A Maze of Death
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| A Maze of Death | |
.jpg/200px-AMazeOfDeath(1stEd).jpg) Cover of first edition (hardcover) |
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| Author | Philip K. Dick |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Doubleday |
| Publication date | 1970 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 216 pp |
| ISBN | NA |
A Maze of Death is a 1970 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. Like many of Dick's novels, it portrays what appears to be a drab and harsh other-planet, human colony and explores the difference between reality and perception. It is, however, one of his few to explore the human death instinct and capacity for murder and is one of his darkest novels.
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[edit] Synopsis
The plot revolves around fourteen colonists of the world Delmak-O. They are: Betty Jo Berm, a linguist addicted to prescription drugs; elderly Bert Kostler, settlement custodian; Maggie Walsh, a theologian; Ignatz Thugg, who oversees thermoplastics; Milton Babble, a physician; Wade Frazer, a psychologist; Tony Dunkelwelt, a geologist; Glen Belsnor, who specialises in artificial intelligence and telecommunications; Susie Smart, a typist; Roberta Rockingham, celebrated sociologist; Ben Tallchief, a naturalist; Seth and Mary Morley, a marine biologist couple; and Ned Russell, an economist. They inhabit a universe in which the deities of their religion actually appear to exist and can be contacted through a network of prayer amplifiers and transmitters. Tallchief is transferred to Delmak-O as a direct result of his praying.
Thugg, Babble, Dunkelwelt, Belsnor and Smart all seem mentally ill and hostile toward the other colonists. After they fail to receive an expected message from an off-world authority revealing the purpose of the colony, they begin to lose control of their sanity. After Tallchief is murdered, the group falls into a state of intense paranoia.
Delmak-O is mysterious and largely unexplored. It seems to be inhabited by both real and artificial beings and small, gelatinous objects ("tenches") that duplicate items presented to them and give out advice, in anagrams reminiscent of the I Ching. In addition, various members of the group report sightings of a large "Building". As various calamities continue to befall each character, part of the group ventures out to find the Building. However, each member of the group perceives the Building differently and determines it to have a different purpose. In the process, Berm commits suicide.
Tallchief dies after an encounter with the "Form-Destroyer", a physical manifestation of the force of entropy and decay. After Smart fails to seduce Seth Morley she attempts to seduce Dunkelwelt, but again fails. Dunkelwelt appears to perform a miracle, turning a loaf of bread into a stone, and this stone is subsequently used by Mary Morley to kill Smart as revenge. Dunkelwelt, blaming himself for Smart's death (it is not at this point known who killed her), becomes insane and kills Burt Kostler. After witnessing this, Belsnor shoots Dunkelwelt, and the group loses their trust in him after seeing how readily he used his gun. Thugg steals the gun from him, causing a standoff, which Walsh tries to defuse. She is shot by Thugg and experiences a comforting encounter with the Intercessor (one of the forms of their deity/deities) in a hallucination (rendered as a theophany) as she dies. Seth Morley is injured in the ensuing fight and Thugg runs off in a state of psychopathy.
Morley is abducted by armed men from his bed in the infirmary, who kill Belsnor. They put him aboard a small flying craft, and Morley overpowers them despite his injury to take control of the craft. With it he discovers that Delmak-O is in fact Earth, and he returns to the group to report this.
By this point, Rockingham has disappeared, taken by the same forces who abducted Morley, leaving only Babble, Frazer, Russell and the Morleys in the settlement alive. Russell admits to being an agent of the mysterious armed forces and is killed by Thugg, who reappears, apparently sane again. The group then admit to having killed the other members and fly off to consult a tench. Its advice leads them to the conclusion that they are all part of a psychiatric experiment designed to see if they could live together peacefully, but that it has failed catastrophically due to their murderous tendencies. They reason that Morley and Rockingham were abducted in an attempt to save them as they had not tried to kill anyone, unlike the rest of the group who remained alive. Noting that they all share the same tattoo, which forms the words "Persus 9", they ask the tench what this means. However, this causes the tench to explode and the world around them to crumble to pieces.
They awake in a spaceship in orbit around a dead star, and it becomes clear that the whole experience was a collective hallucination caused by the use of equipment designed for this purpose. They are trapped in their current orbit due to unspecified damage to their ship and cannot contact anyone for help. The hallucinations are designed to help them pass the time and prevent insanity, but they have become increasingly savage as their mental states deteriorate. Seth Morley becomes depressed and considers suicide by letting all the air out from the ship, killing the rest at the same time, but the Intercessor, who was part of the hallucination and by extension supposedly not in the "real" world, intervenes and removes him from the ship. The others, after failing to find him, embark on another hallucination which begins in exactly the same way as the previous one, only this time without Seth Morley.
[edit] Religion in the novel
One of the aspects of the novel is the artificial theology shared by all the characters. Their primary religious text is a book called "How I Rose From the Dead in My Spare Time and So Can You" by Egon Spectowsky, a "great 21st Century communist theologian".
This theology includes the assertion that prayer is seldom useful unless it is electronically transmitted throughout the universe. It also includes several different functions of the divine, although it is later stated that the religion itself is messianic and based on Christianity. The "Mentufacturer" is the creator in this pantheon, while the messianic function is handled through the existence of the Walker-on-Earth, a divine manifestation that appears to intervene in the lives of chosen people. The Intercessor controls peoples destiny, while the Form-Destroyer embodies the forces of death and entropy.
[edit] Resemblance to other Dick novels
Eye in the Sky (1955), Time Out of Joint (1959) and Ubik (1969) also reflect solipsistic, subjective 'realities' from the vantage point of their individual and group participants, while his Man in the High Castle (1962) also makes use of the I Ching as a tool for discernment of individual destiny. In Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964), much of the action occurs on Alphane III/M2, an abandoned former global psychiatric institution which became an independent and functional society after its professional staff evacuated it after an interstellar war. Moreover, that institution was developed as a response to the stresses and psychopathologies associated with space colonisation, much as "Delmak-O" was suspected to be in this novel. Religion also plays a prominent role in Eye in the Sky, Man in the High Castle, Galactic Pot-Healer (1969), Valis (1981), The Divine Invasion (1981) and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982). Inhospitable space colonisation conditions, and human responses, are also explored in Martian Time-Slip (1962) and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1966).
[edit] See also
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