A Scanner Darkly Philip K. Dick,
Publisher: Orion Pub Co
ISBN: 1857988477
Edition: Paperback; 1999-09-30
Summary:
Mind - and reality-bending drugs factor again and again in Philip K.
Dick's hugely influential SF stories. A Scanner Darkly cuts closest
to the bone, drawing on Dick's own experience with illicit chemicals
and on his many friends who died from drug abuse. Nevertheless, it's
blackly farcical, full of comic-surreal conversations between people
whose synapses are partly fried, sudden flights of paranoid logic,
and bad trips like the one whose victim spends a subjective eternity
having all his sins read to him, in shifts, by compound-eyed aliens.
(It takes 11,000 years of this to reach the time when as a boy he
discovered masturbation.) The antihero Bob Arctor is forced by his
double life into warring double personalities: as futuristic
narcotics agent "Fred," face blurred by a high-tech scrambler, he
must spy on and entrap suspected drug dealer Bob Arctor. His
disintegration under the influence of the insidious Substance D is
genuine tragicomedy. For Arctor there's no way off the addict's
downward escalator, but what awaits at the bottom is a kind of
redemption--there are more wheels within wheels than we suspected,
and his life is not entirely wasted. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk
Book Details:
Edition Info: Paperback; 1999-09-30
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