Our Friends From Frolix 8 by Philip K. Dick

When the future comes, will we know it’s here?

Philip K. Dick was incredibly prolific. His body of work includes such notables as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which would become Blade Runner on the big screen), Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (one of my favorite novels of all time), and Ubik, one of Time Magazine’s top 100 novels.

I’ve read a lot of Dick’s novels, and I keep expecting one of them to be disappointing, or at least mediocre. He’s written so many that I’m sure some of them are going to be. But I’m honestly kind of surprised to say that Our Friends From Frolix 8 is not one of them.

With a title like Our Friends From Frolix 8, it’s easy to walk into the reading experience with a bit of skepticism. And like a lot of Dick’s writing, the characters are a bit flat, some of the description a bit flavorless, and the dialogue a bit blunt.

But the ideas…if it were possible to see inside this man’s thought process, I’m not sure I would want to. There’s something I’ve discussed, the possibility that when one is writing, one is afraid to let go of all of those loose ideas for fear that there will never be another one. This is clearly not a belief that Philip K. Dick ever held. Each and every novel he wrote was filled to the brim with ideas, each page replete with fascinating topic after fascinating topic. And if he ever had anything more to say about a past idea, why, he’d simply return to it without any compunction.

Our Friends From Frolix 8 is about politics and morality and death and humanity and Yeats and choice. It’s about Nick Appleton, a tire regroover. His father was a tire regroover, as was his father before him. It’s the future, and the government is run by two separate parties: The Unusuals and the New Men. These two groups have evolved differently from the rest of the population, and mandatory tests are given to the rest of the people, the Old Men, to give them a chance to become a member of the two parties. But everyone believes the tests are rigged, and that the only way to get in to one of the two governmental parties is basically to have been born into them. And it turns out that this is true; that the tests are rigged, and that the people who give the tests decide on a whim who will pass and who will fail.

A two party system where the same families keep putting their offspring into office? Hm, sounds completely unfamiliar.

All of the Old Men believe a savior is coming, a man who left Earth long ago to find alien life that would be willing to come back and help him free the world from the tyranny of the New Men and the Unusuals. And he is coming back; they’re right to believe in him. He’s coming back, and he’s bringing with him an unfathomable alien being. And together they’ll free the Old Men, but to do so they’ll have to do something completely horrible.

It’s interesting that in a lesser novel, this would be the climactic moment of the novel. But the final confrontation between this savior and the New Men/Unusuals occurs off the page. This alien landing in Times Square and doing something truly evil is observed only on the television, and Nick Appleton only observes it and reflects upon what it means about the future, about the choices they’ll have to make, and about what it means about the nature of humanity.

I would love to talk about the ideas presented in Our Friends From Frolix 8 at length, but in the end it’s almost unnecessary. Just know that I highly recommend the book if you’ve any patience whatsoever for science fiction mixed in with your philosophy, because the metaphysical and political ideas presented in this novel are well worth exploring, and trip’s not so bad, either.



My favorite part:
The discussions of the corpse of the God-like organism found in deep space. Mostly unrelated to the plot, but fascinating and a perfect example of the bounty of ideas present in his works.