Voices From the Street

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**Title** **Voices From the Street**
Cover of first edition (hardcover)
Author	Philip K. Dick
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	Tor Books
Released	2007
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages	301 pp
ISBN	ISBN 0-7653-1692-7

Voices From The Street is an early novel by the late science fiction author Philip K. Dick, written c1952-53. Unpublished at the time, it was released on January 23, 2007 by Tor Books.

As with many of his early books which were considered unsuitable for publication when they were first submitted as manuscripts, this was not science fiction, but rather literary fiction. The original manuscript was 547 pages in length. There is some speculation that the unpleasant marriage in the manuscript may be an attempt by Dick to sort out his own faltering second marriage to Kleo Apostolides (1950-58), as noted in Lawrence Sutin and Emmanuel Carriere's biographies of the author.

1 Synopsis
2 Trivia
3 Bibliography
4 References

[edit] Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

According to Lawrence Sutin's book, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, (Published 1989) the plot was as follows:

"A young man, struggling with an unsatisfying job and a dreary marriage, falls into total despair when the supposed ideals of both politics and religion fail him...Jim Fergesson, the...owner of Modern TV Sales and Service, has a paternal, quarrelsome relationship with salesman Stuart Hadley, a would-be dandy in his mid-twenties who is, for all his pretensions, a lost and frightened soul whom Fergesson nicknames "Stumblebum." Hadley's wife, Ellen, with whom he has a son, bores him; once he has even struck her. Hadley adores his beautiful older sister Sally, who would protect him from the world if she could" -although she is trapped in a similarly fragile marriage with her boorish husband, Robert. (Phil's own idealized representation of his deceased sister Jane figures in this portrait). "His friends the Golds, a Jewish socialist couple, disgust him..with their victimlike ways. Hadley is drawn to strong, extreme types like Marsha Frazier, the tall, gaunt editor of the fascist literary quarterly Succubus, and Theodore Beckheim, the charismatic black preacher who heads the Society of the Watchmen of Jesus. Hadley has a bitter affair with Marsha, who resembles [Phil's own] mother Dorothy in physique and forceful temperament." Eventually, "Fergesson fires Hadley when he wanders off on an identity quest once too often. This spurs a drunken spree (likely influenced by the "Nighttown" sequence in Joyce's Ulysses) and then disaster. This takes the form of a nervous breakdown. Too late, Fergesson realises that Hadley is indispensable to his television and radio store, but Hadley and Ellen have moved house, and Hadley seems set to establish himself as an artist.

[edit] Trivia

Fergesson appeared briefly in Dick's previous novel, Gather Yourselves Together.
Fergesson appears again in Dick's later post-apocalyptic Science Fiction novel, Dr. Bloodmoney (1964), again as proprietor of a television and radio reapir shop, although he is killed in the opening stages of World War III.
Stuart Hadley returns in Dr. Bloodmoney, as a black man. (He was caucasian in Voices from the Street)
Stuart Hadley also shows up in Dick's potboiler science fiction novel, The Crack in Space. (1966) In this novel, the character is once again caucasian, and he works for Darius Pethel, who is essentially the same character as Jim Fergesson, only with a different name.

While Voices From The Street is definitely a sequel or spinoff to Gather Yourselves Together, neither Dr. Bloodmoney nor The Crack In Space could really be considered sequels, since they are mutually exclusive, and the characters make no references to incidents that took place in either Gather Yourselves Together or Voices From The Street. In this instance, the author has re-used some unpublished characters he liked and knew well, rather than linear continuation of their life stories.

Some critics argue that these various Hadleys and Fergessons are alternate world versions of each other, which would might explain their lack of memory of other incidents as well as Stuart's alternate ethnicities. However, there is no indication in any of the novels that this was his intention. In the case of Bloodmoney, Dick appears to be attempting topicality through having sympathetic black character in the book, as was characteristic of modern literary fiction at the time that it was originally written.