Time Out Of Joint (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

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A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children. Imagine if you will a man, an ordinary man who enjoys solving the daily newspaper puzzle. But while this man’s attention is focused on this one task, the puzzle of his life remains unsolved. This man presently resides in the The Twilight Zone… The right frame of mind for reading Time Out of Joint would be to consider it a newly found episode of The Twilight Zone. Imagine Rod Sterling in his skinny suit, skinny tie, and deadpan voice:

Then comes the second part, which is very Kafkaesque. Ragle Gumm wants to run away from the city, but everybody and everything is preventing him from achieving that. I almost see K. and his Trial in here - when K. is trying to change the course of events, it only leads to failure. However, Ragle succeeds and manages to break away. He offers us scenes from small town American life to underscore the absurdity of our mundane existence. But ultimately, Time Out of Joint is a novel that emphasizes the marvel of space travel ( or migration and travel) as one of man's most primitive instinct. In my earlier review I also noticed a possible connection to Orson Scott Card’s writing and again I noticed what could be some allusions to, or inspiration from, Orwell’s 1984. Published and marketed along with his SF canon, but written during the period of his mainstream efforts and less "far out there" than many of his works. Then we have the last part of the book, which is a political thriller. Yeah, the whole buildup ends in quite a disappointing revelation.

Yes, he thought. And I’m a man who lies around the house scrounging a living by filling out Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next? Puzzles in a newspaper contest. While other adults have jobs, wives, homes of their own. Genius. Visionary. The master of science fiction. Did this man have a crystal ball? Could he see into the future? While the rest of the world toils at their jobs, Ragle Gumm stays at home, his sole source of income a daily newspaper contest called "Where will the little green man appear next?" When odd things start happening, Ragle thinks he may be having a nervous breakdown. Is he or is it something much more sinister? Ragle Gumm has a unique job: every day he wins a newspaper contest. And when he isn t consulting his charts and tables, he enjoys his life in a small town in 1959. At least, that s what he thinks. But then strange things start happening. He finds a phone book where all the numbers have been disconnected, and a magazine article about a famous starlet he s never heard of named Marilyn Monroe. Plus, everyday objects are beginning to disappear and are replaced by strips of paper with words written on them like "bowl of flowers" and "soft drink stand." When Ragle skips town to try to find the cause of these bizarre occurrences, his discovery could make him question everything he has ever known.

The book itself seems to be divided into three different fragments. The first part is a creeping horror of existence - what if something is wrong around you? Something small, unimportant, but still unexplainable. The deeper you look, the more things just seem wrong. Can you really believe the people around you? Even your neighbour?

Ragle begins to realize that his world is somehow artificial. He is beginning to uncover some curious items, hear some odd radio transmissions.

It had nothing to do with minerals, resources, scientific measurement. Nor even exploration and profit. Those were excuses. The actual reason lay out-side their conscious minds. If he were required to, he could not formulate the need, even as he experienced it fully. No once could. An instinct, the most primitive drive, as well as the most noble and complex. It was both at once." No one takes the immaterialist philosophy of the 17th century Bishop Berkeley seriously today - that being is a result of being perceived. But perhaps we should. Isn’t this what quantum theory suggests, that only when something is noticed or measured does it become definite? And, at a more quotidian level, isn’t Berkeley’s kind of immaterialism the foundation of advertising in all its forms, from retail selling, to political campaigning, to the generating of national feeling? The only thing real is what is perceived to be real by enough people. All this escalation of philosophical intensity leads to big expectations, but when the truth comes out, it’s anticlimactic. It’s a good enough idea in and of itself, but it only barely ties in with the philosophical speculation that precedes it. The slips of paper, for example, make little sense other than to heighten the mystery. They suggest something metaphysical that just isn’t there. Also, a practical matter ~ wouldn’t it have been easier to just build a soft-drink stand than to brainwash people into seeing one? The Incident, a 2014 Mexican film in which the book notably appears, about people trapped in an infinite loop.

Ragle Gumm is an ordinary man leading an ordinary life, except that he makes his living by entering a newspaper contest every day -- and winning, every day. But he gradually begins to suspect that his life -- indeed his whole world -- is an illusion, constructed around him for the express purpose of keeping him docile and happy. But if that is the case, what is his real world like, and what is he actually doing every day when he thinks he is guessing 'Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next?' E questo Tempo fuor di sesto, per quanto ancora un po' "acerbo" nello sviluppo della trama, rientra in questa categoria. Central problem in philosophy. Relation of word to object . . . what is a word? Arbitrary sign. But we live in words. Our reality, among words not things. No such thing as a thing anyhow; a gestalt in the mind. Thingness . . . sense of substance. An illusion. Word is more real than the object it represents. Word doesn’t represent reality. Word is reality. For us, anyhow. Maybe God gets to objects . Not us, though” (50). The book is about Ragle Gumm, an unemployed middle aged man who lives with his sister, her husband and their small kid. Ragle is a local celebrity in his small American town on account of the fact that he keeps winning a newspaper contest that requires extraordinary skills in mathematics. When he is not working hard at the contest, he is swilling beer and lusting for his neighbors wife. But Ragle senses that something is not right with his existence. Small clues lead him to question the very nature of his reality and what he believes to be true. Ragle could be at the centre of a sinister plot by the government to hide the truth about space travel and its benefits from the citizens. Review [Spanish] by Alberto Cairo (2001) in Las 100 mejores novelas de ciencia ficción del siglo XX

In a civil war", Ragle said, "every side is wrong. It's hopeless to try to untangle it. Everyone is a victim." I still love the book, but now, having read PKD's biography, I understand a little bit more about his relationships with women. He really sees his ideal partner as a stupid and dependent young female. PKD had a lot of problems, and his emotional immaturity is quite visible here, but hey, we all have our mistakes, and PKD is still an excellent writer. So, for me, three and a half stars rounded up.

Un'idilliaca cittadina americana degli anni '50, dove vive la sua strana vita Ragle Gumm. Non sposato, sta in casa della sorella, di suo marito e del loro figlio. Al contrario del cognato Vic, commesso del supermercato, lui non lavora: si guadagna da vivere rispondendo al popolare quiz "trova l'omino verde" sul giornale, quiz del quale è il campione indiscusso da quando è cominciato.