14. Philip K. Dick, Now Wait for Last Year

This story takes place in and around the year 2055 when the world is allied with the heartless people of Lilistar in an all out inter-planetary war against the reegs.  The world's capital is located in Cheyenne, WY and the world's leader, the UN Secretary, is a guy who goes by the nickname the Mole.  The story follows the lives of Virgil Ackerman, the vein older wartime profiteer;  Dr. Eric Sweetscent and his wife Kathy, the kind man and the shrill woman caught in a loveless marriage;  and the Mole, the calculating but misunderstood good leader of the world.

The Lilstar spies who have posted themselves throughout the world begin to introduce a potent drug, intended to be a weapon to be used against the reegs, called JJ-180 to selected humans.  Kathy is one of their victims.  Once taken, the drug transports the user either backwards, forwards or laterally in time and, after the high is over, unless the user takes another dose it slowly shuts down the user's liver until he dies.  In this way it is instantaneously addictive.  Kathy takes the drug one night and is blackmailed to join her husband, who by now has become one of the surgeons taking care of the Mole, in order to spy on both her husband and the Mole.

Desperate to feed her habit, Kathy shows up in Cheyenne and drops a JJ-180 pill in her husband's water and gets him addicted to the drug.  He then secures a supply of the drug for Kathy and returns her to the west coast and then sets off to find the antidote for the drug by taking the drug, traveling into the future and buying the cure.  In the mean time he discovers that the Mole has been prolonging his rule over the people by traveling laterally in time using JJ-180 and bringing other Moles back with him to replace him each time he dies in the current time line.

The story is made more complex by both Eric's search for a peaceful end to the war as he bounces back and forth in time and the Mole's complex strategy of staying in power using his counterparts from other time lines.

In this short book Philip K. Dick weaves a futuristic war time political thriller and a psychological drama together with a group of diverse and eccentric characters into one coherent story line.  Then he adds a lot of depth to all of the characters, even the minor ones, by, for example, giving them telepathic or pre-cognitive skills.  It is this complex weave which makes this one of the better PKD stories that I have read.  I urge you to pick it up as soon as you can.