After seeing many of the movies (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly... ) that brought Dick the posthumous fame and commercial success that eluded him in his lifetime, I finally got my hands on one of his books. Unfortunately, clearly not his best one.

Lies, Inc. starts out quite interesting: Over-crowded Planet Earth in the future. Rachmael Ben Applebaum is an inter-stellar shipping entrepreneur whose business is ruined when teleportation is invented. It now only takes fifteen minutes to reach the recently discovered Earth-like planet Whale's Mouth. People emigrate to Whale's Mouth by the millions, while almost no one is suspicious of the fact that the teleportation technology works only one way, and the only information about the new paradise are the shiny advertisements issued by the company that runs the teleporters. Applebaum figures that there must be some people wanting to a return trip and decides to set out on the eighteen year flight with his last remaining vessel. Since this is a Dick novel, he is also plagued by hallucinations about being a rat.

So far, so good. This first part of the book had been previously published, with the second part having being rejected by the editor at the time. Turns out, the editor made a good call. The extra material is very difficult to read, and probably not worth the effort. It describes Applebaum's (I think, even that is hard to tell, as the character names seem to change) experiences after being hit by an LSD dart, is very incoherent and not much related to the rest of the book. After this part is finished, the novel drops back into the original storyline and brings it to a rather sudden, unsatisfying end.

Part Two: The Banana Stand keeps the fruit within reach.