A Scanner Darkly - Hardcover

Dick, Philip K.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375424024 ISBN 13: 9780375424021

Publisher: Pantheon, 2006

Synopsis

A drug dealer of the future periodically moves away from his spaced-out world to become an informer for narcotics agents until he becomes unable to separate his two personalities, in a graphic version of the novel composed of stills from the animated motion picture. Reprint. 50,000 first printing. (A Warner Independent Pictures film, written & directed by Richard Linklater, releasing March 2006, starring Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, Robert Downey, Jr., Woody Harrelson, & Rory Cochrane) (Comics & Graphic Novels)

About this title

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

Book Description:

A brilliant sci-fi novel from one of the last century's most influential pop culture figures.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0375424024
• ISBN 13: 9780375424021
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 200