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Philip K. Dick

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The Game-Players Of Titan Kindle Edition

by Philip K. Dick (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.4 106 ratings

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Years ago, Earth and Titan fought a war and Earth lost. The planet was irradiated and most of the surviving population is sterile. The few survivors play an intricate and unending game called Bluff at the behest of the slug-like aliens who rule the planet. At stake in the game are two very important commodities: land and spouses. Pete Garden just lost his wife and Berkeley, California, but he has a plan to win them back. That is, if he isn’t derailed by aliens, psychic traitors, or his new wife.

The Game-Players of Titan is both satire and adventure, examining the ties that bind people together and the maddening peccadilloes of bureaucracy, whether the bureaucrats are humans or alien slugs.

Print length

242 pages
Language

English
Sticky notes

On Kindle Scribe
Publisher

Mariner Books Classics
Publication date

October 23, 2012
File size

747 KB
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Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Years ago, Earth and Titan fought a war and Earth lost. The planet was irradiated and most of the surviving population is sterile. The few survivors play an intricate and unending game called Bluff at the behest of the slug-like aliens who rule the planet. At stake in the game are two very important commodities: land and spouses. Pete Garden just lost his wife and Berkeley, California, but he has a plan to win them back. That is, if he isn’t derailed by aliens, psychic traitors, or his new wife. The Game-Players of Titan is both satire and adventure, examining the ties that bind people together and the maddening peccadilloes of bureaucracy, whether the bureaucrats are humans or alien slugs.

PHILIP K. DICK (1928–1982) wrote 121 short stories and 45 novels and is considered one of the most visionary authors of the twentieth century. His work is included in the Library of America and has been translated into more than twenty five languages. Eleven works have been adapted to film, including Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly.

About the Author

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) wrote 121 short stories and 45 novels and is considered one of the most visionary writers of the twentieth century. His work is included in the Library of America and has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. Eleven works have been adapted to film, including Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B006R8PJWI
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books Classics; Reissue edition (October 23, 2012)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 23, 2012
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 747 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 242 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #149,496 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #216 in Psychological Literary Fiction
- #912 in Women's Literary Fiction
- #1,568 in Dystopian Science Fiction (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
4.4 106 ratings

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Philip K. Dick

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Over a writing career that spanned three decades, Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) published 36 science fiction novels and 121 short stories in which he explored the essence of what makes man human and the dangers of centralized power. Toward the end of his life, his work turned toward deeply personal, metaphysical questions concerning the nature of God. Eleven novels and short stories have been adapted to film; notably: Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly. The recipient of critical acclaim and numerous awards throughout his career, Dick was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2005, and in 2007 the Library of America published a selection of his novels in three volumes. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

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4.4 out of 5

106 global ratings

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Amazon Customer

Real-life Monopoly meets Poker in a post-apocalyptic, alien-monitored USA. Don't forget your record player.

Reviewed in the United States on March 1, 2018

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I cannot put to words how much I enjoyed this book. I'd rank this one around 5th-10th, not quite as mind-bendingly incredible as Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldtritch, or Flow My Tears The Policeman Said, but still fantastic. You might particularly enjoy this if you've lived in California. No amount of alcohol could coax me into gambling away Berkeley!

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DarkKnight22

An enjoyable if light read

Reviewed in the United States on March 18, 2016

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I love almost everything I've ever read by Philip K Dick, and The Game-Players of Titan is no exception. This book features a number of things Dick often used when writing: aliens, psychic powers, drugs, altered consciousness, and a bleak future. What it didn't seem to feature, and what I often look for in Dick's writings, is a thought provoking question about the nature of human existence. For example, A Scanner Darkly explores the use of recreational drugs and gives the reader an opportunity to reflect on addicts and how they live. In this novel, it felt like Dick just wanted to tell a story with his characteristic quirks and style. So if you like Dick and feel you'd enjoy reading something a bit less heavy than his usual works, check this one out.

Reviewed in the United States on August 18, 2015

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Another fantastic book from P K Dick. Enjoyed every minute of it.

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Divine Play

Middle-Range Philip K. Dick, but Worthwhile

Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2014

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I am an avid fan of Philip K. Dick and I see each novel or story as part of a great oeuvre of a brilliant and immensely creative mind. That said, “Game Players of Titan” is probably of middling quality. The story depicts a post-apocalyptic world dominated by a silicone-based life form from Titan called “vugs.” Their invasion was facilitated by devastating planetary war involving the use of “Henkel Radiation” by Red China, which reduced earth’s population and sterilized much of the remainder. A couple that is able to conceive a child has gotten “lucky.”

Humans now occupy their time in a game called “Bluff.” Winners not only acquire property but other people’s spouses. Pete Garden, the protagonist, owns large amounts of property. However, at the beginning of the story he has not only lost an area of prime real estate but also his wife. The quality of marital relationships is judged by how well the partners succeed at Bluff together. Pete also suffers from depression and a preoccupation with suicide.

The story involves the mysterious murder of an infamous “Bindman” (player and property owner), Pete’s unexpected fatherhood, and the culminating contest between humans and the gambling-addicted vugs; the stakes being the vugs’ withdrawal from Earth or the replacement of the human players with simulacra.

