One flew over the Alphane moon

Clans of the Alphane Moon is a very Dickian novel; someone who knows his work could read a paragraph or two from anywhere in the book and immediately know who wrote it.

The set-up is ingenious. A small, habitable moon was once the site of a Terran psychiatric hospital, but the hospital—and its patients—were abandoned years ago. They have survived, and formed clans, which the author introduces first only by abbreviations. The deps—depressives; the manses—manics; the pares—paranoids, and etc.

The Terrans want the moon back; it is part of a territory squabble between Earth and their former enemies, the Alphanes. They send a psychiatrist to evaluate the situation, with the idea that the former patients—now living on their own—will be re-hospitalized and treated, whether they like it or not.

The rest of the plot, which involves (1) the struggle by the clans to retain their freedom, and (2) a CIA agent in the middle of a divorce—who is planning to kill his wife (the psychiatrist) while she is on the moon—by means of a remote-controlled ‘simalcrum’ (life-like robot)—is difficult to describe. And was nearly impossible, for me, to make sense of.

This is not, in my opinion, one of Dick’s more successful works. The best of them—A Scanner Darkly, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Man in the High Castle, Wait for Last Year—are no less crazy, no less inventive in terms of plot. But as you read them you know you are on a journey, and when you finish them, you feel as if you’ve arrived somewhere.

I’m not sure where we arrived in Clans. What is Dick saying? That to be crazy and free is better than being locked up and sane? But the clans are not described as living particularly happy lives.

That a psychiatrist can be wackier than her patients? Well, no argument there. Still, we are batted around from one place to another, and events end up seeming more than usually arbitrary.

I must add, however, that in this novel Dick has come up with the best alien character ever; a large, telepathic slime-mold from Ganymede. The slime-mold is named—wait for it—Lord Running Clam. I think we should have a yearly contest for best alien character names. And I think it should be called the Lord Running Clam contest, in fond memory of Philip Dick.