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A MAZE OF DEATH

            "A mind-assaulting adventure in an unknown world."              

FIRST EDITIONS

			Doubleday, hb, 70-111158, Jul 1970, 216pp, $4.95, (Michelle Moschella) {Levack: "Bound in royal blue cloth with silver lettering on the spine, '1970' on the title page. 'First Edition' on the copyright page. Date code 'L21' at the lower right margin of page 216. According to David Hartwell this book was accidentally pulped, leaving only library and review copies actually distributed."}
			Gollancz, hb, 00694-3, Jan 1972, 216pp, L1.80 (?) {Levack: "Bound in maroon paper boards with gold lettering stamped on the spine. '1972' on the title page. States nothing about printing or edition on the copyright page.[normal practice for Gollancz, however, they generally mark later printings."]}

    Among the papers at the Bowling Green State University in Ohio Patrick Clark discovered several manuscript sections and one manuscript for a novel with the working title of THE HOUR OF THE T.E.N.C.H. This would become A MAZE OF DEATH on publication. These manuscripts date to some time in 1968. The longest of them is a 422 page typewritten draft of the novel with ink corrections throughout. The fragments consist of some handwritten notes and a 16 page section titled "Notes on the Tench Novel." In PKD Otaku #7 Clark writes further on these notes and reprints parts of them in the zine.

    And in RFPKD #7 he describes the establishment of this hithertofore unknown cache of Dick papers:

    In his many years as a writer Philip K. Dick left a paper trail of massive proportions. Much of his later output is in private hands, either with his literary estate or various collectors and booksellers. The largest collection open to the public is at the University of California-Fullerton Library holding materials from Phil’s teenage notebooks through 1975. There is at least one other depository as well. A small collection of PKD’s papers is housed in the Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University in Northern Ohio. This library was established in 1969 under the direction of Raymond Browne and contains primary research material of the study of 19^th and 20^th Century American culture.

    On Feb 27 1969, Browne wrote to Phil asking him to donate some of his papers to the project. Phil was enthusiastic and replied on Mar 6, asking for more details. On Mar 21 he sent Browne "a mass of materials including the rough draft of a novel (which, by the way Doubleday has bought), typed notes, holographic notes, letters to me and from me." All of this material seems to have remained untouched for the most part since it arrived at Bowling Green.

    About the 422 page manuscript titled THE HOUR OF THE T.E.N.C.H. Clark goes into some detail:

    This seems to be a copy of the draft received by the SMLA on Oct 31, 1968 and published in 1970 by Doubleday. The draft and the published novel are virtually the same. The draft itself has numerous, minor changes. None of these are significant. In most cases the changes are single-word substitutions or deletions…

    Specktowsky’s book had been introduced two pages previously and this paragraph would have better fit there. But in any event, Phil chose to cut it. Phil always said he didn’t do multiple drafts until FLOW MY TEARS and the BGSU manuscript certainly bears this out.

    When Dick sent the manuscript for THE HOUR OF THE T.E.N.C.H. to the SMLA where it arrived on Oct, 31 1968 it was titled as such. But in a letter to Don Wollheim dated Oct 22, 1968 -- a week earlier -- he refers to the novel as A MAZE WITH DEATH:

    PS. Another thought just struck me. If Doubleday turns down A MAZE WITH DEATH, perhaps you would like to see it. Do you think so?

    This would indicate that the T.E.N.C.H. manuscript was a draft written before Oct 22, 1968 although it is the one he sent to the SMLA… This is all very confusing and maybe what happened is that PKD intended A MAZE OF DEATH to be the title all along but, on a whim, knowing his titles always got changed anyway, he slapped THE HOUR OF THE T.E.N.C.H. on the manuscript and sent it off.

