Counter-Clock World (1965)

In Philip K. Dick’s Counter-Clock World, time reversed in 1986 and in the “now” of the novel things are going in the other direction, timewise, from future to past. People come alive in their graves, are unearthed in systematic capitalistic ways, and then age back to zygotes again—they have to find a willing womb, a woman who completes the process by finding a man to return the sperm to. There are lots of funny and obvious inversions, and some not so obvious. They say “goodbye” when they meet and “hello” when they part. They don’t want to be called a horse’s mouth. Cigarettes start as butts and actually clean the air as they unburn. I saw the movie Tenet not long before reading this. Both deliver a similar sense of disorientation in the ways they portray time moving backward. Dick is pretty good at a rare gothic note too, as many scenes are set in graveyards. His descriptions of the experience of coming alive in a coffin are vivid and a little unsettling. It’s a traumatic experience for them and even for us too reading about it. One thing I missed entirely and had to learn from Wikipedia is “sogum,” which is consumed socially and frequently, the way we take smoke or coffee breaks or eat out. Sogum is waste taken anally via a pipe. Later it is disgorged in privacy as food. The story has a giant shot of Christian religion running through it, but it is the usual busy plot of paranoia and secret forces at work. There’s an interesting race element here as most of the characters are Black people or allied with Black people. There doesn’t appear to be much racial tension that I noticed—it’s closer to a genuinely post-racial world. Libraries are in charge of eradicating literature as time flows into the past and they are fairly brutal and authoritarian about it. People say “food” instead of “shit”—that didn’t immediately register on me. Between Counter-Clock World and Tenet, I must say I see a lot of difficulty imagining and conveying what it looks and feels like to live in time moving the other direction. Could we even understand the language? Neither the novel nor the movie is particularly lucid, but it’s obvious how hard they are trying. This is good for any Dick binge.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.