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Loading... A Scanner Darklyby Philip K. Dick
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Couldn't get into it, would like to try again.  RatSoup | Oct 7, 2009 |  "A Scanner Darkly" is a trippy book about drug addiction that doesn't devolve into a preachy anti-dope public service announcement. Pretty much every single character is whacked out from doing a drug called Substance D, which destroys the brain, and withdrawal from it can cause death. The main character is Bob Arctor, an undercover cop in the drug trade who ironically winds up being assigned to surveillance on himself. The drugs cause him to confuse his identity between the policeman and the criminal, which does result in comical situations. The book reads like a classic novel from English class, but is still entertaining despite the tragedy. (  ) bgsu_drew | Sep 7, 2009 | An unsettling book, this, for despite the science-fictional trappings (Robert Arctor's 'scramble suit' and the cephscope) we are in the California of the late 20th century. So much of this book reads like PKD's own experience, which it almost certainly was. This is his requiem to the friends he lost on the way. Meet on the ledge. (  ) RobertDay | Aug 10, 2009 | This is my first venture in to PKD. Pretty impressive - a very creative reality mixed with the 'classic' tragedy of drug addicts. I would recommend against the audio book version...Paul Giamatti gives a good performance, but doesn't provide a lot of vocal differences between characters...I listened to this as an audiobook for my commute to-and-from work, and I will admit that my driving suffered from time to time while I tried to backtrack and figure out what was going on in the story and which characters were in the scenes. ( ) lookitisheef | May 6, 2009 | Well done. Not fun but fascinating. ( ) thesmellofbooks | Jan 16, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0679736654, Paperback)Mind- and reality-bending drugs factor again and again in Philip K. Dick's hugely influential SF stories. A Scanner Darkly cuts closest to the bone, drawing on Dick's own experience with illicit chemicals and on his many friends who died from drug abuse. 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. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:52 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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