    Certainly on the same day he wrote to Wollheim he is also wrote to his agent, Scott Meredith, and talked more of these matters:

   I just now received a very nice letter from Don Wollheim, in which he picks up where he and I left off at the convention. At that time I told Don I wanted to do another novel for Ace, and in his letter he asks if I meant that and still mean it. He says: <<... I would like to see you keep on with us, even though report has it you have made pots of money with Doubleday. I don't know about pots of money, but I think we can come to some reasonable accommodation financially if given a reasonable chance.>> I have no new novel in the works, however, because I have been working on A MAZE WITH DEATH, but it occurs to me that if Larry Ashmead doesn't want it, maybe Don might. I am writing Don, and I'm mentioning A MAZE WITH DEATH. Could we try him if Doubleday turns the novel down? (By the way -- Don wants my material presented directly to him and not through Terry Carr. He says, <<... this is for me and would be published under my editorship.>>
    Because of Don's interest I will start as soon as possible on another new novel... but it will take a while. Would he buy an outline and sample chapter? Or does he want the whole thing?

    A few weeks later on Nov 13, 1968 we find that this is all resolved; PKD wrote a letter to Ace editor Terry Carr telling him that Doubleday had bought A MAZE WITH DEATH but that he is working on a new novel for Ace and has already sent three and a half chapters and an outline to Don Wollheim. This new novel would eventually become OUR FRIENDS FROM FROLIX 8.

    The title of A MAZE OF DEATH was still not decided as late as January 1970 when Dick wrote:

    I, too, prefer MAZE OF DEATH, but I think a THE should start it; i.e., THE MAZE OF DEATH (or possibly A MAZE OF DEATH). So go ahead.

    Doubleday published the newly title A MAZE OF DEATH in July 1970 in what is now a very scarce edition. Daniel Levack, PKD’s biographer, relates that David Hartwell said that this first edition was "accidentally pulped, leaving only library and review copies actually distributed."

    That may be so, I have never seen a copy even in a library. But an ex-library copy in merely ‘good’ condition was for sale by one bookseller for $699! And another for $400. As this Doubleday edition is the only USA hardcover and it was mostly destroyed one can see that these prices are really quite fair. The only other hardcover in English came from Gollancz in England in 1972. This edition too would have some value to the PKD collector.

    In 1976 Mark Hurst acquired the reprint rights to A MAZE OF DEATH – along with several other PKD novels – for Bantam Books. Accordingly, in Sep 1977 Bantam produced their paperback edition.

    More editions followed from DAW Books and Vintage Books in the USA and from Grafton and Voyager in the UK.

    As usual when PKD discussed his books with interviewers Apel & Briggs in 1977, he was less than totally positive about A MAZE OF DEATH:

    Another one I'm not sure of is A MAZE OF DEATH. I get different reactions when I read different parts. There's a part in there where the same whole conversation is repeated twice. It's long, and everybody's babbling away. But it's different -- it's carefully rewoven so that the second time around it's not the same; it has a different meaning.

    A MAZE OF DEATH also contributed to PKD’s post-Pink Beam world view:

    My 3-74 experiences are an outgrowth of my Palmer Eldritch experience of over ten years earlier. "Faith Of Our Fathers" shows this, too; I knew Him to be real ...but only in UBIK does he begin to appear as benign, especially then in A MAZE OF DEATH.

    And:

    in MAZE OF DEATH there are endless parallel realities arranged spatially.

    In the story Ben Tallchief, Seth Morley and others are enticed to the planet Delmak-O. Once there they can find no reason for their existence and as they muddle their way around, they die one by one, either by murder, accident or reasons unknown. At last they wake up to find themselves in a doomed spaceship the computer of which has generated a series of virtual worlds to occupy the crew while they wait to die. But once awake the crew debate the situation on virtual world Delmak-O and despite the violence decide to return there – its better than all the other worlds they’ve tried so far.

