Dayworld

Dayworld

First edition
Author	Philip José Farmer
Cover artist	Don Ivan Punchatz
Country	USA
Language	English
Series	Dayworld
Genre	Science Fiction
Publisher	Putnam Publishing Group
Publication date	1985
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback), Ebook (Adobe Acrobat & MS Reader)
Pages	320 p. (paperback edition)
ISBN	0-399-12967-7 (paperback edition)
OCLC	11133683
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 19
LC Class	PS3556.A72 D34 1985
Followed by	Dayworld Rebel, 1987

Plot summary

Dayworld is the first in the Dayworld trilogy of science fiction novels by Philip José Farmer, inspired by his own acclaimed short story The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World. The story is set in a dystopian future in which an overpopulated world solves the problem by allocating people only one day per week. For the rest of the six days they are 'stoned,' a kind of suspended animation. The novels focus on a man, Jeff Caird, who is a daybreaker, someone who lives more than one day a week. He is not like most daybreakers; he belongs to a government defying group called the “Immers”. The Immers are a very large and powerful group that works to create a better government. Not all Immers are daybreakers, so to get messages and information from one day to the next, they have daybreakers, like Jeff, to work in every day. The daybreakers of the Immers assume seven different personalities and seven different jobs. They slip from culture to culture, in seven different worlds.

As Jeff goes day to day, he runs into problems while working as an Immer and as a daybreaker, and must cover his tracks, all while trying to keep up with his seven different lives, families, friends, and jobs. Eventually the stress makes Jeff unstable, and the Immers must dispose of him to keep the rest of the Immers safe. Jeff, wanting to live, tries to escape the Immers, but there are undercover Immers in every job, area, and government level. Jeff is caught and put in a sort of insane asylum, classified with “multiple personality disorder”, for the legal time before he can be considered “incurable” and killed. But Jeff has an escape plan…

Awards and recognition

Nominated for the Locus Award (1986 - Best SF Novel: 23rd).^[1]

There are two sequels to this novel: Dayworld Rebel, published in 1987 and Dayworld Breakup, published in 1990.

References