One of the stand-out novels in Philip K. Dick's career of wildly reality-bending SF, Martian Time- Slip convinces by placing its insanities in a quiet, even domestic context.

Here colonised Mars has a flavour of grubby, struggling 1950s suburbia, where money (not to mention water) is in short supply, jobs are insecure, the humour's mostly black, and small tragedies like one minor character's suicide cause far-ranging ripples. The good old human comedy of lies, power-play, real-estate deals and extramarital naughtiness continues as ever - all distorted by the real SF factor, an autistic child's dislocated sense of time.

In one memorable scene he sketches the glorious new Martian housing project just being planned... but as it will look a century later, a decayed slum. So powerful are this boy's visions of nightmare futures that they suck in other people and infect them with sick images of the "gubbish worm", an appalling symbol of entropy. Gubbish devours beauty and reduces language itself to meaningless gubble-gubble. The very human and occasionally even likeable villain Arnie Kott plans to exploit this time-twisting ability, whereupon things become very tangled indeed.

SF Masterworks #13