    A MAZE OF DEATH gets ô ô ô ô

OTHER ENGLISH EDITIONS:                  For Cover Pix Click Here:

FOREIGN EDITIONS

		Laffont - Ailleurs et Demain, pb, 19, 1972, ?, ? (?) {tr. into French by Alain Doremieux as AU BOUT DU LABYRINTHE} SDM: 7501212
		Prisma, pb, 0644-8, 1972, 175pp, ?, (?) {tr. into Dutch by Suurmeijer as VLUCHT IN VISIOENEN}
		La Tribuna, ?, SFBC 46, 1974, 208pp, Lit 1500 (Libero Vitale) {tr. into Italian by V. Curtoni as LABARINTO DI MORTE}
		Heyne, pb, 3397, 1974, ?, ? (?) }tr. into German by Yoma Cap as IRRGARTEN DES TODES}
		Heyne, pb, ?, 1976c, ?, ? (?) {tr. into German as IRRGARTEN DES TODES} "SF Bibliotek"
		J'ai Lu, pb, 774, 1977, 224pp, ? (?) {tr. into French by Alain Doremieux as AU BOUT DU LABYRINTHE} ISBN: 2-277-11774-9.  SDM: 7719893
		?, pb, sf3B, 1979?, ?, ? (?) {tr. into Japanese}
		Laffont - Ailleurs et Demain, pb, ?, 1982, 234pp, ? (?) {tr. into French by Alain Doremieux as AU BOUT DU LABYRINTHE} ISBN: 2-221-02123-1.  SDM: 8305107
		?, pb, ?, 1982c, ?, ? (?) {tr. into Polish as LABIRYNT SMIERCI}
		Mora Kiado, tp, 698-4, 1986, 207pp, 33ft (Korga Gyorgy) {tr. into Hungarian by Veres Mihaly as A HALAL UTVESZTOJE}
		Livre de Poche, pb, 7085, 1987, 219pp, ? (?) {tr. into French by Alain Doremieux as AU BOUT DU LABYRINTHE} ISBN: 2-253-04311-7.   SDM: 9312547
		Tokyo Sogensha, jpb, 69603480, 1989, ?, ? (?) {tr. into Japanese} by Hiroo Yamagata}
		Mobius -- Kozmosz Fantasztikus Konyvek, pb, 207, 1990c, ?, ? (?) {tr. into Hungarian by Veres Mihaly as A HALAL UTVESZTOJE}
		Rossiisky Zapad -- Kaliningrad, hb, 5-8486-0016-3, 1993, ?, ? (?) {tr. into Russian; includes: THE GAME PLAYERS OF TITAN and DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? as well as "Small Town", "Beyond Lies The Wub", and a short article "Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd"}
		Fanucci, Il libro d' oro della fantascienza 70, 1994, 200pp, Lit 22000 (?) {tr. into Italian by Vittorio Curtoni as LABIRINTO DI MORTE}ISBN: 88-347-0418-5
		Rebis -- Poznan,?, ? 1997, ?, ? (?) {tr. into Polish by Arkadiusz Nakoniecznik as LABIRYNT SMIERCI}
		Severo - Zapad -- Saint Petersbourg, hb, ?, 1997, ?, ? (?) {tr. into Russian. Included MARTIAN TIME-SLIP, A MAZE OF DEATH and "Faith Of Our Fathers" and "The Preserving Machine."
		J'ai Lu, pb, ?, 1997c, ?, ? (?) {tr. into French as AU BOUT DU LABYRINTHE}
		Plaza Janes, ?, Mundos Imaginarios, 1999c, ?, ? (?) {tr. into Spanish as LABERINTO DE MUERTE}"Prologue de Vicente Verdu"

    A noser is a strange craft, he said to himself as he stood at the edge of the parking field surveying the lines of inert vessels. First of all, they were incredibly cheap; he could gain possesion of one of these for less than four silver dollars.

NOTES

PKDS-2 10:

Publication date for A MAZE OF DEATH was July 24, 1970.

PKDS-12 7:

{From the Mark Hurst Chronology}

• 1976

Acquired reprint rights to UBIK, THE 3 STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH and A MAZE OF DEATH for Bantam.

