A Scanner Darkly - Softcover

Dick, Philip K.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0586045538 ISBN 13: 9780586045534

Publisher: Panther Books, 1978

Synopsis

When undercover narcotics agent Bob Arctor is given a new assignment, his existential confusion is only slightly increased by the name of his target drug-user.

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

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)

About this edition

• Publisher: Panther Books
• Publication date: 1978
• ISBN 10: 0586045538
• ISBN 13: 9780586045534
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256