“Love isn't just wanting another person the way you want to own an object you see in a store. That's just desire. You want to have it around, take it home and set it up somewhere in the apartment like a lamp. Love is"--she paused, reflecting--"like a father saving his children from a burning house, getting them out and dying himself. When you love you cease to live for yourself; you live for another person.”

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said was published in 1974 and was awarded the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 1975. The novel is a profound, absurd, and mind-bending parable on the nature of loneliness and disaffection. It’s a novel filled with uncharacteristic heart on the behalf of Dick and its themes are familiar ones: drugs, the nature of reality, and personhood.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is a dystopian novel that addresses a range of existential, social and polictical themes: identity and loss of identity, celebrity and ordinariness, subjective perceptions and objective realities, state sponsored mind control and drug induced mind bending, genetic engineering and emotional networking.

A near future America — which, in this early 70's narrative, means 1988 — that unsuccessfully tries to hide its cultural decay and social dysfunction behind empty celebrity worship and self-gratifying class boundaries. But the problem with living in a rigidly stratified society is that, when you're radically removed from your accepted place in it, you effectively lose everything...including you.

At the outset of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, we meet Jason Taverner, a famous television star whose show is watched by an avid audience of thirty million viewers. But
such happy moments of well-being and acclaim never last long in a Dick novel. Before the end
of the first chapter, an ex-lover tries to kill Taverner – by means of a Callisto cuddle sponge,
which digs its fifty feeding tubes into his body. And by the second chapter, Taverner has
awakened in a low-down, bug-infested skid-row hotel room, without any recollection of how he
got there. When he tries to phone his friends and colleagues, none of them recognize him any
more. On October 11, Taverner was a celebrity; on October 12 he is a nobody, with no identification, nothing. He finds himself in a surveillance society that monitors its citizens' every move while keeping it docile and compliant through vapid entertainment (which he is a part of), material reward, and drugs. He decides to forge an ID which brings him into trouble with the police state and brings him into contact with Police General Felix Buckman and his lover/sister Alys. Little does Taverner or Buckman know that Alys is the key to Taverner’s plight (her use of the reality-warping drug KR-3 is the reason Taverner was transported to a parallel universe where he no longer existed).

This novel, while not perfect, is endlessly fascinating. Taverner starts the novel as a high profile celebrity, who is self-absorbed, and blinded to reality of the dystopian police. One could say he actually operates above it. But when he is transported to a parallel reality where he doesn’t exist, he is faced with actually observing reality, feeling what it feels like to be a “normal.” By the end of the story we are lead to believe that Taverner is back to his former reality, but perhaps changed. Likewise, the character progression of Police General Felix Buckman finds him forever changed by the end of the novel. In fact, Dick seems to suggest that police can rebel from the systems they serve. When the Buckman experiences his epiphany at the climax, embracing a black man whom he has encountered randomly at a gas station, it's not only as if Dick is trying to apologize for centuries of racial injustice but he is pointing out that Buckman has finally learned that the objectification of the other is wrong (this a bit ironic considering this novel doesn’t treat its women characters very well – Dick seemed to have held some sexist attitudes).

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is one of my favorite books among Dick’s works. It blends high philosophical concepts with the typical pulp fiction writing we come to expect from Philip K. Dick. Its prose is indeed pedestrian but I rather like the straightforward approach he takes to language. It’s the conceptual underpinnings of a novel by Dick that I rather enjoy. ( )

better the second or third or whatever
time ( )

I always enjoyed Dick's short stories but as I grow older I'm less impressed by his novels. This was an interesting premise but mostly a seedy space opera. There are a few more of his novels I will read but my expectations are now lower. ( )

It's a Wonderful Life [under Fascism] ( )