Now Wait for Last Year
Philip K. Dick
225 pages
published in 1966

Now Wait for Last Year is one of those books I first read in Dutch. Philip K. Dick was quite popular in the Netherlands in the seventies and his books were still around the local library when I started reading science fiction, a decade or so later. I can remember liking it at the time, though little about the plot other than that it involved time travel; it has been about twenty years since I last read it after all.

Rereading it now I still like it. Now Wait for Last Year is early Dick, from before he had his "road to Damascus" experience and relatively straightforward for a Dick book. Nevertheless, many of the typical Dick themes and concerns crop up here, something that goes for most if not all of his books.

Though written in 1966, this feels like a fifties novel, as its concerns are so typical for the science fiction of the time. American science fiction of the fifties reflected the obsessions of the time: the pressure to conform, the paranoia ("reds under the beds"), the fear of nuclear war, the march of pop psychology, all of which are obsessions Dick made his own through all his works. Now Wait for Last Year shares some of them.

The outer plot of the book is about the fix Earth ("Terra") has found itself in, allied to the losing side in a centuries old interstellar war, Lilistar. It wasn't surprising Gino Molinari, supreme elected leader of Terra had signed a Pact of Peace with the 'starmen rather then their enemy, the Reegs, as the latter looked like four-armed, blue chitinous monsters, while the 'starmen were actually related to Terrans (through the hoary old cliche of Earth as lost colony). Unfortunately, the 'starmen are not quite what they seem, treat Earth as something to exploit and are still losing the war. Is it a coincidence that the Lilistar leader, Frenesky, has a vaguely Russian name?

The inner plot is about Dr Eric Sweetscent, artiforg surgeon to Virgil Ackerman, over 130 years old and one of secretary Molinari's most important political allies, and his relationship with his wife, Kathy Sweetscent, who works as an antiques dealer for Ackerman. Their marriage is not a happy one; she is an addict and practises pop psychology on him, he lets her.

It is when Eric gets to work for Molinari himself, to keep the hypochodriac perpetually ill leader from dying again and Kathy gets her hands on a new drug, JJ-180, which lets you experience time travel, that matters come to a head. Kathy hooks Eric on the drug as well, by putting it in his coffee; it is immediately addictive and worse will kill you in 48 hours if you do not take another dose...

Eric meanwhile discovers that Molinari is not just hypochodriac and on the verge of death regularly, but died at least once already; a bullet riddled corpse is on display in a secret cold chamber in Molinari's Cheyenne headquarters. Even stranger, a third Molinari, much younger and much more energetic, is making video speeches. What is going on and what does it have to do with JJ-180?

So there you have it, a typical Dick novel perhaps, with many of the obsessions and themes Dick had worked on before and would revisit in greater detail later. The plasticity of reality and the struggle to determine what is real and what's just a stage set, the way psychology is used, Earth caught in an interstellar war, ruled by a democratically elected but still tyrannical regime and at the mercy of much more powerful allies, time travel and hallocinations, etc. All present but in a somewhat diluted form. If there is any novel which is both accessible to readers new to Philip K. Dick's writing, yet still representative of it, Now Wait for Last Year is it.