minds are alternately embedded for the purpose of breaking any steady telepathic lock on the assassin. Cartwright ultimately kills Verrick, and Benteley, much to his own astonishment, becomes the next Quizmaster. A second plotline concerns a team of Leon Cartwright's followers travelling to the far reaches of the solar system in search of a mysterious cult figure named John Preston, who, 150 years after his disappearance, is thought to somehow be alive on the legendary tenth planet known as the "Flame Disc". Publishing history Dick completed the first draft of Solar Lottery in March 1954. In December he completed a second draft at the request of Ace Books Editor Donald Wollheim, cutting six passages totalling as much as ten thousand words and adding perhaps seven thousand. In the meantime, however, the book had been sold to a publisher in the UK, where it appeared as World of Chance: this version includes the cut passages. However, the entire text of this version was severely copyedited, with wholesale eliminations of adjectives. When Solar Lottery was first published in the United States by Ace Books, as one half of Ace Double D-103 in May 1955, it was bound dos-à-dos with The Big Jump by Leigh Brackett. The Ace Double edition ran 131 pages. Ace published a standard-format edition of the novel in 1959, running 188 pages. Its 1968 reissue, also running 188 pages, was labelled, misleadingly in view of the existence of the UK edition, "Complete & Unabridged". Reception Reviewing the Ace Double, Anthony Boucher praised the novel as "built up with the detail of a Heinlein and the satire of a Kornbluth". Declaring that Dick had created "a strange and highly convincing and self-consistent future society," he faulted Solar Lottery only for "a tendency, in both its nicely contrasted plots, to dwindle away at the end". Reviewing a 1977 reissue, Robert Silverberg noted that the novel's final revelation "looks forward to the cynicism of the radicalized Dick of the 1960s". Sources Disch, Thomas, "Towards the Transcendent: An Introduction to Solar Lottery and Other Works", Philip K. Dick, eds. Olander and Greenberg, New York: Taplinger, 1983, pp. 13–24. Gallo, Domenico. “La lotteria del sistema solare”, in Trasmigrazioni: I mondi di Philip K. Dick, a c. di V.M. De Angelis e U. Rossi. Firenze, Le Monnier, 2006, pp. 115–22. References External links Solar Lottery cover gallery 1955 American novels 1955 science fiction novels Ace