- Paperback: 288 pages
- Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (Dec 3 1991)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0679736654
- ISBN-13: 978-0679736653
- Product Dimensions: 13.1 x 1.8 x 20.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 222 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (76 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #187,199 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
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
From Publishers Weekly
America in the near future has lost the war against drugs. Though the government tries to protect the upper class, the system is infested with undercover cops like Fred, who regularly ingests the popular Substance D as part of his ruse. The drug has caused Fred to develop a split personality, of which he is not aware; his alter ego is Bob, a drug dealer. Fred's superiors then set up a hidden holographic camera in his home as part of a sting operation against Bob. Though he appears on camera as Bob, none of Fred's co-workers catch on: since Fred, like all undercover police, wears a scramble suit that constantly changes his appearance, his colleagues don't know what he looks like. The camera in Fred/Bob's apartment reveals that Bob's intimates regularly betray one another for the chance to score more drugs. Even Donna, a young dealer whom Bob/Fred loves, prefers the drug to human contact. Originally published in 1977, the out-of-print novel comes frighteningly close to capturing the U.S. in 1991, in terms of the drug crisis and the relationships between the sexes. But the unrelenting scenes among the addicts make it a grueling read.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
A masterpiece,
By Anton PANAITESCO (Montreal) - See all my reviews
This review is from: A Scanner Darkly (Paperback)
This book is one of my all time favourites, I've read it over and over again.The world described by M. Dick is wicked and mad, leaving hardly any hopes for healthy minds to survive. The downfall of the hero throughout the book is described in a subtle way. It is a must-read.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dick's dark night,
By Doug Mackey (Fairfield, IA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: A Scanner Darkly (Paperback)
Among Dick's 45 or so novels, A Scanner Darkly is his dark night of the soul, and is based on one of the lowest points in his life-his involvement with drugs and hard-drug users in 1970-72. Although Dick's characters had rarely been two-dimensional before, in this novel they clearly take on flesh, and for him it was a breakthrough. The dialogue is street talk of the late 1970s, gritty and realistic; the setting is Southern California, and though nominally science fiction, the sf elements are minimal. The conversations of the characters reflect, often humorously, their derangement and deterioration from the use of drugs. The main character is both a narcotics agent and an addict of the hallucinogenic Substance D, nicknamed "Death." The split in his personality finally brings him to a crisis and entry into a drug rehabilitation center. The whole story is told with great compassion, which makes the pessimism somewhat bearable. On the whole this is not a happy book. But it is compelling, real, and incredibly deeply felt. Most readers of PKD, I believe, tend to rank this near the top of the list of all his books.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Let Them Play Again,
By Storm (Leuven, Belgium) - See all my reviews
This review is from: A Scanner Darkly (Paperback)
This is not an SF novel. This is a story about Dick's drug-addicted friends and their sad fates. The book consists of a series of anecdotes and scenes that range from the absurdly funny to the grotesquely tragic and are too familiar if you have some experience with drug addiction.We see the characters (Dick's friends) degenerate into madness because of their drug habit. But still we refrain from saying they are degenerates and brought it on themselves, because of the compassion that Dick puts in his writing. All they wanted was to play, how can you think that is wrong. At the end is an author's note in which Dick honors his dead friends and wants them to play again but in another way. This note is one of Dick's best writings and will break your heart (if you've got one that is). Oh yeah there's also a kind of plot to the book, but that's just thrown in to please the straights.
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