What can I say about The Simulacra?
It's about a dystopian future where society is divided into two layers, the Be's and the Ge's. The Ge's are the ones in control, the ones who know the secret. The Be's are the lower class, much as the worker bees in a hive with the queen on top.
In this case Nicole Thibodeaux is that queen. She's a woman who doesn't seem to age and whose always the First Lady. Every four years the president changes, but it seems that with the post of ruling the USEA (I'll come to that) comes a marriage to Nicole as well.
It's for her that the Be's do what they do.
What about the USEA? It's not an America we know, but an alternate reality where the US and Germany have fused together.
There's more than that alone that makes this story quite chaotic.
Equipment to travel in time is available to the Ge's. Neanderthals have resurfaced. And flying to Mars is possible with home made rockets.
Oh and psycho-analysis is forbidden by law. Mental illness needs to be cured by drugs only.
Actually the USEA is ruled by a number of kartels, (AG Chemie, Karp Sohn und Werken,..) and how they face their own extinction.
Still, pretty chaotic. But I did like it, just the part about the influence of Germany is a bit too WWII for me. It's understandable, since the effects of the war had to be still omnipresent when this novel was written and I noticed this morbid fascination in other novels of him too.
I think you can compare it with the tendency of James Bond movies to make Russia the big bad evil during the cold war.
Germany is an easy villiain, surely when Philip K Dick wrote this novel.
