Dick, Philip K A Scanner Darkly ISBN 13: 9780547572178

A Scanner Darkly - Softcover

9780547572178: A Scanner Darkly
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"Dick is Thoreau plus the death of the American dream."--Roberto Bolaño

Bob Arctor is a junkie and a drug dealer, both using and selling the mind-altering Substance D. Fred is a law enforcement agent, tasked with bringing Bob down. It sounds like a standard case. The only problem is that Bob and Fred are the same person. Substance D doesn't just alter the mind, it splits it in two, and neither side knows what the other is doing or that it even exists. Now, both sides are growing increasingly paranoid as Bob tries to evade Fred while Fred tries to evade his suspicious bosses.

In this award-winning novel, friends can become enemies, good trips can turn terrifying, and cops and criminals are two sides of the same coin. Dick is at turns caustically funny and somberly contemplative, fashioning a novel that is as unnerving as it is enthralling.

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Review:
Mind- and reality-bending drugs feature again and again in Philip K. Dick's hugely influential SF stories. A Scanner Darkly is the novel that cuts closest to the bone, drawing on Dick's own experience with illicit chemicals and on his many friends who died through drug misuse. 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. In a just world this harrowing novel, the 20th selection in the Millennium SF Masterworks, would have matched the sales of Trainspotting. --David Langford
Review:
One of the most original practitioners writing any kind of fiction, Dick made most of the European avant-garde seem like navel-gazers in a cul-de-sac (Sunday Times)

My literary hero (Fay Weldon)

For everyone lost in the endlessly multiplicating realities of the modern world, remember: Philip K. Dick got there first (Terry Gilliam)

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  • PublisherMariner Books
  • Publication date2011
  • ISBN 10 0547572174
  • ISBN 13 9780547572178
  • BindingPaperback
  • Number of pages304
  • Rating

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9781857988475: A Scanner Darkly (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9781857988475
Publisher: Gateway, 1999
Softcover

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    Victor..., 1977
    Hardcover

  • 9780345260642: A SCANNER DARKLY

    Del Rey, 1979
    Softcover

  • 9781407247410: A Scanner Darkly

    Gollancz, 1999
    Softcover

  • 9781780220420: A Scanner Darkly

    W&N, 2012
    Softcover

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Book Description Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. Winner of the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel, Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly is a semi-autobiographical novel of drug addiction set in a future American dystopia -- and the basis for the Hugo Award finalist film starring Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, and Robert Downey, Jr."A Scanner Darkly is about a descent into the deep fears of our 24-hour consumer society: the twilight of intellectual and emotional collapse.A fascinating portrait of 70s Californian counter-culture."--The Guardian Bob Arctor is a junkie and a drug dealer, both using and selling the mind-altering Substance D. Fred is a law enforcement agent, tasked with bringing Bob down. It sounds like a standard case. The only problem is that Bob and Fred are the same person. Substance D doesn't just alter the mind, it splits it in two, and neither side knows what the other is doing or that it even exists. Now, both sides are growing increasingly paranoid as Bob tries to evade Fred while Fred tries to evade his suspicious bosses. In this dystopian future, friends can become enemies, good trips can turn terrifying, and cops and criminals are two sides of the same coin. Caustically funny and somberly contemplative, Dick fashions a novel that is as unnerving as it is enthralling."Dick is Thoreau plus the death of the American dream."--Roberto Bolao Hugo Award-winner Philip K. Dick's semi-autobiographical science fiction novel of dystopia and drug addiction. Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability. Seller Inventory # 9780547572178

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