The Game-Players of Titan
By (Author) Philip K. Dick
HarperCollins Publishers
HarperVoyager
5th December 2001
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Fantasy
813.54
Paperback
224
Width 129mm, Height 198mm, Spine 15mm
170g
Roaming the pristine landscape of Earth, cared for by machines and aliens, the few remaining humans alive since the war with Titan play Bluff, allowing them to win or lose property and also form new marriages in order to maximise the remote chance some pairings will produce a child. When Pete Garden, a particularly suicidal member of the Pretty Blue Fox game-playing group, loses his current wife and his deed to Berkeley, he stumbles upon a far bigger, more sinister version of the game. The telepathic, slug-like Vugs of Titan are the players and at stake is the Earth itself. The Game-Players of Titan is a brilliantly conceived vision of a future dystopia, full of imaginative detail, moments of pure humour and thought-provoking musings on the nature of perception, as the seemingly straightforward narrative soon turns into a tumultuous nightmare of delusion, precognition and conspiracy.
'One of the most original practitioners writing any kind of fiction' Sunday Times 'A great philosophical writer' Independent 'Dick quietly produced serious fiction in a popular form and there can be no greater praise' Michael Moorcock
Philip K Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. He attended college for a year at Berkeley. Apart from writing, his main interest was music. He won the Hugo Award for his classic novel of alternative history, The Man in the High Castle (1962). He was married five times and had three children. He died in March 1982.