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Loading... Eine andere Welt (original 1974; edition 2004)by Philip K. Dick
Work InformationFlow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick (1974)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. âLove 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.â 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. Itâs 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 â which, in this early 70's narrative, means 1988 â 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 â 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 Tavernerâs 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 doesnât exist, he is faced with actually observing reality, feeling what it feels like to be a ânormal.â 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 doesnât treat its women characters very well â Dick seemed to have held some sexist attitudes). Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is one of my favorite books among Dickâs 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. Itâs the conceptual underpinnings of a novel by Dick that I rather enjoy. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to Publisher SeriesIs contained inFive Novels of the 1960s & 70s: Martian Time-Slip / Dr. Bloodmoney / Now Wait for Last Year / Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said / A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick The Philip K. Dick Collection by Philip K. Dick (indirect) AwardsNotable Lists
Fiction.
Science Fiction & Fantasy.
HTML: Pop star Jason Taverner is the product of a top-secret government experiment that produced a selection of genetically enhanced people forty years ago. Unusually bright and beautiful, he's a television idol beloved by millionsâ??until one day, all records of his identity inexplicably disappear. Overnight, he has gone from being a celebrity to a man whom no one seems to recognize. And in a police state, having no proof of his existence is enough to put his life in danger. As Jason races to solve the riddle of his disappearance, Philip K. Dick immerses us in an Orwellian atmosphere of betrayal, secrecy, and conspiracyâ??a world in which everyone informs on everyone else and omniscient police have something to hide. Painting a horribly plausible portrait of a neofascist America, he explores the meaning of identity and reality in a world skewed by drugs, genetic enhancement, and a culture of celebrity. His bleakly beautiful novel bores into the deepest bedrock self and plants a stick of dynamite at its center No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Most of your common PKD themes are here. A sudden change or revelation that makes you question everything you knew about reality. A surveillance state. Disguise. But then we get some new or less common elements as well â a lot of shade thrown at eugenics, a staggering amount of sexual content for Dick Not that there is sex on the page, exactly, but the police encounter a pedophile (but in this world, the age of consent is 13 â it's messy), two of the female characters are bisexual, and there is an incestuous couple? I would almost think I was reading Heinlein, except there isn't a hot tub in sight.
Not to mention Heinlein is not interested in the question of WHAT EVEN IS REALITY/HUMANITY? Which is Dick's whole thing.
Out of everything, the anti-Black edge to eugenics is probably what ages the poorest, not because dick doesn't see it or mention it, but the treatment of it feels undercooked. ( )