A Scanner Darkly (1977)

This book is a fascinating insight into the damage recreational drugs can do to our psyche. Set in an alternate history, there is a new drug on the market known as 'Substance D' or 'Death'. Prolonged use of this drug messes with the physical structure of the brain, leading to severe mental illness and, eventually, death. Even withdrawing from the drug doesn't reverse the effects, with many ex-users left as walking, talking vegetables.

Our protagonist is an undercover police officer, who is forced to take the drug in the line of duty. Told from his point of view, the novel documents his slow descent into insanity. Being inside the mind of a user is unpleasant and often confusing. However, this is a book well worth reading. ( )

Come sempre, Dick. Come sempre, destabilizzante. Lo amo e lo odio. Amo quel modo di guardare oltre, nel buio, odio quello che vedo. Così reale, lucidamente allucinato, così vicino alle debolezze dell'animo da far male. ( )

One of the first things I noticed about this book was how quickly I was drawn into this world. Set in 1994 unless you were told or already knew then I highly doubt you'd pick that it was written in 1977. It could have been set today and still I would have believed it. Philip K. Dick was always well ahead of his time and his writing holds up as well now as it did when first written.

This book delves into the murky world of psychedelic drugs and the police trying to stop it but not in a typical crime show way. Bob Arctor is a typical, every-day user of the most popular drug Substance-D. He shares a house with two other similar men Luckman and Barris. His friends are all drug-users. They sit around, take drugs and talk shit. Arctor is also trying to work his way up the dealer chain. Because Arctor is really an undercover narcotics officer, known as Fred. He left his previous life to try and find the source of this dangerous narcotic.

Now because he has to blend in with everyone Arctor can't be seen to not take drugs. So he is a habitual user. One of the bad effects of Substance-D is a, sometimes permanent, alteration of the mind. It splits into two consciousnesses that can be unaware of the other. To protect his identity from other narcotics officers, thereby reducing the options for corruption, Arctor wears a body and voice altering camouflage suit when reporting to his colleagues and goes by the name of Fred. Under this alias he is given his latest task - monitoring the activities of the suspected ringleader, Bob Arctor. As he is made to spy on himself he beings to disassociate the two roles he portrays to the point the he is no longer aware that he is both people.

I won't go more into the plot as I believe this is a story that you need to read for yourself. There are some interesting twists and turns. Dick is a great writer and really brings the fore his first-hand knowledge of this world. There's a lot of moral ambiguity here and that's done on purpose. In an afterword Dick points out that he wrote this just to tell the consequences as they are without saying whether they were right or wrong. It was a choice that the characters chose and this is the where it lead them. Nobody forced them, it was of their own free will.

A really great book, Philip K. Dick was a great writer, one of the best science-fiction writers of all time. I would easily recommend picking this book up. And, just like many of his other works, this has been made into a movie. I purposefully held off on watching it as I've always planned to read this book. Now I have I will tomorrow night watch the movie and see how well it compares. ( )

So here I thought I was diving into one of the Sci-Fi classics, and I ended up in what seemed like a wild, trippy, R-rated version of That '70's Show. Except, that's not it either. It was a trip, certainly. "What a long strange trip it's been." - The Grateful Dead.

Well, even though I was lost for much of it, I rode with the trip and didn't worry too much about piecing together a coherent plot. I think the audiobook narration helped quite a bit with that; I don't know that I would have enjoyed this book near as much by simply reading it off the page.

But I did enjoy it. I was fascinated, and couldn't pull away. In a sense, it was like playing in the street, as the author illustrates in his note after the novel.... ( )

A lot of people misunderstand this wonderful anti-corporate tragicomedy, so I may as well just spoil:

It's about a corporation who operate drug rehabilitation clinics. They also grow a certain plant from which a certain highly addictive amphetamine that causes permanent cognitive impairments is derived. They sell the drug on the streets for 100% profit. Then, when people burn out and get admitted to their clinics, they treat them indefinitely for 100% profit. They've poisoned every level of the system, from individual users to black markets to law enforcement to the clinics themselves: it's all the same company, selling itself to itself forever until the protagonist in his innocence exposes it all. ( )