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Review: A Scanner Darkly, Phillip K. Dick
Jan. 29th, 2008 09:58 amThey wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow.
-A Scanner Darkly, author's afterword.
The interesting thing about Scanner, PKD's autobiographical novel about the slow, gradual, terrible destruction of Bob Arctor, a cop in a world so paranoid about drug abuse and security that he ends up working undercover to investigate himself, is that how little actual science fiction is in it. There's mention of a broken "'ceph scope" (an expensive toy that evidentally surface scans your mind), and the interesting idea of the Scramble Suits, which the police use to hide their identities even from themselves, to avoid the attention of murderous drug pushers and of course the fictional Substance D itself, but beyond those toys the story is barely sci-fi at all.
What Scanner is really about is an examination of the drug culture as PKD experienced it in the late sixties. He and his friends were out to have a good time, and the best way to have was using drugs. But the brief pleasures that they received were paid for ten fold over by the destruction that the drugs brought down on their minds and bodies. They hardly need to be hassled by the police (indeed, the cops tend to be watchers in this book, observing but rarely intervening). The bad trips, wasted lives and physical destruction wrought on their bodies is punishment enough. PKD is upfront about this. Though in the afterword he claims to make no judgement about either side in this proto-War on Drugs, the painful, naked detail he records when he describes drug users losing their minds, or Arctor's physical and mental breakdown as he goes cold turkey off Substance D, is indictment enough. The price for the pleasures recieved is too high, far too high.
-A Scanner Darkly, author's afterword.
The interesting thing about Scanner, PKD's autobiographical novel about the slow, gradual, terrible destruction of Bob Arctor, a cop in a world so paranoid about drug abuse and security that he ends up working undercover to investigate himself, is that how little actual science fiction is in it. There's mention of a broken "'ceph scope" (an expensive toy that evidentally surface scans your mind), and the interesting idea of the Scramble Suits, which the police use to hide their identities even from themselves, to avoid the attention of murderous drug pushers and of course the fictional Substance D itself, but beyond those toys the story is barely sci-fi at all.
What Scanner is really about is an examination of the drug culture as PKD experienced it in the late sixties. He and his friends were out to have a good time, and the best way to have was using drugs. But the brief pleasures that they received were paid for ten fold over by the destruction that the drugs brought down on their minds and bodies. They hardly need to be hassled by the police (indeed, the cops tend to be watchers in this book, observing but rarely intervening). The bad trips, wasted lives and physical destruction wrought on their bodies is punishment enough. PKD is upfront about this. Though in the afterword he claims to make no judgement about either side in this proto-War on Drugs, the painful, naked detail he records when he describes drug users losing their minds, or Arctor's physical and mental breakdown as he goes cold turkey off Substance D, is indictment enough. The price for the pleasures recieved is too high, far too high.
