COUNTER-CLOCK WORLD

"The Dead Grow Young"

1st.EDITION:
UK 1st.: Sphere, pb, 2956-4, Jun 1968, 160pp, 5/- (David Davies)

OTHER ENGLISH EDITIONS:


FOREIGN EDITIONS:

{For the best bibliographic info in French goto: www.multimania.com/ggoullet/pkdick/frames.html Thanks for the cover pix, Gilles}

This part of his job he liked least. The cries of the dead; he hated that sound, and he had heard them, the cries, so much, and so many times. Men and women, mostly old but some not so old, sometimes children. And it always took the digging crew so long to get there.

Vote for your Fave PKD Story! "...I still greatly admire COUNTERCLOCK WORLD and GALACTIC POT-HEALER, by the way." -- {Gregg Rickman, CA}

PKDS-2 10:

Publication date: Feb 7, 1967.

PKDS- 15 11:

... There's a startling photo of Stephen Hawking slumped in his wheelchair, face slack, eyes intense, looking and sounding like a classic PKD character... If even COUNTERCLOCK WORLD can turn out to be scientifically correct, maybe PKD was more of a "hard" science fiction writer than most of us gave him credit for.

PKDS 28    5

{... ...}

    "Did you ever read COUNTER-CLOCK WORLD?"

    "I don't think so. Who wrote it?"

    Jason said, "In it everyone and everything moved from the future backward into the past. So they got younger."

    "Maybe that's the only solution for us." She nodded complacently. Relaxing in her cherished afterglow. "Have you ever had it happen that you're reading a book and after a while you feel you know the author? He becomes a real person to you, shining through the book? Do you know what I mean?"

    "No," Jason said.

    "This COUNTER-CLOCK WORLD book you mentioned. When you read it did you feel the presence of a living person behind it? I think -- it occurs to me -- that you might actually feel love, maybe merely of a sort, for the author as you come in contact with him, the person, through the book. But he would never know he was loved by you. Like you say, he's probably dead. But maybe something of him lives on and is loved by way of the book."

    "The thing is," Jason said, "alive or dead he'd never know. And nothing happens if you love someone and they don't know it. That's utterly futile. As you just now said about me, I could be --"

    "I think that's the best that could happen to the author of a book. To live on, after his death, in the book, and somewhere, some way, to be loved by someone who read the book. Of course, it would have to be a very good book. I don't mean just any book."

    "COUNTER-CLOCK WORLD was not that kind of book."

{... ...}

{in THE DIFFERENT STAGES OF LOVE by PKD -- a previously unpublished passage from FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID}

"Get out the sogum," Sebastian said. "It's sogum time."

IPOV 216:

Time is about to end (lineal time) as a factor of life; it won't reverse, as in COUNTERCLOCK WORLD, but our present will dissolve as all the accretions of the last 3500 years will vanish, as if dreamlike. They never took place... {PKD c.1974-75}

TDC :

It wasn't until 1964, when Editions Opta of Paris approached me with the extraordinary proposition that they would publish every novel that I had written. They have a fancy bookclub edition that they put out, and for this they got a picture of me for the back cover, and an article about me by John Brunner. They sent me a copy of the first book -- THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE and COUNTERCLOCK WORLD -- and they had a complete bibliography of my stuff. They had everything and it was beautiful. In comparison to, like ACE books... {PKD 1977}

SL-38 201:

Meanwhile, my writing career creaks on. My Berkley book, COUNTERCLOCK WORLD, just came out, with a very nice cover -- which shows a girl who looks exactly like Nancy. What is more, the girl in the story, Lotta, is based on Nancy. I keep wondering if by any chance Terry and/or Carol Carr gave Damon Knight (the editor at Berkley Books) a picture of Nancy (they have several which I sent them). Otherwise it must be chalked up to psi, I suppose.
{PKD > Cynthia, Feb 27, 1967}

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