Obtain Immediately A Game Of Unchance Written And Illustrated By Philip K. Dick Supplied As Online Book

Game of Unchance” is yet another example of Dicks criticism of the endless cycle of consumption, What we seem to have on the surface is an alien force, invading a planet using consumer goods, Dick wrote on this before in both “The Little Movement” and “War Game, ” In several other stories Dick warned against the malevolent character of blind consumerism, This story also fits nicely alongside the novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch in its portrayal of the tedious banality of life on the Martian frontier, One reason the carnival is so easily able to trap the people of the Martian settlement is that their life is so horribly boring, Anything out of the ordinary awakens their life just a bit, It is not just that they hope they can find something they need in the prizes offered by the carnival, They are also attracted to the freaks, the food, and most importantly the women, Mars seems to be a place where sexual desire between spouses reaches their ultimate end,

Now, while the military rightfully sees these offworld carnivals are a military threat, they do not understand the entire scheme, They see only that the carnival leaves behind small robots that kill livestock, poison the soil, and otherwise make agricultural life impossible, They do not realize that this carnival is apparently followed by another one maybe the same company under a different banner, selling traps, They are not really invaders, They are just manufacturing needs, for the big payout later, Manufactured needs is something that people living in the late capitalist world do not need a detailed lesson in,

Dicks mutants are continuing their path toward becoming less and less heroic, As with “Captive Market” we find people with amazing abilities using their talents to cheat at carnival games, For people raised on superheroes it is hard to understand, but I find Dicks interpretation of posthuman mutants using their abilities to make a quick buck the most believable.
We live in a world where an incredible amount of

talent is being used to enrich corporations, devastate the environment, and degrade the worth of human beings, What reason is there to believe mutants would do more with their abilities, " “A Game of Unchance”
Circuses, microbs, fake goods, traps,

Opening line:
While rolling a fiftygallon drum of water from the canal to his potato garden, Bob Turk heard the roar, glanced up into the haze of the midafternoon Martian sky and saw the great blue interplan ship.

In the excitement he waved, And then he read the words painted on the side of the ship and his joy became alloyed with care, Because this great pitted hull, now lowering itself to a rearend landing, was a carny ship, come to this region of the fourth planet to transact business,
The painting spelled out:

FALLING STAR ENTERTAINMENT ENTERPRISES
PRESENTS
FREAKS, MAGIC, TERRIFYING STUNTS, AND WOMEN!

The final word had been painted largest of all.

The Spiral of Needs

A Game of Unchance was published in the science fiction magazine Amazing in, and it is another example of how critical PKD was of our capitalist consumer society.


The setting is a Martian colony, which, with its farmlife, its closeness to nature at first sight would not qualify as the perfect embodiment of a community tending towards blind consumerism.
Albeit, the work is monotonous and mindnumbing, there is little fun, little excitement, and so the farmers and their families jump at every opportunity promising some entertainment and respite from daytoday routine.
This is offered by a blue carnival spaceship that appears and whose crew set up a funfair with candy cotton, carousels, alluring women and even more alluring games of chance.
In one of these games of chance, our little community of Martian settlers wins a prize they have not bargained for, a kind of Greek gift figurines that will soon turn out as microbs set on the destruction of the farmers lifestock and water supplies.


Despite the warning of a UN security officer never any more to meddle with carnivals from out of space, the farmers, now reduced to despair and the hardiness that usually goes with it, have another go at the next carnival ship now a red, not a blue one that comes to their planet, and again there is a prize that attracts their attention: This time its traps that are specially made to deal with the highlyintelligent and swift microbs which have been pestering the farmers.


This in an opportunity no one would let go,


While reading this story one should not fall into the same perception pattern the UN officials both General Mozart, the military man, and General Wolff, the even more arrogant secret service guy have adopted.
These men regard the carneys as insidious invaders who are bent on taking the Martian colonies away from Terra and on eventually occupying Terra itself, and thats why the UNs ultimate goal is not so much to protect their Martian settlements but to forestall any forays the invaders might make towards Terra.
For these people to think and view the case entirely in the categories they deal with every day may surely come with the territory, but they are barking up the wrong tree.


What is going on here is certainly some kind of invasion but not of the military kind: The first carnival with the stuff it left behind paved the way for the second carnival most probably these were working in conjunction , where the settlers could get the antidote, once again by risking what surplus they had created through their labour.
The idea behind it is not very farfetched when you look at all the things around your household that you have bought because you already had some other things which could be enhanced luckily, in our world, its more a question of enhancing and improving and hardly ever of counteracting with the help of new and better products.
Dick might, in a way, be describing the smartphone mania here, where people feel driven to buy themselves a new device every year although the old one is still working, simply because they feel they can no longer lead a life worth living with the antemodel.
Saying that the old smartphone is still working has to be qualified: I think one of their purposes is to fall onto the floor and get a crack across the screen, because it happens so often.
You could have dropped your old mobile phone as often as you liked, and it wouldnt have been the worse for that, but those smartphones break, even in their cases, probably because they are designed that way.


In PKDs story, the microbs are doing real harm, but our economy has alread learned to thrive on fears that are often merely imagined for instance, the fear of social isolation or loss of prestige.
In that respect, our economy is even superior to or, from Dicks point of view, more exploitative of it consumers than the carneys in A Game of Unchance.
You fully realize how dependent you really are on things that are, strictly speaking, hardly necessary once they dont work any more: A couple of years ago the radio in my car broke down, and when I asked how much it would be to replace it, the price I was told seemed the one for a new car to me.
To cut a long story short, I decided to leave the car radio as it was i, e. broken, silent, kaputt and after a fortnight or so I did not miss the constant radio shower any more, It is not necessary, only you have to realize,

Imagine the feeling that usurps your soul when your smartphone gives up its unholy ghost, In such a situation, it would be wise to tell yourself that you are worrying about the loss of a thing that you did not miss, nor ever even wasted a thought on, fifteen years ago.
That will probably not soothe you, but surely make you feel like a fool, And then its patience that is wanted
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