Now Wait for Last Year

Now Wait for Last Year is a 1966 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. It is set in 2055, when Earth is caught between two galactic powers in an interstellar conflict. Dr. Eric Sweetscent and his wife Kathy get addicted to a powerful drug that appears to cause time travel. The doctor's patient is the world leader, UN Secretary General. Of the twenty-eight novels Dick published in the 1960s and 1970s, this novel is one of the five chosen to represent this period of his career in The Library of America series, Volume Two.
Dr. Eric Sweetscent has problems. His planet is enmeshed in an unwinnable war. His wife is lethally addicted to a drug that whips its users helplessly back and forth across time -- and is hell-bent on making Eric suffer along with her. And Sweetscent's newest patient is not only the most important man on the embattled planet Earth but quite possibly the sickest. For Secretary Gino Molinari has turned his mortal illness into an instrument of political policy -- and Eric cannot tell if his job is to make the Male better or to keep him poised just this side of death.Now Wait for Last fear bursts through the envelope between the impossible and the inevitable. Even as ushers us into a future that looks uncannily LIKE the present, it makes the normal seem terrifyingly provisional -- and compels anyone who reads it to wonder if he really knows what time it is.From the Trade Paperback edition.