TIME OUT OF JOINT

"The time is now but the date on the newspaper was April 3rd 1988"

1st.Edition: Lippincott, hb, 59-7775, 1959, 221pp, $3.95, (Arthur Hawkins) {Levack: "Bound in orange paper boards with black lettering on the spine and front cover. No date on the title page. 'First Edition' on the copyright page."}

                                   

New Worlds #89, 90, 91, Dec 1959, Jan/Feb 1960 {Abridged}

OTHER ENGLISH EDITIONS:

FOREIGN EDITIONS:

  • wpe5A.jpg (8269 bytes)
  • Like, ?, 428-x, 1996, ?, ? (Kari Puikkonen){tr. into Finnish as ON AIKA SIJOILTAAN}

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

                TOMORROW TODAY  Ragle Gumm, mathematical genius, earned his living in a queer way, solving complicated puzzles in the daily newspaper. But soon, imperceptibly, his vast network of equations began to go out of control... everything was out of its natural order... and the world, and time were out of joint!

Vote for Your Fave PKD Story!   TIME OUT OF JOINT. Third place is hardest of all -- why couldn't you have said top five? If you had said pick the three best, I would have put HIGH CASTLE here, but you said three favorite. JOINT was one I read early on, and it was the first one that made sense. It made a big impression on me. It was so normal, so 50s, and then -- wham! -- the killer ending. Despite certain critics, I do not find the ending contrived or hokey. It's just what the book needed to show how unnatural and artificial the Milk & Honey Fifties really were. I wrote a letter to PKDS about this one (excerpted in their 5th Newsletter) and received a lengthy reply from Bob Stewart. S there you have it. -- Paul Rydeen, AL

Ken Lopez. Bookseller catalog

DICK, Philip K. Time Out of Joint. Philadelphia: Lippincott, (1959). First. Dick's first hardcover book in this country, and one of Pringle's hundred best science fiction novels -- the earliest of the six novels by Dick that made Pringle's list. Pringle called this story of a man whose mind is capable of transporting him to a world where appearance and reality change places "a nightmare which may have seemed far-fetched in 1959, but which now strikes us as strangely truthful." The theme is similar to Dick's later writings, which were influenced by his experiences with psychedelic and other drugs, and which led him to believe that his vision and insights were the result of a vast network of universal trans-human intelligence to which he, sometimes unwillingly, had access. A cheaply-made book, this copy has shelfwear at the extremities of the spine and the lower corners; a near fine copy in a near fine dust jacket. An important and uncommon book, particularly scarce in nice condition. $750.00 [item 60, Holiday List]

. DICK, Philip K. Time Out of Joint. Philadelphia: Lippincott, (1959). First. Dick's first hardcover book, in this country, and one of Pringle's hundred best science fiction novels "a nightmare which may have seemed far-fetched in 1959, but which now strikes us as strangely truthful." A cheaply-made book, this copy bears the ownership signature of one of Dick's relatives and the boards show wear at the extremities and corners. Near fine in a very good, spine-faded dust jacket with several small edge chips and slightly longer edge tears. $650   {These may still be for sale, Apr 1999 -- Lord RC}

PKDS-1 4:

Five PKD titles have been purchased by Bluejay ... TIME OUT OF JOINT is to be published in 1984.

PKDS-3 6:

Bluejay's TIME OUT OF JOINT is due out in July '84, with an Afterword by Lou Stathis.

PKDS-12 10:

Edhasa in Spain will publish TIME OUT OF JOINT

PKDS-22 6:

Something is going on with TIME OUT OF JOINT. The property has been under option at Warner Bros. for a few years: now the Daily Variety reports that screenwriter Sam Hamm -- who wrote most of the best parts of Batman and has agreed to write the sequel -- has placed a screenplay for TIME OUT OF JOINT with Guber-Peters, producers of Batman. They were at Warner Bros. in August when this story came out: since then they've been hired by Sony to run Columbia Picture, and the lawsuits and countersuits that resulted have been big news. Where this leaves the TOOJ project is anyone's guess, but it seems unlikely that a Sam Hamm screenplay is just going to get tossed on the junnkpile. An intriguing footnote is that Hamm is now working on the script for Watchman, based on the comic art novel, for director Terry Gilliam. Gilliam, also a name to conjure with these days, was quoted within the past year as saying that he wants to do a movie from a Philip K. Dick novel as one of his future projects.

PKDS-24 9:

Many films are optioned, of course, and few are made. Nothing is known of the progress (or lack thereof) of TIME OUT OF JOINT, in development at Warner, except that we've learned that Sam Hamm's collaborator on the script is Mike Duncan.

PKDS-26 11:

The Carroll & Graf paperbacks are in print, including TIME OUT OF JOINT. The Bluejay has been remaindered.

PKDS-26 12:

In the UK Penguin has TOOJ out in trade paper.

