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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. 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  0.078 seconds to build listing  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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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. (