In 1994, Martian union leader Arnie Kott hears of a new theory that mentally ill people are out of sync with time. He recruits a ten-year-old autistic boy, Manfred Steiner, to use his precognitive abilities for a real estate deal, and hires recovered schizophrenic Jack Bohlen to build a machine that will allow him to communicate with Manfred.
Martian Time-Slip contains examples of:
- Abandon the Disabled: Kids with physical or mental disabilities, like autistic Manfred or web-fingered Sam, are often left to be raised at Camp Ben-Gurion, an institution for anomalous children.
- All Psychology Is Freudian: The psychiatrist in the book thinks in freudian terms. Possibly justified by both it being written in the sixties and the psychiatrist not being all that competent anyway.
- Angry White Man: Arnie Kott, who despises pretty much everyone (Bleekmen, mentally ill people, people who have outsmarted him, women who aren't Doreen - and sometimes Doreen, too) and thinks they're out to get him.
- Anti-Role Model: The teachers at the public school include robotic replicas of historical villains like the Emperor Tiberius, who tell the students their life stories to discourage them from doing the same things.
- AstroTurf: Anne Esterhazy, a prominent member of a safety committee, campaigns to ban spaceships from landing more than 25 miles from a major canal. The only landing field within 25 miles of a major canal serves Arnie's settlement. Anne is Arnie's ex-wife, and the two are still good friends and business partners.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Otto, literally as he's the one to kill Arnie Kott in the end, because one of Kott's impulsive actions was destroying his livelihood.
- Conspicuous Consumption: Water is scarce on Mars, so Arnie is proud of the fact that his steam bath doesn't preserve run-off.
- Dark World: Arnie Kott uses Manfred's abilities and a Martian ritual to send himself back a few weeks into his own past so he can make a business deal, but finds he is in a hallucinatory version of the past tainted by the boy's fearful fixations on entropy and death.
- Driven to Suicide: Manfred's father Norbert impulsively throws himself in front of a bus early in the novel.
- First-Name Basis: Arnie and his employees all call each other by their first names. He insistst on it and dislikes using last names.
- Friend to Psychos: Doreen Anderton, whose brother was schizophrenic (he committed suicide) is pretty much the only character with any empathy for Jack Bohlen, who may or may not be slipping back into his schizophrenia.
- Gaia's Lament: Earth is severely overcrowded and suffers from heavy pollution.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: Both Arnie and Jack relive the same day over and over again, a cople of times, not in the right order, each time more bizarre than the last. It may be Mental Time Travel - Arnie can't change anything, despite trying to.
- Madness Mantra: "Gubble, gubble." Gubble is Manfred's word for rottenness and decay. It's also virtually the only word he's capable of saying. When Manfred sends Arnie three weeks back in time, Arnie finds out that most of the words in the newspaper have been replaced by the word "gubble." But after he averts the Bad Future waiting for him, he starts talking normally.
- Mad Oracle: What Arnie Kott thinks Manfred is and why he wants so much to communicate with the boy. In a way, that's true, but Manfred only sees one of his own possible futures (a paralyzed, dying old man in a decaying hospital - that hasn't been built yet). When this future is averted, Manfred becomes quite a bit more communicative.
- Magical Native American: The Bleekmen are telepathic. Possibly more. They're also exploited, despised and driven to alcoholism.
- Mentally Unwell, Special Senses: There's an in-universe theory that autistic people experience time in a different way, giving them precognition. It works, more or less, in Manfred's case.
- Pizza Boy Special Delivery: Otto Zitte got kicked out of the repairmen's union for having sex with bored housewives on the job. He starts doing it again after he becomes a Traveling Salesman.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: Arnie Kott is extremely racist against Bleekmen, whom he regards as subhuman animals.
- Precursors: The Bleekmen, who inhabited Mars before people arrived from Earth. They built the irrigation canals that are still in use, but their civilization has been in decline for a long time, and now they mostly live as either manual laborers or as bands of scavengers.
- Recruited from the Gutter: Arnie rescued his "tame" Bleekman, Heliogabalus, from the desert. He keeps Helio on as his slave. The two openly despise each other, but Helio sticks around because serving Arnie is better than dying of thirst.
- Space Jews: The Bleekmen resemble and are thought to be genetically similar to Africans on Earth. They're referred to by the same racial slurs, are paid below minimum wage, and are seen and treated as subhuman, although they seem as intelligent as the earthlings.
- The Tape Knew You Would Say That: This is how the robotic teachers at the public schools work. They run through "cycles," playing different canned responses for different situations.
- Through Her Stomach: Otto feeds rare and expensive foods to women he hopes to seduce.
- Traveling Salesman: Otto Zitte becomes a door-to-door salesman of black-market goods like caviar.
- Transplanted Humans: Bleekmen are explicitly stated to be genetically similar to Earth's African Aboriginals, hinting at either them of Earthlings to have been transplanted.
- Vapor Wear: Otto drools over the girls in New Israel, who work in sweaty t-shirts with no bras.
- Why Couldn't You Be Different?: Norbert Steiner is ashamed of having an autistic son. He blames his wife for being a refrigerator mother.