There is, as in every Dick novel, there is the never-ending conflict between appearance and reality, and moments in which reality dissolves into its fundamental, frightening “Abgrund” (abyss).

This is not one of the Philip K. Dick novels I would read multiple times, such as “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” “Ubik,” or “Now Wait for Last Year,” but any of his novels and stories is both a challenge and a pleasure to read. As with the greatest writers, his style and imagination are one of a kind.

3 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Awesome! 😍

Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2016

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Brand new! Awesome! 😍

Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2012

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I've got to rank this in the lower half of Dick's novels, as the last third of the book feels rushed and it doesn't come off as very coherent (even in comparison to his other dense mind-benders). But, the book has its charms. It's got plenty of ideas per square inch, the usual quota of highly imaginative scenarios and incisive moments, and a vivid assortment of characters and alien life forms. It resembles "Solar Lottery" a bit in its unpredictable plot turns (as well as in being nominally centered around some large-scale version of a game - TV Quiz Shows in the earlier case, and a complex board game resembling Monopoly in this case). It also reminds me a bit of "Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldridge" in terms of what Sutin calls Eldridge's "tight plotting" and "hairpin turns".

3 people found this helpful

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Manuel Armenteros

Without a doubt, PKD's underrated masterpiece, its obscurity should be shattered

Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2014

Recently I have become a huge fan of Philip K Dick. Within a span of 3 weeks, I've read, in order: Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, A Maze of Death, Clans of the Alphane Moon, Valis, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, Martian Time Slip, A Skanner Darkly, Now Wait for Last Year, Time Out of Joint, The Penultimate Truth and Dr. Bloodmoney.

All of these books were outstanding, some more than others naturally, such as Ubik and Flow My Tears are slightly better than Time Out of Joint or The Penultimate Truth. Debating this is, of course, a matter of taste much like anything else, after all PKD focuses on somewhat similar themes in all his books: the deceptive nature of reality, paranoia, drugs, conspiracy theories, human nature in extreme circumstances and religion, among other themes.

After having read A Martian Time slip, the following books, though still amazing, were starting to become somewhat predictable - to the extent that such a comment can be made about PKD at all - I'm sure had I inversed my reading order, I would still feel some fatigue due to continuous exposure to a single author. However, after the first few pages of The Game Players of Titan, I felt like I was re-reading PKD from the start. Yes it contains paranoia, drugs, conspiracies - the usual stuff we all love PKD for - but the way this was written out was simply amazing.

A card game with such interesting and high stakes as can be possible, without sounding outrageous in a self-satisfactory manner, characters which you are not sure are good or bad until the last portion of the book, bizarre precognitions that make you want, in fact need, to keep reading in order to straighten things out. This book has it all: talking cars, a woman who can turn people into atoms, a suicidal protagonist, a card player who cannot lose, an alien race which has battles with itself; out of the few hundreds of thousands of people on Earth only a few "lucky" pairs can have babies, never did this book linger too long, it only seemed to keep getting better.

The description Dick gives at a late point in the book about how it feels to look at another species with another lens reminds me of Immanuel Kant's distinction between things as they appear to us, and things-in-themselves, things which due to our limitation of our brains we cannot go beyond it in principle. Well, Dick does some magic and he gets as close as it is humanly possible to look at ourselves in the eyes of some other species.

This novel offers brain food, thrills, and a card game that makes Tim Power's much larger book (also about card games) "Last Call", seem comparitvely boring and just a little long-winded (though to be fair, it was a good book for its genre, and Powers is not Dick), this is, so far as I can say, tied along with Ubik and Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said my favorite PKD novel, and am surprised it did not recieve much mention or any honors. Many people have one or two PKD books which they reserve the title as PKD's "underrated masterpiece", in my experience it's this one.

Buy it, borrow it, read it in a Kindle if you must, but go and get it out of obscurity and into the light where it belongs!

2 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Richard Griffith

Ok

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 17, 2020

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Product was great but delivered to wrong house

Chris Johnstone

Lucky 13

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 29, 2009

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This is PKD's 13th science fiction novel and he had produced Man in a High Castle a couple of years earlier and it is 10 years since he published his first novel. It is very typical PKD, it has a variety of scifi ideas rather than one of two, some bad jokes, lots of of psychiatry/psychology, drugs and a good plot. It also has a lot of one of PKD's trademarks about identity and false identity and can you trust who you are talking to. It is based around a small group of long lived, almost sterile humans who have lost the war to game playing Titans and have to play an odd form of Monopoly crossed with poker to win huge tracts of land. They are mainly infertile, humans are slowly dying out and they swap partners regularly in the hope of getting pregnant. The game involves a lot of bluffing and the Titans are telepathic, as are a small group of humans. Two plot lines are how can you get away with murder when the Titan police can read your mind to find your guilt and how can you bluff in a game where the opponents are telepathic. You will have to read it to find the answers.

2 people found this helpful

jdpmel

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 23, 2018

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Insanely brilliant!!

Amazon Customer

Three Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 21, 2016

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