Martian Time-Slip and Clans of the Alphane Moon, which are among the novels Philip K. Dick published in 1964, are alike in several ways, but sufficiently different to provide striking illustrations of his procedures as a novelist. In both novels Dick attempts to fit realist delineation of mundane lives and struggles, and fantastical, sometimes whimsical, reality distortions into the same text. Martian Time-Slip and Clans of the Alphane Moon are ‘anti-psychiatric’ novels. Both suggest that the socially powerful are more dangerous—since prevailing ideology both encourages their destructive behaviour and blinds them to their own condition—than are those who are labelled insane and rendered powerless. Both parties live by fantasy; social ‘reality’ is not readily available as a norm. In this respect these novels corroborate the contemporary anti-psychiatric politics of Thomas Szasz and R.D. Laing.

Clans is largely a novel about a bitter marital break-up, and Time-Slip, extensively concerned with parents and children and the inability of adults to protect children from the evil abroad in their society, is pervaded by aridity and degradation. These observations may lead in two different directions. We may be reminded of how solidly both novels are concerned with things we can all recognize, and fear: the strains of divorce, the difficulty of committing suicide when all the neighbours in your apartment block know what you are up to, the difficulty of understanding your children when the passage of lived history means that they are alien to you, the strains of life in the suburbs. (Silvia Bohlen and Erna Steiner and their kids, beside the banks of the dull Martian canal, are living in the suburbs —or a better comparison would be with one of the trailer-park settlements on the outskirts of small towns in the American West.) Or we may feel that both novels are intensely concerned with sterility (see Chapter 5 above), and that this sterility has an ontological dimension: although we can explain it as a reflection of social forces (wastefulness and destructive competition), this explanation does not seem fully adequate. It signifies the encroachment of entropy, which is at once that which destroys life and that which, alone, underlies reality.