Mass-market Monday | Philip K. Dick’s Solar Lottery

Solar Lottery, Philip K. Dick. Ace Books, first edition, second printing (1959). Cover art by Ed Valigursky. 188 pages.

Here is a summary from this edition’s first page:

WINNER TAKE THE WORLD!

By the summer of 2203, Ted Benteley managed to break away from his old Industrial Hill oath and was free at last to offer himself in new bondage to Quizmaster Verrick. Of course, like everyone else on Earth, Ted held a ticket on the great lottery that could suddenly make him the next quizmaster with the whole world as his possession, but he could hardly figure on that one chance in six billion!

What Bentley didn’t realize when he went to swear himself forever to Verrick was that the lottery was about to take a wilder turn than ever before, one that would make Benteley himself the deciding factor in a power game of truly cosmic proportions!

Philip K. Dick’s first-published novel, Solar Lottery (1955) is hardly his finest work (even as it points to his later themes). Neither is Ed Valigursky’s pulp fiction cover especially creative, at least when compared with the dozens of covers that came after. But I figured today’s solar eclipse made Solar Lottery a nice pick for an inaugural series where I kinda sorta go through all the mass-market paperbacks I can’t seem to get rid of and post something about them. Many if not most of the mass-market paperbacks I own were, at least on their first go around, marketed in genre ghettos, assuring that they actually got cool art and interesting designs—even if Valigursky’s hammy space dude cover can’t match, say, the Cronenberg vibes of Edward Soyka’s cover for Collier’s 1992 reprint, it’s still more interesting and human than the handsome, sterile series of PKD reprints Mariner Books did in the 2010s which seemed to scream, No, this isn’t really sci-fi, this is literature!