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A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
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A Scanner Darkly

by Philip K. Dick

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2,69427931 (4.09)50

Member recommendations

  1. Aeryion recommends Rubicon Harvest by C. W. Kesting, "The world of Rubicon Harvest seems to be a mixed homage to both Scanner Darkly and A Clockwork Orange in the way the sub-culture of designer drugs are (see more) used and abused and how their importance interplay with the expression of self and the experience of perception on reality. The synthetic neurocotic Symphony makes Substance D look like Tic-Tacs. Rubicon Harvest deserves it's place among the medicated plots of these other great postmodern works of spec-fiction!"
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Showing 1-5 of 25 (next | show all)
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 |  
I picked this up after watching the film. It had been years since I'd read anything by PKD, and he's always been hit or miss with me, but this was a hit. Great story. The film stuck really close to the book, too. ( )
kyuuketsukirui | Nov 9, 2008 |  
Good book ( )
gerleliz | Oct 24, 2008 |  
I enjoyed this book very much, though I found it to be rather depressing. And, when you read in the manner of how this book is a large piece of PKD's once personal life, it twists the already-stuck knife just a bit more. This is more of a drug culture novel than it is a sci-fi one. The main theme here is identity and how once can lose that to an addiction.

I certainly enjoyed it; bus as to recommending it, I am uncertain as to its general reception. I think it takes a person who can see past "good & evil" to see what the meat of this novel is truly composed of. ( )
bardsfingertips | May 29, 2008 | 1 vote
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Series (with order)
Canonical Title
Original publication date
People/Characters
Important places
Important events
Awards and honors
Epigraph
Dedication
Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love:

To Gaylene     deceased

To Ray            deceased

To Francy       permanent psychosis

To Kathy        permanent brain damage

To Jim            deceased

To Val            massive permanent brain damage

To Nancy       permanent psychosis

To Joanne     permanent brain damage

To Maren       deceased

To Nick            deceased

To Terry        deceased

To Dennis       deceased

To Phil            permanent pancreatic damage

To Sue            permanent vascular damage

To Jerri          permanent psychosis and vascular damage

... and so forth.
First words
Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair.
Quotations
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Publisher's editors
Blurbers
Book description

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)

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