Now Wait for Last Year

Tags:  sci-fi,

Philip K. Dick’s 1966 novel, Now Wait for Last Year, is set in the United States in the year 2055. Earth has been drawn into a centuries-old war between two alien species, the human-like ‘Starmen and the insect-like reegs. World government has consolidated into a single entity under the United Nations, and the current Secretary General, Gino Molinari, is responsible for managing the world’s war effort.

The war takes place in the background of this story. In the foreground, we follow Dr. Eric Sweetscent, a surgeon who specializes in keeping wealthy men alive using “artiforg,” or artificially forged, organs. Dr. Sweetscent works for Virgil Ackerman, the 120-year-old owner of the Tijuana Fur and Dye company.

Eric Sweetscent replaces the old man’s organs as necessary to keep him alive. His wife, Kathy Sweetscent, a antiques buyer for Virgil Ackerman, is beautiful, cruel, and borderline psychotic. The Sweetscents’ marriage is a wreck.

Early in the book, Virgil Ackerman tells Eric Sweetscent that he will be transferred into the service of UN Secretary General Gino Molinari, who is in dire need of medical attention. This is where the story picks up and the unexpected twists and turns begin. The fun of this book, which didn’t seem to promise much in its opening chapters, is in following these mind-bending turns.

Gino Molinari, a once-strong man, is constantly ill due to the immense pressures of the war. Earth is a weak, second-tier ally to the ‘Starmen, and is being bullied by their more powerful ally to supply more material, more weapons, more labor and more soldiers to what appears to be a doomed war effort. Molinari’s job is to try to save the world from the ‘Starmen’s ravenous requests.

Just as Eric Sweetscent takes up his new job as Molinari’s physician, his wife, Kathy, becomes addicted to a new drug called JJ-180. The drug permits people to travel through time. Most travel backward, into the past. A few rare exceptions travel forward. And one critical exception travels laterally through time, into parallel universes in which this world’s past branched into different presents.

You can imagine the potential story lines this plot device opens up. Dick is especially good at time-travel narratives, exploring options that most writers are too lazy or unimaginative to even consider. Can Kathy Sweetscent change her unhappy present by behaving differently when she visits the past? Can Eric Sweetscent return with essential information from the future to help Earth avoid a catastrophic loss in this interstellar war? And what in the world is Gino Molinari up to as he skips laterally across parallel universes of the present?

Molinari is the shrewdest of the book’s characters, the one whose mind is powerful enough to make practical use of his strange abilities. He is very good at assessing the political winds, the needs and motives of others, and even the weaknesses of political and military enemies who seem to have him hopelessly cornered.

I won’t give away the plot, because it’s too good and too unexpected. I’ll just say that no one but PKD could have written this one, and it keeps getting more interesting as you read.