The Unteleported Man

Did You Know?

• Dave Langford reviewed Lies Inc. for White Dwarf #56, calling it a marvellously hallucinatory experience.
• The expanded version includes about one hundred pages of additional exposition.

Plot summary

A new teleportation technology called telpor makes spaceship travel obsolete. A colony in the Fomalhaut star system, Whale's Mouth, has received forty million emigrants via one-way teleportation; return to Earth by teleportation is supposedly impossible. The only way back is an eighteen-year spaceship journey with limited suspended animation. Rachmael ben Applebaum, whose spaceship business has been ruined by telpor, decides to fly his own craft, the Omphalos, to Whale's Mouth, driven by a hunch that the utopian claims may be false. Powerful figures oppose his journey. In the expanded version Lies, Inc., additional material begins in Chapter 8 with the phrase, 'Acrid smoke billowed about him, stinging his nostrils.' Rachmael endures a horrific drug trip after being hit by an LSD-tipped dart at his destination. The expansion terminates in Chapter 15 just before the repeated phrase. Confusion may arise over Dick attributing some perceptual chaos to a deliberately incorporated effect of the teleportation process. Sinister modifications to telpor cause victims to experience paraworlds thought to exist as viable alternate realities. Participants fear that consensus about the paraworlds could cause one to manifest aggressively and displace the current reality. Rachmael's own paraworld experience is said to be the worst.

Characters

Rachmael ben Applebaum, the protagonist, is the former owner of Applebaum Enterprise and is implied to be of Jewish-Israeli descent, a source of distaste for Third Reich-esque German authority figures. Theodoric Ferry leads Trails of Hoffman, Ltd., which runs the teleportation machines. Matson Glazer-Holliday heads the police organization Lies, Incorporated. Freya Holm is his mistress and an employee of Lies, Inc. Sepp von Einem created the telpor device. Gregory Gloch is von Einem's young apprentice and a skilled weapons designer who is proleptic and displaced in time. Al Dosker is Lies, Incorporated's ace pilot, described as a small and shrewd-looking African-American.

Publishing history

This novel's publication path is notably unusual for a Dick work. It first appeared as a short story in Fantastic Magazine in 1964. Ace Books acquired the rights, but when Dick tried to expand it to novel length, his revisions were turned down, and the original story was released in 1966 as part of an Ace Double, bound back-to-back with Howard L. Cory's The Mind Monsters. A longer, 80,000-word version came out from Berkley Books in 1983. Dick had been working on incorporating his 1965 expansions when he died in March 1982, leaving the project unfinished. The original story, including Dick's revisions, was published in 1984 under the title Lies, Inc. Some missing manuscript pages were later recovered and printed in the Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter #8 in 1985. A 2004 edition of Lies, Inc finally included those recovered pages.