Now Wait for Last Year, by Philip K Dick

Now Wait for Last Year is a 1970s sci-fi book, set in the 2050s. It tells the tale of Eric Sweetscent, a doctor specialising in 'artiforgs', artificial organ transplants, and how his life changes after his wife takes a mysterious drug, JJ-180. But this isn't really the whole story, and to summarise it properly would probably reavel too much about the book.

As you can probably guess from the title, this is a book about time travel, to some extent. But it's also about interstellar war, love, marriage difficulties, drugs, mental health and morality, so it crosses a fair few bounderies! And, unlike some of the books I've read lately, this is definitely a book with a few layers in it. This is, to my mind, old-school sci-fi, perhaps more about creating a dysfunctional world and seeing where it goes than telling a tale of a hero saving the world.

The speculative fiction in the book interests me. I particularly liked the aritificial intelligences, for example the automatic cabs which have real personalities and can be bluffed and cheated, or the robot debt collector who giggles. There's quite a few interesting minor inventions that crop up, and then there's the typical failure to predict some things - video tapes are still present. I was also particularly amused that $50 was seen as a large sum of money (although this is probably on purpose).

The writing style is good, too - the world is believable, and the author feels no need to explain exactly how things work any more than I feel a need to explain how a microwave works whenever I mention one - this isnt about physics, it's about philosophy. And the quality of the world extends to the characters, who are deep and realistic, with believable motives and flaws; the main character in particular, as he struggles with his own worries and the consequences of his actions.

Of course, because of this depth, this is not a book to pick up for a light read on holiday. The book is very interesting, but you do need to pay attention to the book to keep track of the plot, and at the end you can't really know what happened (or more to the point, what will happen). It's not just that there's loose ends - there's a very large number of those, but they're mostly not important. Perhaps, like the main character, you can't ever really know how something ends or what the consequences of your actions are going to be, and so you can never really write an ending to the book.

So, should you read this book? Well, the short answer is yes, but the long answer is more complex. I'd probably not recommend this as an introduction to this style of book, since it's not the easiest of reads. It's the sort of book where you have to keep a fairly open mind about the plot as the book goes on, and I'd imagine for most people there's other, simpler books that entertain just as much. But if you want an engaging and thought provoking work of sci-fi, then this is the right book for you.

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