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UPDATE: A large-ish image (750 x 1000) of Joe McKay's piece has been added and linked to in the post where it's discussed.
Don Wollheim Was Right: Philip K. Dick's: The Unteleported Man (AKA Lies, Inc.)
Philip K. Dick originally wrote The Unteleported Man (his title) as a 40,000 word novella for magazine publication, around '63-'64. It's a fairly tightly written, straightforward science fiction story about an Earth colony world that turns out to be a bleak garrison state rather than the pleasant place to immigrate advertised on TV (Dick claims he wrote it to go with a piece of cover art the publisher had acquired). It's not his best work, but has a good paranoid premise and features his classic "little guy" character with entrepreneurial dreams, who is dead broke and harassed by "creditor balloons." The morals are (a) governments should always monitor corporate activities (they might disguise a coup d'etat) and (b) the "good German" still exists after Nazism (which needed to be said forty years ago, one supposes). Ace Books asked Dick to expand the story, so in 1965 he wrote about seven chapters of hallucinogenic, parallel worlds nonsense ranging from brilliant to self-indulgent. Ace editor Donald Wollheim rightly rejected this material: unlike other Dick novels that contain dreamlike passages (Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Martian Time Slip), these chapters couldn't be artfully integrated into the existing nuts and bolts story, logically or dream-logically.1 The rejection nevertheless angered Dick, and after Ace went out of business, he planned to combine the original novel with the extra chapters. He hadn't completed the necessary rewrites before his death, however. Since then, publishers have released three flawed versions of the book, in a combination, I would say, of misplaced Dick-worship and the desire to cash in on every nugget of his work since he has become "hot property" in Hollywood.
There are essentially four published versions of this novel:
(1) The original 40,000 word novella, released by Ace Books as a "double" in 1966 and 1972. The title is The Unteleported Man ("TUM").
(2) A posthumous 1983 edition published by Berkley, with the "expansion chapters" originally rejected by Ace. Also titled TUM. The Berkley editor somewhat arbitrarily stuck this material (with three manuscript pages missing) at the end of the original novella, even though Dick had been working on a revised chapter order at the time of his death.
(3) A 1984 British edition titled Lies, Inc. ("LI"). This was Dick's uncompleted 1979 rework (not used by the Berkley editor for the 1983 edition), still with missing pages (only two now because he had shortened the expansion material). Science fiction writer John Sladek was hired to write connective material to fill the gaps.
(4) The 2004 edition of LI, including the expansion material and Dick's 1979 rewrites, but with the original missing pages restored after they turned up in the papers of the estate in 1985.
Most of this is explained in ex-executor Paul Williams' afterward to the 2004 edition. Aaron Barlow's online thesis chapter exhaustively outlines the differences between the 1983 TUM and the 1984 LI. Both Williams and Barlow are ardent fans and never seem to question whether it was proper to release or even consider the "expanded" novella as a finished work. While it's true the missing pages have been restored, they were unavailable to Dick when he did his 1979 revamp. Moreover, he never ultimately approved "Lies, Inc." before he died. In '79 he decided to insert the expansion material about 2/3 of the way through (completely destroying the flow of the original novella), wrote a new first chapter (not as good), and did some chopping and rewriting, but he never finished the project. Ultimately what the publishers are calling LI is a flawed or failed bit of posthumous writing: the reading public would be better served to have the original novella re-released and the expansion material and rewrites included in appendices, like DVD extras.
1. In the 1983 TUM, Rachmael is shot with an "LSD-tipped dart" after he goes through the teleporter to the garrison world to rescue Freya, and the resulting hallucinatory description is excellent, but the rest of the expansion material is meandering and meaningless, plot-wise (although there is much thoughtful and clever writing). In both editions of LI, Rachmael goes through the teleporter several chapters earlier, at a point when he is supposedly in a starship on his way to Fomalhaut. The feeble parallel world foreshadowing in the added first chapter just isn't enough explanation to justify this glaring non-sequitur. Only the most loyal fan will try to defend the hallucinatory chapters as somehow proceeding from--or subverting--the core novel.