Power to the people! Unfortunately, in Philip K. Dick's 1962 novel The Game-Players of Titan, we're two hundred years into the future, the people are the entire human race and humans have anything but power – in the aftermath of Hinkle radiation and losing a war with the Titanians aka vugs from Planet Titan, the human population has been decimated, only a handful of couples can have kids and those vugs hold the real power.
This is a world of advanced technology with such things as The Rushmore Effect wherein elevators, medicine cabinets and flying automobiles are programed to answer questions by speaking the truth. It’s also a world where playing The Game is of central importance: those fortunate humans who play the Game are referred to as Bindmen. And the vugs? There are some vugs here on Earth to keep tabs on human activity, participation in the Game heading up the list. Vugs can manifest as either flies or humans, one can never be sure when one’s dealing with a vug. It’s the roll of the dice.
The Game-Players of Titan is one weird, wild, freaky fiction. PKD works his magic to scramble all sorts of spaced out madness into his speculative stew. To share a taste, here are a number of key ingredients:
The Game: board game that’s similar to Risk or Monopoly requiring a combination of skill and luck, where a spinner and a deck of cards are needed to play and players trade properties and wives back and forth. What’s particularly helpful for a game player: an ability to read other players, knowing when your opponent is or is not bluffing.
Pete Garden: an ordinary kind of guy with suicidal tendencies and gloomy, manic-depressive phases, a guy prone to addiction to liquor and especially drugs. Oh, yes, Pete can get extremely paranoid, frequently for good reason - he has hallucinations that we humans are all surrounded by vugs. Or, maybe he's actually seeing the truth? Even paranoids have enemies. I bet when he was a little kid, Pete saw the sippy cup as half empty. And you've has such bad luck playing the game recently, Pete! You lost Berkeley, California and also your latest wife. You need a three to get yourself a new wife – and you desperately want Berkeley back; you're willing to trade three small cities in Marin County. What you really need, Pete, is some luck - either in yourself or in a new Game playing partner.
Joe Shilling: Poor Joe! He lost big time to Lucky Luckman from New York City. Subsequently, he dropped from Bindman to a non-B (the major distinction in status in this brave new depopulated world). But thanks to his good buddy Pete, Joe can rejoin the game. Once at the table for the ultimate stakes, Joe shares a true gem of wisdom: the biggest enemies for a game player are greed and fear. Thus spoke Shilling. Lesson to last a lifetime.
Psychic Pat McClain: This PKD-style femme fatale is a telepath. Since this luscious lady can read minds, she is automatically disqualified from the Game, forever relegated to non-B status, a fact of life that makes her furious. There’s something funny about Pat – she refuses to submit to having her own mind read, such a curious stance for a mind-reader. Sounds like Pat might have something to hid from the Bindmen.
Mary Anne McClain: Holy psychokinesis! Mary Anne is Pat’s eighteen-year old daughter, a young lady having the power to invoke the Poltergeist effect, moving people and things through space and through walls. Oh, funky baby! I want you on my side. As do Pete and his fellow players.
Jerome Luckman: lucky guy at the Game: lucky guy at having children. Is there such a thing as too much luck? The fate of this New Yorker adds yet again another philosophic dimension to the novel.
Carol Holt: Pete's new wife. He did come up with a three, after all. Shortly following their marriage, turns out Carol is pregnant. Oh, lucky day for both Carol and Pete. Now our protagonist truly has the stakes raised as he gambles at the Game and takes his chances at life.
Dave Mutreaux: A pre-cog, that is, someone able to tell the future, another type of person excluded from the Game. And the players have an EEG Machine to detect if someone wishing to come to the table is a pre-cog. However, the more PKD develops his story, the more Dave and his pre-cog abilities rise in importance. In the game of life, always a good idea to befriend a person who can warn you of the consequences of possible bad decisions.
Vugs on Titan: There's the ultimate Game. It's Pete and his group versus the vug master game players on Titan. But alas, even if the vugs lose, those critters still wield tremendous power. The vugs just might take W.C. Fields seriously when he said, "It’s morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep his money."
Life, a Game of Chance: But seriously folks, there’s a great sense of play in The Game-Players of Titan. Who can Pete trust when appearances frequently differ so radically from reality? Whatever choices Pete makes depend so much on LUCK, big time. Pete recognizes we ordinary humans are at such a disadvantage - we can't see into the future, we can’t read other people’s minds, we simply have to take our chances.
In many ways, the challenges Pete and his fellow players face are similar to our own. No answers are provided (unlike VALIS and other PKD novels, The Game-Players of Titan does not even touch on theology). Decision making here is more in the spirit of gaming and game theory, of bluffing and calling bluff, of relying on skill and playing the odds, all along counting on a bit of luck. And please remember, no matter where you are on the game board or where you are in life, greed and fear will rarely work to your advantage.
Such a flaky, fun novel. One of the most enjoyable PKDs I've come across.
"Junk, like a billion golf balls, cascaded brightly, replacing the familiar reality of substantial forms. It was, Joe Schilling thought, like a fundamental breakdown of the act of perception itself... "I'm scared - what is this?" He did not understand and he reached out groping in the stream of atom-like sub-particles that surged everywhere. Is this the understructure of the universe itself? he wondered. The world outside of space and time, beyond the modes of cognition?" - Philip K. Dick, The Game-Players of Titan
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