Some of the most powerful passages in Dick’s work are those in which there is an ontological interregnum: a traumatic unworlding is not yet given a narrative motivation
cool phrasing
in an atmosphere of louche decadence, the business and cultural elite linger like models or gawp like voyeurs as they stand around a swimming pool
The mise-en-abyme here produces a charge of the weird, both because of the scandal of an uncreated thing, and because of the twisted causality that has allowed such a thing to exist
After a while, Doyle comes, reluctantly, to accept his Fate — which in literarygeneric terms is to be propelled, by means of SF, into the nineteenth-century picaresque
There is certainly laughter here, a renegade form of parody and mockery that one hesitates to label satire, especially given the pallid and toothless form that satire has assumed in British culture in recent times
