�Sorry.�

And maybe.

� � Who was that last guy again?�

Long before his �Blade Runner� changed the face of big screen science fiction, Philip K Dick was burning up the keyboard. Dick�s alien landscape of paranoia and surrealism, his frenetic unraveling of social structure and his screwball slant on the future touched nerves that no one ever touched before. What we don�t know will kill us, what we count on never counted at all.

So, OK, sci-fi, who reads it, right? Mere grist for the loosely grounded, dismissed out of hand but for Asimov and Ellison.

Or so it seemed.

Dick is currently enjoying a pop revival, not personally of course, (he died in 1982), but commercially. Among Dick�s novels currently in re-release is �Voices From the Street�, written in 1952 and, as befitting the visionary, promptly deemed unpublishable. �Voices� is one of a half dozen proletarian-realist novels penned before Dick�s submersion in the sci-fi genre. One thing is certain, I�ve never read anything like it.

Stuart Hadley is a 25 year-old television salesman in Oakland California. As postwar exuberance fades and real life settles in Hadley suffers the pangs of alienation that will mark his generation. Newly married with a baby son, Hadley feels trapped on a low rung of the American dream. He cycles between wanting to make it and wanting out and his search for life�s substance threatens to undo him. Desperate to connect he hooks up with one Marsha Frazer, mistress to the charismatic cult leader, Theodore Beckheim. Hadley wants to believe, but Beckheim�s message fails to save him and his world dissolves into violence and madness.

Life out of balance, an early take on a dominant theme. From Bellow to Malamud, James Jones to Keruoac the struggle to signify haunts us still,

Dick�s own mercurial imbalance gives his words the ring of insight. He saw what was coming and what it would do to him. �Voices From The Street� is Dick at his bare bones best, no parallel universe, no space invaders, just real life scaring the crap out of you. Dick�s voice speaks to the crippled spirit. His work endures even if he didn�t.

Tom Larsen has been writing fiction for ten years and his work has appeared in Newsday, New Millennium Writing, Puerto del Sol and Antietam Review. His short story "Lids" was included in Best American Mystery Stories - 2004. He lives in Lambertville, NJ with his wife Andree and Langley the cat. It's just not the same around there since Elaine and Sue moved away.