The Man Who Japed – Philip K Dick Free Audiobook

Written by Philip K Dick
Read by Luke Daniels
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

This book is very short, and it is quite straightforward for PKD. As this is one of his earlier works, I was expecting an extremely outdated view of the future, but surprisingly, PKD kept the details of the mechanisms vague enough that there were no glaring ‘futurisms’, such as those that jammed the first chapter of “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch”. Simply stating that they took a ship between planets rather than inventing the Amazing Steam-Powered Punch-Card Engine helped the book a lot.
Despite the fact that this book came before PKD really started to ‘write outside the box’, I was expecting the traditional PKD chestnuts- the nature of reality, psychotherapy, bleak futures, evil robots, etc.- to be mostly overlooked. Happily, he managed to investigate most of his favorite topics without tripping over himself or screwing up the plot, as he did in “The Simulacra”. The plot flowed straight and true, and although one part seemed a little forced, it didn’t detract from the book- it was simply a wee bit off.
If you are new to PKD, you should give this book a try, but don’t expect any cosmic insights, just a good book. You might also try “Time Out Of Joint”. If you are familiar with PKD, you should read this as his inventive take on the good old distopian novel. It is also proof that though the man wrote a lot of mind-bending novels, he could also get a point about individuals in a distopian system across perfectly clearly.