Now Wait for Last Year: A virtual compendium of Dick’s pet themes

Now Wait for Last Year by Philip K. Dick

A virtual compendium of many of Philip K. Dick‘s pet themes, tropes and obsessions, Now Wait for Last Year, the author’s 17th published sci-fi novel, originally appeared as a Doubleday hardcover in 1966. (As revealed in Lawrence Sutin’s biography on Dick, the novel was actually written as early as 1963 and rewritten two years later.) Phil was on some kind of a roll at this point in his career, having recently come out with the masterpieces The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Dr. Bloodmoney, and Now Wait for Last Year is still another great one for this important writer.

In it, the Earth of the year 2055 is in big trouble, fighting a protracted, losing war with the 6-foot-tall, antlike reegs of Proxima Centauri while being harassed and bullied by its allies from Lilistar. Against this typically bleak Dickian backdrop, we meet Dr. Eric Sweetscent, an “artiforg” (artificial organ) transplant surgeon who leaves his cushy post at Tijuana Fur and Dye Co. to minister to no less a personage than Gino Molinari, the hypochondriacal, psychosomatically ill U.N. Secretary General who is head of the Earth forces in Cheyenne, WY. Sweetscent’s life is severely re-complicated when his estranged wife, Kathy, gets herself hooked on a new military weapon, a drug called JJ-180, which has the power to cause instant addiction and to induce time-travel effects in the user. And as if Eric’s life weren’t troubled enough, Kathy has just decided to get her husband hooked on the drug as well…

I mentioned up top that Now Wait for Last Year is a virtual compendium of Dick’s themes and ideas, and as such, it would make a perfect introduction for any readers new to PKD. The subject of artiforgs had already been broached in The Penultimate Truth, which novel also featured Cheyenne as the U.N. capital. (For that matter, the subjects of 1920s cowboy star Tom Mix AND St. George, Utah, both strangely figure in the two novels.) As in so many of Dick’s other books, the topic of divorce is spotlighted prominently here (the author was himself married five times before his death at age 52), as is the issue of a world leader who is not what he seems (dealt with in depth in The Simulacrum and The Penultimate Truth), although here, that leader is not a mechanical construct, but something much more ingenious. As in The Crack in Space, the theme of alternate Earths with alternate futures is given an airing, as are Dick’s ambivalent attitudes toward drugs (JJ-180 is seen as an abomination in this book, and Eric in one section ponders that anyone who addicts another “ought to be hanged or shot”); these attitudes would turn decidedly antidrug a decade later, in the author’s A Scanner Darkly. The issue of suicide is again touched on (I’ve lost count of how many Dickian characters have had suicidal thoughts; Phil made a few attempts himself during his troubled life), but here, the author treats us to a wonderfully life-affirming resolution that caps his book off very sweetly.

The novel, I should add, just brims with invention and ideas on virtually every page, be it the women’s fashions (ebony teeth, toenails painted to depict the Norman Conquest, public toplessness with nipples gilded with a Martian life form!), Tijuana Fur and Dye owner Virgil Ackerman’s Wash-35 outpost on Mars (an exact replica of a few square blocks of Washington, D.C., in 1935), the ingenious political intrigue or the truly disorienting, drug-induced time traveling. This is a novel that grows wilder and wilder as it proceeds; hold on tight and prepare to be stunned! Here we have Dick operating at the near peak of his powers, and modern sci-fi really doesn’t get too much better, loopier or heartfelt than that.

Now Wait for Last Year, still, is not a perfect book, and nitpicker that I am, I was able to discern some small problems. In the Martian Wash-35, for example, is a replica of the Uptown Theatre… which didn’t open until 1936. And that McComb Street in “D.C.”? That should be “Macomb.” And when Kathy spots a 1932 Model A Ford during her JJ-180 trip… well, the Model A was discontinued in 1931; the Model B started in ’32. And while I’m picking nits, just how DOES one cut a drug CAPSULE in thirds? OK, enough of that. Truth is, I really did love this wild collection of Philip K. Dick’s pet preoccupations. “A daft and delightful yarn,” Scottish critic David Pringle calls it in his Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction, and ain’t it ever the truth! How I wish that some major studio would spend $200 million to lovingly bring THIS ONE to the big screen!

~Sandy Ferber

Earth is allied with the planet Lilistar against the alien Reegs. Gino Molinari, the leader of Earth’s forces, has just hired Eric Sweetscent as his personal physician. For his new job, Eric has to leave his wife Kathy, who has just become addicted to a new hallucinogenic drug. Eric is glad to leave, though, because he and Kathy aren’t getting along.

When Eric arrives at Gino Molinari’s side, he finds that the man has some strange health issues. At first Eric thinks Mr. Molinari is a paranoid hypochondriac until he discovers that he has survived numerous bouts of cancer. Soon there are other strange discoveries about Molinari’s health that baffle Dr. Sweetscent. When he finds out that the drug that Kathy’s hooked on came from off-world and causes its users to travel through time, he wonders if her drug addiction and Gino Molinari’s bizarre symptoms could be related. He also starts to wonder if Earth is on the wrong side of the war.

You never know what you’re going to get with a story by Philip K. Dick. Well, that’s not exactly true. You can almost certainly expect aliens, spaceships, robots, drug use, paranoia, bad marriages, time warps, alternate universes, and badly inaccurate psychology. What I mean is that PKD’s stories vary greatly in quality — some of them are incredibly clever and innovative, while others are almost painful to read. This may be because, according to biographers, Dick’s novels reflect his own unhappy life and his struggles with drugs, divorce, and mental illness.

Now Wait for Last Year (1966) is definitely one of the better ones. Eric Sweetscent is a complex character with complex problems for which there are no obvious solutions. A wrong move could endanger all of humanity! There’s mystery, whimsy, and humor here, too — the scenes with the talking taxis are funny (humorous situations with automatons are a familiar PKD element).

What stands out most, though, is that Now Wait for Last Year is an unusually emotional novel for Philip K. Dick. Eric deals with a whole spectrum of feelings toward his wife: grief, love, hate, treachery, anger, disgust, and pity. I actually dissolved into tears during the final scene of Now Wait for Last Year when the talking taxi gives Eric some beautiful advice.

I listened to Brilliance Audio’s version of Now Wait for Last Year. Luke Daniels performed it perfectly, as usual. I love old science fiction and I love audiobooks, so I absolutely adore Brilliance Audio for putting so much old science fiction on audio recently!

~Kat Hooper