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Rating: "It's not a great way to inherit the earth" said Blair seeing his expression. "Perhaps we have not been meek enough."
"Or perhaps we have been too meek." Nicholas replied.
Fifteen years after the start of the third world war, most of humanity lives underground, in anthills, dedicating themselves to the construction of robots, the plombs, tasked with fighting on the earth’s surface now devastated by nuclear weapons and deadly viruses.
But what would happen if the underground people discovered that what they know about the war is just a grand charade?
The ant-hill director, Tom Mix, is forced to risk his life to save that of a friend, seeking an artificial pancreas, he must climb to the surface. The sunlight is getting closer for him, after years he is about to see the sky again, and also to discover the penultimate truth.
At the base of this science fiction novel, we find two typical themes of Dick's narrative, illusion and power.
The author imagines a future where lies are the mechanism on which the world society operates: distorted information, fake documents, an illusion of unreal reality with which to nourish most of the workforce to ensure the good life for a lucky elite.
Deception, as a system of social control, cannot but intertwine with power, the globalized, intricate one, that by leveraging terror holds humanity in its grip, whose life is dictated by production times.
In almost all of Dick's stories, at some point, the perception of reality is overturned, scenarios suddenly flip. During reading, when you think you have figured out the situation, something is likely to happen that forces you to a re-reading, sometimes opposite. That's why the truth is penultimate, there is always one last truth behind it.
An ironic, paranoid work, reflecting the author's will to explore themes of reality, simulation, and society. Dick's work is sometimes defined as sociological science fiction, preferring to address humanistic themes over pure technology.
The penultimate truth, to be read in one breath.
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