The Penultimate Truth (1964)

I circled back to this Philip K. Dick novel when I saw it on an Esquire list, early in the present political regime, of "essential books to prepare you for what's next," which included the usual suspects by George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Sinclair Lewis, etc. There's a lot of Dickian muddle to the tale in this novel, whose picture does not immediately come clear. By pieces, we understand we are in a post-apocalyptic Earth after a nuclear war Cold War nightmare style has made the planet surface uninhabitable. Underneath, billions live in so-called ant tanks—the "ant" is for antiseptic, though it obviously recalls the ant farm toys popular circa 1964. The underground people work on the war effort, waiting for the day those above signal it's safe to return. But on the surface there is actually no war, only a complicated ongoing propaganda campaign to keep most people working and living underground and afraid to come to the surface. Inevitably some do. They are captured and herded into crowded apartment complexes. The surface is controlled by wealthy people who live on giant private estate parks, called "demesnes," a term that goes back to the origins of feudalism. As an allegory, the three classes are thus physically arrayed: the working class laboring underground, the middle class huddled into urban states that cannot be escaped, and the upper class living great lives of pleasure on country estates. There actually was a World War III, but it didn't last long and left most of the surface habitable. Obviously Cold War dynamics motivated the underground living, a logical extension of fallout shelters. So that's the context into which Dick injects his usual cast of bumbling, confused everymen and everywomen. The tale is good at illustrating basic home truths, most notably how easy it is to maintain a huge fraud once it is in place. One thinks now, after these past 40 years, of how pernicious and persistent the "common sense" wisdom of the free market remains, for example, trickle-down economics as merely an unexamined article of faith. It's like spinning plates on top of sticks. Once you get it started you can keep it going if you're skillful enough, and deceitful enough. And then the applause. Good one for Dick binges.

In case it's not at the library.