A Scanner Darkly

@book{citeulike:200881, abstract = {Mind- and reality-bending drugs factor again and again in Philip K. Dick's hugely influential SF stories. <I>A Scanner Darkly</I> 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. <I>--David Langford, Amazon.co.uk</I>}, author = {Dick, Philip K. }, citeulike-article-id = {200881}, howpublished = {Paperback}, isbn = {0679736654}, keywords = {iown, scifi}, month = {December}, posted-at = {2005-05-15 20:47:22}, priority = {2}, publisher = {Vintage}, title = {A Scanner Darkly}, url = {http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=citeulike09-20\&amp;path=ASIN/0679736654}, year = {1991} }

TY - BOOK ID - citeulike:200881 L3 - citeulike-article-id:200881 TI - A Scanner Darkly PB - Vintage SN - 0679736654 N2 - Mind- and reality-bending drugs factor again and again in Philip K. Dick's hugely influential SF stories. <I>A Scanner Darkly</I> 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. <I>--David Langford, Amazon.co.uk</I> KW - iown KW - scifi AU - Dick, Philip PY - 1991/12/03/ UR - http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=citeulike09-20&amp;path=ASIN/0679736654 ER -