"Solar Lottery" by Philip K. Dick

An ingenious, frenetically paced book crammed full of fascinating ideas. This was Dick's first published novel yet it doesn't feel like it. He jumped into writing with his style and his themes fully formed. That's not to say this isn't rough - but all of his stories are rough. For me that is a big part of their appeal. It feels like he wrote this in a white heat and then immediately had it published, screw any rewriting. It has so much energy! And talent to burn. I've always found it hard to write about Dick (but not about dick) because anything I'd want to tease out or explore is already right there between the pages, blatant. His ideas are front and center: the human struggle to be an individual rather than a cog in the machine and the equally human desire to just have a relaxed, pleasant life; mega-structures like governments and corporations that hold complete dominion but still function like slot machines or a roulette wheel or a bad yet very funny dream; a world of predetermined lives where everyone, high and low, is still prey to luck and randomization - it is the person who can figure out a system deciphering that randomness who often wins.

My favorite part of the book was an outstanding sequence in which an android assassin attempts to carry out a hit - a blank slate of an assassin whose decisions are made by a multitude of minds jumping in and out of its body, changing directions and plans abruptly with each new mind, confounding its telepathic pursuers with every new and surprising decision. a breathless and very exciting scene. (Mark Monday, GoodReads)

The operating principle was random selection: positions of public power were decided by a sophisticated lottery and when the magnetic lottery bottle twitched, anyone could become the absolute ruler of the world, the Quizmaster.

But with the power came the game – the assassination game – which everyone could watch on TV. Would the new man be good enough to evade his chosen killer? Which made for fascinating and exciting viewing, compelling enough to distract the public’s attention while the Big Five industrial complexes ran the world. Then, in 2203, with the choice of a member of a maverick cult as Quizmaster, the system developed a little hitch…