Counter-Clock World -- FLAME

External Since: Dec 09, 2006 Posts: 2

G-------d allllllllmighty.
I lasted 120 pages before I had to give up in disgust.
The implications of the reverse-time world do not meet
up with what the characters do in the novel.

My mind forced me to abandon the effort -- rarely to I
find to guts to drop a book in mid-read.

In reverse-time the characters recent past would be
cloudy and their future certain. The concept is difficult
to write about it a way that calms logical minds.

In the story, one or twice a day the characters vist the toilet
sitting down and scoop wet paper out of the bowl
that suddenly appears when the toilet reverse flushes by
its own power? GROSS!!!

Wouldn't fetuses have to crawl back into the wombs that
gave them birth?

Good God what an awful book!!
Protect your well-being, read "A Scanner Darkly" instead.

EE.

External Since: Dec 11, 2006 Posts: 1

ROFL. Admittedly I have only read CCW once, and not recently, but I
don't remember it being THAT bad.

PKD's handling of time-reversal is indeed wildly inconsistent -- some
processes are reversed, some aren't. And some things are reversed that
don't need to be (i.e., libraries destroy information instead of
collecting it).

It's a typical novel from PKD's Ace Books period: lots of quirky
characters running around against the backdrop of a bizarre,
scientifically dubious premise.

Erik Evenson wrote:
> In the story, one or twice a day the characters vist the toilet
> sitting down and scoop wet paper out of the bowl
> that suddenly appears when the toilet reverse flushes by
> its own power? GROSS!!!

I don't recall PKD being so specific about that. There are all those
references to characters imbibing "sogum," but he never really spells
out what's happening.