PKDS-16 6:

"...Robinson came up with some refreshingly intriguing ideas. For instance, he sees Dick in A MAZE OF DEATH, deliberately murdering the cast of characters he has used in his books, and grown sick of since SOLAR LOTTERY. There is a different, new cast after MAZE, he says..." {from a letter to PKDS from Phil Wooley, Cheltenham, England, on Kim Stanley Robinson's talk at Conspiracy '87, as the WorldCon in Brighton was called.}

PKDS-16 7:

Earlier in 1987 Grafton (UK) released...A MAZE OF DEATH.

PKDS-24 12:

In Japan, Sogensha put out in December 1989 an edition of A MAZE OF DEATH (Translated by Hiroo Yamagata)

TDC 79

(PKD:) Another one I'm not sure of is A MAZE OF DEATH. I get different reactions when I read different parts. There's a part in ther where the same whole conversation is repeated twice. It's long, and everybody's babbling away. But it's different -- it's carefully rewoven so that the second time around it's not the same; it has a different meaning.

TSR 218

in MAZE OF DEATH there are endless parallel realities arranged spatially;

{For continuation see: FLOW MY TEARS}

IPOV 20

My 3-74 experiences are an outgrowth of my Palmer Eldritch experience of over ten years earlier. "Faith Of Our Fathers" shows this, too; I knew Him to be real ...but only in UBIK does he begin to appear as benign, especially then in A MAZE OF DEATH.

RFPKD #7, Aug 1998. ‘Phil Dick in 1968: From the Collection at Bowling Green’ by Patrick Clark.

PKD OTAKU #7, Nov 2002, p1ff. Clark also refers the interested reader to RFPKD #7, Aug 1998, for a description of the collection at BGSU from which the Tench notes came. Patrick Clark too sees THE HOUR OF THE T.E.N.C.H. as being written before Oct 22, 1968.

GSM Xerox Collection. ‘The Game Of "THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH"’ by Patrick Clark. The quote is from a letter from PKD to Judith M. Glushanok, Jan 13, 1970.

BGSU Papers

Dear Scott,

    I just now received a very nice letter from Don Wollheim, in which he picks up where he and I left off at the convention. At that time I told Don I wanted to do another novel for Ace, and in his letter he asks if I meant that and still mean it. He says: <<... I would like to see you keep on with us, even though report has it you have made pots of money with Doubleday. I don't know about pots of money, but I think we can come to some reasonable accommodation financially if given a reasonable chance.>> I have no new novel in the works, however, because I have been working on A MAZE WITH DEATH, but it occurs to me that if Larry Ashmead doesn't want it, maybe Don might. I am writing Don, and I'm mentioning A MAZE WITH DEATH. Could we try him if Doubleday turns the novel down? (By the way -- Don wants my material presented directly to him and not through Terry Carr. He says, <<... this is for me and would be published under my editorship.>>
    Because of Don's interest I will start as soon as possible on another new novel... but it will take a while. Would he buy an outline and sample chapter? Or does he want the whole thing?

Cordially,

Philip K. Dick [PKD>Scott Meredith, 10-22-1968] {note: The second novel PKD mentions here is most likely OUR FRIENDS FROM FROLIX 8, published by Ace in 1970 -- Lord RC}

BGSU Papers

{...} Yesterday I sent off a new novel. A MAZE WITH DEATH, to Scott. It is an s-f mystery, and Larry Ashmead is interested in it for a series of <<future mystery, novels>> as they'll be called. I mention this only to indicate that I am actively writing, these days...which is not always so -- I go in cycles of creativity and sloth, as you may know. Anyhow, I have this one new novel in the works and intend to start on another as soon as possible. {...}

{...}

PS. Another thought just struck me. If Doubleday turns down A MAZE WITH DEATH, perhaps you would like to see it. Do you think so? {PKD > Don Wollheim, 10-22-68}

BGSU Papers

"The Hour of the T.E.N.C.H."  Draft of novel, 224 typewritten pages with many minor corrections in ink throughout. This novel was published by Doubleday in 1970 under the title A MAZE OF DEATH.

