Philip K. Dick Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After The Bomb (1965)
Like We Can Build You, another novel existing somewhere in the grey area between Dick's science-fiction and his mainstream writing. This one concerns itself with the hang-ups, social dynamics, hopes, fears, madnesses of a small Northern California community, and primarily with that - looking closely one will notice that their world is post-apocalyptic: there is no electricity, food, coffee and cigarettes are scarce, media is a single daily broadcast by an astronaut who has become trapped in orbit, stuck inside a module that should have taken him to Mars five years earlier, oh.... and sharing this world are the likes of Hoppy Harrington, an armless and legless telekinetic who can see the future, Jack Tree who nearly brings about a second apocalypse by thinking about it just a bit too hard, and Bill Keller - an unborn twin buried within his sister's body who communicates with the dead.
It's a testament to Dick's great skill that he can throw some of this sort of stuff into the mix, render it as no less bizarre than it would be, and still give it equal billing to more prosaic events such as, for example, Stuart McConchie discovering that somebody ate his horse. In terms of post-apocalyptic fiction, it could be argued that this is far from the greatest, the most credible, or even the greatest of Dick's novels (Deus Irae probably beats it in terms of events after the bomb) in the genre, but it weaves the preposterous and improbable into something approaching a soap opera and really does give a good demonstration of how this guy could leave other writers standing when he really pulled out the stops.
