Time Out Of Joint (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

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What I most enjoyed in the book was the philosophical speculation about the nature of reality and the meaning of words. When Ragle initiates a conversation with his brother-in-law about philosophy, he cites George Berkeley ~ the Idealist philosopher who proposed that nothing actually exists except as ideas in the mind of God. “ How do we know that piano exists?” says Ragle and Vic replies “ I’m sorry, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s just a bunch of words” (49). In a civil war", Ragle said, "every side is wrong. It's hopeless to try to untangle it. Everyone is a victim."

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.” 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. As always when examining a quotation, it's important to know the precise context in which it was uttered. In the case of this particular quotation from Act 1, Scene 5 of Hamlet, the title character speaks these words just after his encounter with the ghost of his father, who's told him how he was murdered by Claudius. 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… What I was trying to do in that book was account for the diversity of worlds that people live in. I had not read Heraclitus then, I didn’t know his concept of idios kosmos, the private world, versus koinos kosmos, which we all share. I didn’t know that the pre-Socratics had begun to discern these things. There’s a scene in the book where the protagonist goes into the bathroom, reaches in the dark for a pull-cord, and suddenly realizes there is no cord, there’s a switch on the wall, and he can’t remember when he ever had a bathroom when there was a cord hanging down. Now, that actually happened to me, and it was what caused me to write the book. It reminded me of the idea that Van Vogt had dealt with, of artificial memory, as occurs in THE WORLD OF NULL-A where a person has false memories implanted. A lot of what I wrote, which looks like the result of taking acid, is really the result of taking Van Vogt seriously! I believed Van Vogt, I mean, he wrote it, you know, he was an authority figure. He said, people can be other than whom they remember themselves to be, and I found this fascinating. You have a massive suspension of belief on my part."The title of the book is a reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet : "The time is out of joint; O cursed spite!/That ever I was born to set it right!" [I.V.211-2]). The philosophical foundation of Time Out of Joint is the Platonic distinction between the true nature of reality and the illusion that we usually mistake for reality. Once Ragle sets out to discover the truth, it is Immanuel Kant that he cites. Kant’s philosophy distinguishes between the world of our perceptions and the world as it truly is. “ The Ding an sich, as Kant said” (170). This story was written in 1959. His character Ragle Gumm is an ordinary man leading a fairly ordinary life. Ma abbiamo anche un intrigante sguardo sul futuro, tra strani abbigliamenti e slang, vita post-bellica e guerre civili inimmaginabili. Ha una coppia di vicini entranti e assillanti, spesso presenti in casa sua, e una mezza storia con la bella ma infantile vicina, chiaramente osteggiata dalla sorella visto il carattere della donna e il suo essere sposata.

A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children. E questo Tempo fuor di sesto, per quanto ancora un po' "acerbo" nello sviluppo della trama, rientra in questa categoria.I have a copy of Time Out of Joint languishing in my house for over ten years. I have no idea where it came from, I am pretty sure I never bought it. Is that weird? No, I guess not. I could tell you how I suddenly decided to read it after having ignored it for ten years, but that would be a spectacularly uninteresting anecdote so I will leave that out. Review [Spanish] by Alberto Cairo (2001) in Las 100 mejores novelas de ciencia ficción del siglo XX My only criticism is that it takes a while to get where it is going, but this is good, vintage PKD.