Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said - Softcover

Dick, Philip K.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0586042032 ISBN 13: 9780586042038

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 1976

Synopsis

The real world is bad enough, a police state functioning at maximum power, the disaffected locked away in forced labour camps, student dissadents kept underground by the national guard. Indifferent to so much hardship and oppression, smiling Jason Taverner hosts his weekly show on NBC.

About this title

Review:

Philip K Dick notoriously charted SF's most dangerous, booby-trapped realities. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974) is a relatively straightforward tale of paranoid unease at finding the world isn't what it should be.

Jason Taverner is world-famous for his songs and regular TV show. "Thirty million people saw you zip up your fly tonight." "... It's my trademark." Although this future US is a grim police state with labour camps in Alaska and Canada, jetsetting Taverner enjoys being one of the winners.

Then he wakes up in a sleazy hotel room, still well-dressed and flush with money, but no longer the famous Jason Taverner. No ID--that's a forced-labour offence. His agent doesn't know him. Nor do his closest friends. He's even vanished from police databanks.

Forged documents are needed, hand-drawn by teenaged expert Kathy--one of Dick's most alarming women, a neurotic petty criminal who's also a police informer, who entraps and manipulates Taverner until he's terrified of her. He may deserve it: this self-obsessed megastar inflicts small, unthinking cruelties on virtually every woman he meets.

The title's policeman is another interesting character: Police General Felix Buckman, a mostly good man (and fan of Elizabethan songs: "Flow, my teares...") trapped in a horrible system. Is Taverner, the man with no past, a threat? Less so, maybe, than Buckman's amoral sister Alys, who takes special interest in Taverner and seems to have the world's only copies of his music albums...

Paranoid wrongness is expertly conveyed, and resolved with a typically offbeat SF notion. A sunny finale concludes one of Dick's most approachable novels.--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)

Dick quietly produced serious fiction in a popular form and there can be no greater praise (Michael Moorcock)

One of the genuine visionaries that North American fiction has produced (LA Weekly)

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

The most consistently brilliant SF writer in the world (John Brunner)

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
• Publication date: 1976
• ISBN 10: 0586042032
• ISBN 13: 9780586042038
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208