Phillip K. Dick - The World Jones Made

The World Jones Made (1956) is one of Philip K. Dick’s most unsettling mid-century visions—a cynical, dizzying meditation on freedom, control, and the curse of prophecy.

Set a century after a devastating world war, humanity now lives under a one-world government enforcing “Relativism”—the idea that no belief can be held as absolute truth. Into this sterile, pacified order strides Floyd Jones, a one-eyed demagogue who can literally see one year into the future. His gift—or curse—turns him into a populist prophet, rallying the disillusioned masses and terrifying the authorities who can’t outmaneuver a man who already knows what they’ll do next.

Dick threads the novel with grim ironies: a government that suppresses belief to preserve peace, and a prophet who weaponizes certainty to spark chaos. The result is part political satire, part metaphysical nightmare. Mutant “drifters,” alien life forms, and looming cosmic threats blur the line between science fiction and theological allegory, pushing the question: if you could see the future, could you ever be free?

Bleak, prophetic, and unnervingly modern, The World Jones Made reads like an early sketch of the paranoia and authoritarian dread that would later define Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and A Scanner Darkly—a world not built by gods, but by the desperate and the deluded.