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Title: A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick ISBN: 0-679-73665-4 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 03 December, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.61 (74 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Let Them Play Again
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Punishment for pleasure.... Not fair.
Comment: Just as Philip K. Dick described, the theme of this novel is not to set moral wrongs or rights of drugs and its users. It simply is to tell the consequences of drug misuse. It not only deals with the physical consequences, but also the psychological aspect, as well. To loose your own identity, unaware of the loss of one's own self. In a way, this novel can be categorized as Science Fiction-Black Comedy. But the humor in this novel does not make the subject of drug less serious, but more intense. The outrageous humor entertains the reader, giving him a moment of pleasurable laughter. Then, like drugs, a time comes when he realize that the pleasure once devoured, in fact, is just the beginning of a slow death. The reader laughs at the addicts' stupidity, and then faces the ultimate punishment with the characters involved. Although this novel may have too many adult contents, I wish this novel can be a recommended read for the ever curious and anxious high school students. A serious science fiction that has black comedic humor. What else can you ask from a fiction?
Rating: 5
Summary: Darkly, indeed
Comment: Dick's tragic satire on drug enforcement skewers drug users, enforcement, treatment, and organized crime with equally scathing ferocity as cogs in an out-of-control system of perverse psychological torture. The central plot device, that the undercover drug agent protagonist must narc on himself under the influence of a drug that splits his psyche into conflicting personalities, is just Dick's opening salvo.
In the end, Dick's breathless pursuit of the targets of his satire is not an expression of anger but of palpable grief and despair, which the postscript explains in very real, moving terms.
One subplot is marred by what I think is regrettable mysoginy, from which Dick does not seem to have a satirist's distance, but this is a problem with Dick in general.
This is my favorite Dick novel, if for no other reason than it's more grounded in a reality I recognize than his more fantasy-oriented, more philosophical stories.
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Title: Ubik by Philip K. Dick ISBN: 0679736646 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 03 December, 1991 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by PHILIP K. DICK ISBN: 0679736662 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 03 December, 1991 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Valis by PHILIP K. DICK ISBN: 0679734465 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 02 July, 1991 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: The Man in the High Castle by PHILIP K. DICK ISBN: 0679740678 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 30 June, 1992 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick ISBN: 067974066X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 29 June, 1993 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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