Dr. Adder

Dr. Adder is a dark science fiction novel by K. W. Jeter set in a future where the United States has largely broken down into reluctantly cooperating enclaves run by a wide variety of strongmen and warlords, with a veneer of government control that seems largely interested in controlling technology. Dr. Adder is an artist-surgeon, who modifies sexual organs of his patients to satisfy the weirdest of perversion; he is clearly depicted as a partly criminal, partly counter-cultural figure in a future Los Angeles which anticipates the cyberpunk idea of the Sprawl.

Dr. Adder is Jeter's debut novel. It was originally completed in 1972, and then published in 1984 by Bluejay Books — the first fictional work it ever published — with illustrations by Matt R. Howarth.

According to Philip K. Dick, the publication of this book was delayed for a decade due to the extreme violence and graphic sex, and but for this delay "its impact on the field would have been enormous."

The novel also features an unconventional DJ, called Radio KCID, a science-fictional portrait of one of Jeter's friends, Philip K. Dick (the call sign is an anagram of DICK). KCID is an old man living in Rattown, a future L.A. slum; he has a small portable transmitter, which turns him into a mobile radio station. He mostly plays old records of German opera such as Alban Berg's Wozzeck, an important element of the novel, but he also broadcasts pieces of news which mainstream media do not want to broadcast.

The novel is heavily indebted to the counterculture of the 1960s. "[KCID] had some sort of process worked out, an oracle or something. It had to do with randomly generated numbers — he had a little box, a minicomputer that lit up with seven- or eight-digit figures, I think. He told me when he had enough data worked into the system he could predict any series of events connected to Adder, a few minutes before each event actually occurred..." (Jeter, 131). This is a hint at I Ching, the Chinese oracular book Dick used to compose his 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle, but also a popular reading in the counter-cultural 1960s.