Dr. Bloodmoney

Tags:  sci-fi,

Dr. Bloodmoney, published in 1965, takes place in the imagined future of 1980s California. The book opens in Berkeley in 1981, where Stuart McConchie works as a television salesman. McConchie watches a familiar-looking man whose face he can’t place walk into the psychiatric office of Dr. Standstill, across the street.

The patient, we soon learn, is Dr. Bruno Bluthgeld, a former physics professor at Berkeley and researcher at the Livermore lab whom most people blame for an ill-conceived 1972 nuclear test that exposed huge numbers of Americans to toxic radiation. One effect of the radiation is a spike in phocomelia, a condition in which children are born with stunted, fin-like arms and legs. (When Dick wrote the book in 1963, there was an explosion in phocomelic births due to the drug Thalidomide being prescribed as a treatment for morning sickness in pregnant women.)

The tragic effects of Bluthgeld’s mistake, combined with society’s hatred of him, have caused him to lose his sanity. He understands that he’s losing his grip on reality, but by the time he goes for treatment, it’s too late.

The day the book opens in 1981 also happens to be the day of the full-scale nuclear war that destroys most of the industrialized world. Just as we’re introduced to a few of the main characters, the bombs go off, and most of the population of the San Francisco Bay Area is wiped out.

The remainder of the book takes place seven years later, as the world has settled into what looks like an early nineteenth century existence. There’s no electricity, except for some small battery-powered devices, no gasoline, and no luxuries. The windows of the schoolhouse were salvaged from whatever glass wasn’t shattered by the bombs. The land has reverted to whatever local crops can feed the most people, and horses are the main form of transportation.

Small communities like West Marin, where most of the action takes place, become close-knit and suspicious of outsiders. Travelers are rare, and when they do appear, they’ve usually come to steal goods or to try to recruit the town handyman to their own struggling village.

The post-war world is littered with human and animal mutations caused by radioactive fallout, and people use Geiger counters to scan food for radioactivity. Dick’s world is not as bleak or as violent as some post-apocalyptic dystopias. It’s marked more by boredom, tediousness, and privation than by horror and despair.

This book has a huge cast of characters, and it’s hard to keep them all straight. Some of the important ones aren’t even introduced until halfway through the story.

Among the characters, there are four with unusual powers. Dr. Bluthgeld, the brilliant schizophrenic, does indeed have some of the magical powers he believes he has. Hoppy Harrington, born without arms or legs and often referred to as “the phoce” has telekinetic powers which he can project to great distances to move things around as he pleases.

Bill Keller, the unborn twin of Edie Keller, whose fetus-like body is embedded in his sister’s, can see and talk with the dead, who give him information to pass back to the living.

Finally, Walt Dangerfield is an astronaut whose ship was launched into orbit just hours before the nuclear holocaust. Because he was supposed to be going to Mars, he’s been supplied with years’ worth of food and water. His daily radio broadcasts from his orbiting satellite make up the sole uniting cultural force among the otherwise scattered and isolated communities of the US. He plays music, reads stories (particularly W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage) and relays news that has been radioed to him from around the globe.

Communities in the US gather round battery-powered radios, as they did in the nineteen thirties and forties, to get a dose of news and entertainment. Dangerfield is a bonding force with a god-like voice coming from above, and when he falls ill, the communities below react with fear at losing the one man who seems to hold the human race together.

In Dick’s other books, those endowed with paranormal powers like Bluthgeld, Hoppy and Bill Keller make the reader question the nature of fundamental concepts like time, causality, identity, perception and reality. In this book, however, they seem to be thrown in for no clear reason. Their presence and actions don’t make the reader question much of anything except perhaps whether the author actually had a plan or a story to tell when he sat down to write this book.

I know that Dick suffered periods of schizoid insanity interspersed with periods of lucidity. I’m wondering if this somewhat directionless, half-realized book was written during a lucid period. It seems to start out with the kind of set up that the author would normally bend into something that would stretch the reader’s mind, but then it doesn’t get bent. Maybe the author’s mind was too straight at this point in his life to give us one of the strangely twisted tales he’s famous for.

This is not one of his better works. I finished it thinking that Bill Keller, the unborn twin, might have been a symbol of the book itself. Bill was stuck inside his sister’s body, and though he had a voice and the ability to bring knowledge from the world of the dead into the world of the living, he could not survive outside the body of his host.

This one is worth a read if you have lots of time to burn, but if you want to get started with Dick’s works, choose another title instead.