PKDS 26-17:

Bruce Gillespie, editor of PHILIP K. DICK: ELECTRIC SHEPHERD, an important early book on PKD, recently published a privately circulated fanzine consisting of a major essay (also delivered as a talk to a Melbourne SF club) entitled "The Non-Science Fiction Novels Of Philip K. Dick". Gillespie sets out to refute Kim Stanley Robinson's dissmissal of the non-sf novels. ... "What we find in TIME OUT OF JOINT is that the bits and pieces of a science fiction superstructure, which gradually invade Ragle Gumm's consciousness, are actually more autobiographical, more real to the author, than the accurately drawn worlds he presents in the non-sf novels. It is for this reason that the non-sf novels fail, not because of any intrinsic demerits. In TIME OUT OF JOINT Dick finds metaphors for the very real paranoia which afflicted him from time to time. The miracle is that he finds coherent metaphors that he can use to construct and exciting story... The non-sf novels have to take the ordinary world as a given. In the end, Dick felt this was untrue, and he was untrue to himself by portraying the world thus." {Gillespie}

In his mind he chronicled all the lights he could think of. In his house, at the store, at friends' houses. All were wall switches.

TDM 150:

I ask how much of his thinking was influenced by LSD experiences, and which of his books, if any, are derived from acid trips.
"I wrote TIME OUT OF JOINT in the 1950s, before I had even heard of LSD. In that book a guy walks up to a lemonade stand in the park, and it turns into a slip of paper marked Soft Drink Stand, and he puts the slip of paper in his pocket. Far-fucking-out, spacey, that's an 'acid experience'. If I didn't know better I'd say that this author had turned on many times, and his universe was coming unglued -- he's obviously living in a fake universe.
"What I was trying to do in that book was account for the diversity of worlds that people live in. I had not read Heraclitus then, I didn't know his concept of idios kosmos, the private world, versus koinos kosmos, which we all share. I didn't know that the pre-Socratics had begun to discern these things.
"There's a scene in the book where the protagonist goes into the bathroom, reaches in the dark for a pull-cord, and suddenly realises there is no cord, there's a switch on the wall, and he can't remember when he ever had a bathroom where there was a cord hanging down. Now, that actually happened to me, and it was what caused me to write the book. It reminded me of the idea thatVan Vogthad dealt with, of artificial memory, as occurs in THE WORLD OF NULL-A where a person has false memories implanted. A lot of what I wrote, which looks like the result of taking acid, is really the result of taking Van Vogt seriously! I believed Van Vogt, I mean, he wrote it, you know, he was an authority figure. He said, people can be other than whom they remember themselves to be, and I found this fascinating. You have a massive suspension of belief on my part." {PKD}

Word doesn't represent reality. Word is reality. For us, anyhow. Maybe God gets to objects. Not us, though.

TTHC 302:   TIME OUT OF JOINT was another novel passed on by Ace Books. But this time, Wollheim says, he didn't reject it. "I accepted it. Wyn went through it but he didn't dislike it. He didn't like things  like the 'soft drink stand' that disappears. He wanted to ask Dick to rewrite. He sent a list of suggestions to Meredith, but instead of sending it to Phil Dick for revisions Lippincott called up out of the blue and said they wanted to start up a science fiction line. So Meredith had this available and shipped it right off to Lippincott who printed it with no changes. So that's how we lost Philip K. Dick, which I hope taught Wyn a lesson. I understood what Dick was trying to do, but it disturbed Wyn's sense of realism. I liked the whole thing." 25

{... ...}

   TIME OUT OF JOINT sold to Lippincott, a major publishing firm, for $750: "My agent was so excited that he sent me a telegram to announce this joyous news." 27 Published in hardcover as "a novel of menace," and not science fiction, it remained essentially unknown to the American sf audience until its belated appearance as a paperback in 1965.{...}

fn25:    Dick has said that Ace only liked the last, science fictional chapter of the book as it stands. See letter to his SMLA agent jack Scovill 5-5-75.
fn27:    Interview with Cover, Vertex, 36

TTHC  351:   {...}Gradually I've ceased science fiction writing and have been doing "straight" stuff. Also, I revise, sometimes several years later. Under certain conditions, however, I can write very fast, even without notes. The Lippincott book [TIME OUT OF JOINT] was written in two weeks, proof read and then retyped in two more. But it took me years to work out the basic idea of the book.{...}

-- Letter to Eleanor Dimoff, February 1, 1960.

SL:38     189

Dear Scott,

    {...} Each of my recent books which has been truly original and important was not published by Ace; {...} -- not to mention Belmont's reprinting of my older novel TIME OUT OF JOINT (when I mentioned in September this latter event to Don, he retorted, "They'll print anything," hardly a friendly remark by an editor to an author most of whose books have been printed by that editor's house) {...}

{PKD>Scott Meredith, May 22, 1965}

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