4 - Solar Lottery (1955)

Summary

The next novel I will discuss portrays assassination precisely in the way All the King’s Men avoids it—as a radical act in a game of empowerment and disempowerment in which every individual can attain the power that is usually perceived as reserved for a political class. In Philip K. Dick’s first novel Solar Lottery (1955), the society of six billion people on nine planets is governed by the random system of “Minimax” that determines by lottery who gets to rule as the so-called Quizmaster. Set in the twenty-third century, the plot unfolds around protagonist Ted Benteley, who, in the opening scene, has just been laid off from his bureaucratic job with one of the major corporations that hold immense power in this capitalistic society. Employment in this economy often means swearing a fealty oath that binds individuals to other persons or companies in a kind of indentured servitude, and this is how he signs on to work for Reese Verrick, the Quizmaster. Yet Verrick, surprisingly, is ousted from this office and replaced by Leon Cartwright, the leader of a religious sect. Verrick challenges Cartwright and tries to have him assassinated, which in this system of governance is a legitimate way of keeping the very powerful Quizmaster in check; in turn, the Quizmaster usually sets up defenses to protect himself and remain in office. Benteley is caught in this deadly battle but comes out literally on top as the new Quizmaster, though he is not randomly chosen at all.

In envisioning this system in which chance, power, and political violence are inextricably linked, the novel comments on its own cultural moment of Cold War conformism in which paranoia and agency panic afflict both individual and society as each increasingly distrusts the other, sometimes for very good reason. If All the King’s Men at best foreshadows this containment culture, then Solar Lottery is firmly embedded in and critically responds to it, and with this novel the genre of assassination fiction finally moves into the Cold War context in which it would thrive most prominently. While the role of each individual in the novel’s future society is determined by a classification system based on intellectual capabilities, the position of greatest power is assigned in a “great lottery”: each person has “one chance out of six billion” to be taken by a randomized twitch of a magnetic bottle to “the number One class-position” (SL 6) as Quizmaster.