"Notes on the Tench novel."  16 typewritten pages numbered 1-12, 3-6 (possibly intended to be 13-16). Ideas, character descriptions and plot lines for the novel.

Handwritten notes used as a basis for "Notes on the Tench Novel." Four sheets of typing paper, folded in half, with writing on the recto and verso. Pages are variously numbered: 1-2, 9, 12, 13, and some unnumbered.

Informs Carr that Doubleday bought his new novel [A MAZE OF DEATH] but that he is working on a new novel and has sent three and a half chapters and an outline to Wollheim. Suggests sending proofs for THE PRESERVING MACHINE to John Brunner, Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison and Roger Zelazny. {PKD to Terry Carr, 11-13-68} {See: THE PRESERVING MACHINE}

E. P. Waggener & Sons: A MAZE OF DEATH, Doubleday, hb, 1970 (1st). G/G dj. noticeable edge rubbing, moderate dj edge/surface rubbing, some dj chipping, xlib with usual xlib distinctions. $699.95

Ken Lopez: A MAZE OF DEATH, Doubleday, hb, 1970 (1st). VG/VG. Watermarks to the boards and the first few pages near the gutter; very good in a very good dust jacket with modest edgewear and mostly internal dampstaining. $400

Phildickian: A MAZE OF DEATH, Bantam, pb, 64-636, 1971. VG. light reading stress. Minor scratching to the front panel. $6

Alibris: A MAZE OF DEATH, Paperback Library, pb, 64-636, 1971. VG. $4.95

Powells: A MAZE OF DEATH, Paperback Library, pb, 64-636, 1971. VG. G/NI (sticker removal flaw to inside front cover, light reading creases to spine & front cover) $12

Monroe Bethea Books: A MAZE OF DEATH, Bantam, pb, 1977. FINE. This softcover book is unread. It has a light 3/8 inch corner crease on front lower right, light edgewear light chipping and a faint 5/8 inch line on front cover. It is square, clean and tightly bound. $6.50

Ken Lopez: A MAZE OF DEATH, Bantam, pb, 10740-2, 1977. NF. Inscribed in 1978: "Tim please stay calm and sain [sic], Love Isa" (i.e., PKD's daughter). $125

Phildickian: A MAZE OF DEATH, Bantam, pb, 10740-2, 1977. VG. light reading stress. $10

Phildickian: A MAZE OF DEATH, Bantam, pb, 10740-2, 1977. VG. moderate reading stress & creasing.. $6

Powells: A MAZE OF DEATH, Bantam, pb, 740-2, 1977. $9.95

Alibris: A MAZE OF DEATH, Bantam, pb, 740-2, 1977. VG. lightly rubbed corners and edges, slight surface wear, slight crease to front alongside spine. $3.70

Brimstones: A MAZE OF DEATH, Pan, pb, 1977. G. $5.36

Abebooks: A MAZE OF DEATH, DAW, pb, #533, 1983. VG-F. $9

Phildickian: A MAZE OF DEATH, DAW, pb, #533, 1983. VG+. Moderate creasing, tight binding. $10

Phildickian: A MAZE OF DEATH, DAW, pb, #533, 1983. VG. The only noticeable crease is to the left edge of the front panel along the spine. No creasing to the spine. Store stamp to the lower edge of the first page. Internally clean and the binding is still tight. $10

Alibris: A MAZE OF DEATH, DAW, pb, #533, 1983. G-VG. $3.95

Phildickian: A MAZE OF DEATH, DAW, pb, #533, 1983. G+. $5

Abebooks: A MAZE OF DEATH, Vintage, tp, 1994. FINE. $15

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