Now Wait for Last Year

Now Wait for Last Year is a science fiction novel by the American writer Philip K. Dick, published in 1966.

Eric Sweetscent's work is to replace failing organs, and his most important patient is the leader of a world government that is losing a war and hiding how badly, so his professional life is already a study in dependency before the drug enters it. The substance produces effects that look like travel into the future and into alternative arrangements of the same life, and the novel follows Eric as he tries to work out whether what he experiences under its influence is prediction, invention or instruction. Dick's interest is not in the mechanics but in the politics of knowing: a man who has seen a version of next year has to decide what to do with the information and whether doing anything at all is possible. The Tijuana Fur and Dye company, which built its business on an amoeba that copies the structure of whatever it touches, is the other thread, and its owner's recreations of his own boyhood are among the book's strangest inventions. This is one of five novels from Dick's most productive period chosen for the Library of America's second volume of his work.