I was a member of the Quality Paperback Book Club for a number of years. Back in 1995, the Quality Paperback Book Club offered this omnibus edition featuring three class Science Fiction novels: John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), I Am Legend (1955) by Richard Matheson, and Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint (1959).
I read The Day of the Triffids after I was freaked out by the 1962 film version. The British SF writers of that era specialized in catastrophic novels where the Earth was imperiled and The Day of the Triffids–with the horrific situation of most people in the world blinded by an apparent meteor shower and then an aggressive species of plant begins killing people–was enough to give me nightmares for months.
Yes, I Am Legend freaked me out, too! After the outbreak of a pandemic that has killed the rest of the human population and turned infected survivors into “vampires”. Once again, I read the novel after seeing the 1964 movie, The Last Man on Earth. More movie versions followed: The Omega Man (1971), and I Am Legend (2007).
I read Time Out of Joint around 1960. I’d read plenty of Philip K. Dick short stories and loved the quirkiness of his Science Fiction. The title is a reference to Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. The line is uttered by Hamlet after being visited by his father’s ghost and learning that his uncle Claudius murdered his father:
“The time is out of joint; O cursed spite!/That ever I was born to set it right!” [I.V.211-2])
Ragle Gumm lives in the year 1959 in a quiet American town. His unusual profession consists of repeatedly winning the cash prize in a national newspaper contest called “Where Will The Little Green Man Be Next?”. But Gumm’s world starts to unravel as Philip K. Dick creates a world where nothing is as it seems. Paranoid, indeed!
I read all three of these novels in my teens so it was fun to revisit them. Are you familiar with these “paranoid” SF novels? GRADE: A (for all three novels)