PKD's searing metaphysical comedy of death and salvation (the latter available in a convenient aerosol spray) is a tour de force of paranoiac menace and unfettered slapstick, in which the departed shop for their next incarnation. Fragments of reality become disjointed as time begins to move backwards. The head of future anti-psi security agency which jams up nosy telepaths is apparently killed. PKD's greatest, brilliantly filmed as 'Blade Runner' in 1991, directed by Ridley Scott. Trouble was, the androids all looked exactly like humans, and they didn't want to be found. Deckard's assignment, find them and then. Somewhere among the hordes of humans out there, lurked several rogue androids. It was January 2021, and Rick Deckard had a license to kill. The catch, however, is that Eldritch gets to be god in everyone's new private universe. When industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from an interstellar trip, he brings with him a new drug, Chew-Z. In the overcrowded world and cramped space colonies of the late 21st century, tedium can be endured through the drug Can-D, which enables users to inhabit a shared illusory world. For although the UN has slated 'anomalous' children for deportation and destruction, other people - especially the Supreme Goodmember of the Water Worker's union - suspect that the boy's disorder may be a window into the future. On the arid colony of Mars the only thing more precious than water may be a ten-year-old schizophrenic boy. An alternative history with some nifty sci-fi twists thanks to the use of genuine genre tropes like parallel worlds and advanced technology well before its time. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names, all because some twenty years earlier the United States lost a war, and is now occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan. The novel's title comes from a line in Shakespeare's play Hamlet. On discovering some magazines dated 1997 an eccentric who solves newspaper puzzles starts thinking that his apparent world of 1959 is not all it is cracked up to be. Time Out of Joint is PKD’s classic depiction of the disorienting disparity between the world as we think it is and the world as it actually is.

Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick