Eigenwelt (isolated, spiritual world of the inner self), Mitwelt (the middle or integrated world of the ego) and the Umwelt (earthly environment) were coined by the Swiss psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswanger in the course of his writings on schizophrenia. These writings, first read by PKD in the early 1960s, exerted a lasting influence upon him. See, especially the PKD novel MARTIAN TIME SLIP (1964) and its use of another Binswanger concept -- that of the "tomb world."

Kevin Lyons on PKD:

In MARTIAN TIME SLIP, one of his most wildly imaginative novels, "a generation of schizophrenics" has been born to the pioneer colonists on Mars. One of these emotionally damaged kids, the autistic Manfred Steiner, has retreated into the private universe he's created from his subconscious. But that reality is now seeping into, and superceeding, our own.

Martin Skidmore on PKD:

Probably the best of the lot is MARTIAN TIME SLIP, a stunningly powerful work, with one particularly outstanding section where the same scene is viewed a number of times, each from a different viewpoint, thus emphasizing the differences in perception betweem different people, who are supposedly sharing an experience...

DHG 209:

{"Man, Android & Machine."} ... The idea of dysfunctions such as bounce back and bounce forward are possible, here, but these would serve no teleological purpose; they would be time-slips, as in my novel MARTIAN TIME SLIP. Yet, if they were to occur, they would serve a purpose for us, the observer or listener; we would suddenly learn a great deal more about our universe. I believe these ontological dysfunctions in time do occur, but that our brains automatically generate false memory-systems to obscure them, at once. The reason for this carries back to my premise: the veil or dokos is there to decieve us for a good reason, and such disclosures as these time dysfunctions make are to be obliterated that this benign purpose be maintained. {PKD}

DHG 212:

For absolute reality to reveal itself, our categories of space-time experiences, our basic matrix through which we encounter the universe, must break down and then utterly collapse. I dealt with this breakdown in MARTIAN TIME SLIP in terms of time; in MAZE OF DEATH there are endless paralled realities arranged spatially; in FLOW MY TEARS the world of one character invades the world in general and shows that by "world" we mean nothing more or less than Mind -- the immanant Mind which thinks -- or rather dreams -- our world... {PKD}

DHG 220:

In MARTIAN TIME SLIP I've written in so many dream experiences that I can't seperate them, now, when I read the novel.

In MARTIAN TIME-SLIP I've written in so many dream experiences that I can't separate them, now, when I read the novel.

{...} And even my wife said so, and she is a Tough Hard Cold Cruel and Biting type who said once to me (regarding MARTIAN TIME SLIP) "I'd rather be a whore and walk the streets than live off money earned by stuff like this."(...){...}

		Hayakawa, pb, SF346, 1980, ?, ? (?) {Japanese (9th)}

		Robert Laffont - Ailleurs et Demain Classiques, pb, 18, 1981, 314pp, ? (?) {tr. into French by Henry-Luc Planchat as GLISSEMENT DE TEMPS SUR MARS} ISBN: 2-221-00604-6 SDM:8104981

		Suhrkamp, pb,st 773, 1982, 301pp, DM10.00? (Thomas Franke) {tr into German by Franz Rottensteiner as MOZART FUR MARSIANER} ISBN: 3-518-27273-4

		Nord, ?, 33, 1983, 256pp, Lit 4000 (?) {tr. into Italian by Carlo Pagetti as NOI MARZIANI} ISBN: 88-429-0638-7
		WSOY, ?, 18763-1, 1993, ?, ? (Jukka Murtosaari) {tr. into Finnish as MARS ON MEIDAN}
		Amber -- Warsaw, ?, ?, 1994, ?, ? (?) {tr. into Polish by Malgorzata Fialkowska as MARSJANSKI POSLIZG W CASIE}

		?, pb, 696, 1998, ?, ? (?) {tr. into Japanese}

		Fanucci, pb, 71, 1998, 312pp, Lit 12000 (?) {tr. into Italian by Carlo Pagetti as NOI MARZIANI} ISBN: 88-347-0591-2

		Amber -- Warsaw, pb, ?, 1999, ?, ? (?) {tr. into Polish by Malgorzata Fialkowska as MARSJANSKI POSLIZG W CASIE}

		?, pb, ?, ?, ?, ? (?) {tr. into French as GLISSEMENT DE TEMPS SUR MARS}

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