 As with many of his early books which were considered unsuitable for publication when they were first submitted as manuscripts, this was not science fiction, but rather literary fiction.The original manuscript was 547 pages in length.There is some speculation that the unpleasant marriage in the manuscript may be an attempt by Dick to sort out his own faltering second marriage to Kleo Apostolides (1950–58), as noted in Lawrence Sutin and Emmanuel Carriere's biographies of the author.