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The Secret Ascension (Misc)
Series: Misc
Genre: SF
ISBN: 0312930313
Publisher: Tor
Reader Rating: Not rated
The Secret Ascension by Michael Bishop

Description: The U.S. has a permanent moonbase, Richard M. Nixon is in the fourth term of the "imperial Presidency", and an obscure novelist named Philip K. Dick has just died in California. Dick was the author of such well-regarded works as In Milton Lumky Territory and Confessions of a Crap Artist, but late in his life a number of strange manuscripts by him, unpublished, rejected everywhere, get into samizdat circulation, works of science fictional satire and social allegory that mean a great deal to their underground audience. Dick is a hero to them - and now he's dead.

And then he returns, lacking his memory, walks into a psychiatrist's office in small town Georgia asking for help, just in from the airport, with a cab waiting outside, meter running. Lia Pickford, M.D., is nonplussed, especially when Dick fades into nothingness and disappears, leaving the fare unpaid on the taxi. But Cal Pickford, a fan stunned by the news of his hero's death, is electrified when his wife tells him about it.

So begins a sequence of events that involves Cal in the repressive politics of the Nixon regime, the affairs of an aging movie queen, a hip but frightened Vietnamese immigrant and an old black man who works as a groom, leading up to a fateful meeting with Dick, Cal and Nixon himself on the Moon.

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