Important: You will not enjoy this book at all if you only read 90% of it. You will not enjoy this book if you read specific segments of it. You have to read the book in its entirety to find it an enjoyable experience.
It's a science fiction book far ahead of its time in terms of the concepts it works with. That Philip had a very unique mind there is no doubt about it.
The worst part of the book is all the s*x with secretaries that serves no purpose.
Once you can get past that point it gets better.
The further you get into the book the better it gets.
The religious context in the book will feel too heavy handed to modern audiences.
There is no singular best part to the book to talk about, as it has to be viewed in its entirety to be appreciated. It is not a tapestry where all the pieces come together into a beautiful whole. It feels more like there was always a singular object to be appreciated, the book, but it takes you hours to get through all of it. Like if it took you 5 hours to load the color green. You wouldn't talk about the different shades of green, nor would you talk about how the pieces of green came together, you would just finally get that the color green is there and it took you 5 hours to see the color green and green looks like a nice color. That's how I would describe this book. It's something cool that it takes you reading through the entire book to see.
Now that I think a bit more about it, yeah there is one cool part to it, and it is how the weird character ( vague enough to not be a spoiler ) keeps becoming more...non human in terms of what we find out they is over the course of the book. Until finally they turns out to be something that is actually indescribable in terms of experience and presence.
A very good job at writing up an inhuman intelligence.
The book also ends on what feels like a cliffhanger which actually works great for where the story is ended.
The characters display a very 1970's morality but not in a bad way.
The most alien thing in the book are the future humans, and the alien.
I would do a deeper dive but there is honestly no real way to describe it. It's an experience.
I rate it 8.5 out of 10.
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Yeah, all of his books have random s*x interludes that might have just been there to fill up space (he probably had a contract to deliver a certain number of words since some of his books were published serially in shitty sci fi magazines)
This one is interesting since it touches on the loneliness inherent in living in a colony/homestead, the experience of using psychedelics and being uneasy about whether you've come out of it or are still hallucinating, and also what alien minds might be like compared to ours. Really hard book to describe but a good read.
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I agree with everything you said.
The later s*x scenes have a purpose the starting ones do not.
In my opinion it is Philip's way of saying these men are powerful or successful in their lives.
Hey, look, they can sleep around whenever they want. These are obviously alpha males.
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It's been a while but I think the drug that the book focuses on allows you to temporarily "become" one of the characters in a dollhouse, but other people can share the same body at the same time, so the s*x scenes with characters using the drug highlight both escapism and a lack of/violation of privacy, since you can live out your fantasy but people can interrupt it by barging in and taking control of the body.
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I understand. I meant the scenes before that which are just there to establish rich people have s*x.
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Yeah, there are a couple in the "real world" which are pretty much pointless.
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Those ones.
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