Product Description

Substance D -- otherwise known as Death -- is the most dangerous drug ever to find its way on to the black market. It destroys the links between the brain's two hemispheres, leading first to disorentation and then to complete and irreversible brain damage. Bob Arctor, undercover narcotics agent, is trying to find a lead to the source of supply, but to pass as an addict he must become a user, and soon, without knowing what is happening to him, he is as dependent as any of the addicts he is monitoring.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11871 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 217 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Mind- and reality-bending drugs feature again and again in Philip K. Dick's hugely influential SF stories. A Scanner Darkly is the novel that cuts closest to the bone, drawing on Dick's own experience with illicit chemicals and on his many friends who died through drug misuse. 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. In a just world this harrowing novel, the 20th selection in the Millennium SF Masterworks, would have matched the sales of Trainspotting. --David Langford

About the Author
Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) was born in Chicago but lived in California for most of his life. He went to college at Berkeley for a year, ran a record store and had his own classical-music show on a local radio station. He published his first short story, 'Beyond Lies the Wub' in 1952. Among his many fine novels are The Man in the High Castle, Time Out of Joint, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.

Customer Reviews

A Dark Scan of the mind at the height of drugged confusion!
A Scanner Darkly was recommended to me by a real sci fi nut of a friend and so when he proclaimed it "The best book I've read in years" I wasn't expecting much as his copy rested neatly beside various Star Wars novels and a Starship Enterprise bookend. What I didn't expect was one of the darkest, most interesting thrillers I've read in years! This book has a unique visual style and whilst Dick quickly forgets his ramblings of how commercialism has encapsulated the near future you are still aware of the edgy neon wasteland right through to the end. The Science Fiction in this novel is subtly intertwined in the life of the agent sent to investigate himself as he lives one life behind an identity destroying "scramble" suit as a Narcotics agent "Fred" and the other as an openly addicted Substance D doper "Bob Arctor". The fiction comes from this suit the 3d holoscanning equipment set up in the investigation and the Drug he's hooked on; Substance D or "Death" which has the clearly defind side affect of seperating the brains hemispheres leading to total loss of spatial awareness and personality segregation which isn't exactly helped by Freds double life. This book deals with the moral issues of drug taking from both sides of the fence and shows, through the entertaining dialogue between doper Bob and his circle of equally spaced friends that drug taking is fun but that you lose a part of yourself with every hit. The resultant consequences of these situations are for the most part predictable but its the scenes in which cop "Fred" watches doper "Bob" that keep you enthralled as Fred at first evaluates the actions of him and his friends living their lives through addiction to the tragic mental downward spiral as he becomes more and more suspicious of Bob Arctor. There are enough twists at the end to keep things at the right level of intrigue and the final chapter in which Bob Arctor reaches the end of his career is both tragic and satisfying. This is a book easily read in a few days but it will certainly stick in your memory for much longer and make you think twice about sparking that last joint you promised yourself. Even if you're no Sci Fi fan, which I may now be after reading this, you're in for one hell of a "Trip"

Sorry to lower that 5 star average, but...
Dick, for me, encapsulates all that is wonderful about SF: the ability to entirely bend the rules of physics, yet work within them simultaneously. In Do Androids Dream... he presented a lucid hallucination of Earth gone horribly wrong; The Man in the High Castle remains the most potent of alternative histories; and Ubik is simply the greatest journey into madness I could possibly imagine. A Scanner Darkly was the 6th book of Dick's I read, and whilst superb, it was let down with one major flaw...

It tells two parallel stories, yet both are drawn from the same person; on one hand is Arctor, the undercover cop drawn into the world of Substance D (see all the other reviews) and Fred, the same undercover cop watching Arctor. Within these parallel lines are intense bouts of humour (to match Fear & Loathing) and even more intense bouts of paranoia (to match Ubik...well, not quite, but that would be a feat). As the book draws to its satisfying and yet ambiguous ending, it gathers pace and energy, and loses many of the musings of Dick on drugs and consumerism...

Well, in reality it doesn't, it just places these concepts in an altogether more subtle way. I will not endeavor to tell you how, since the joy of Dick is unravelling his plots, sub-plots, underlying themes and underlying-underlying themes. So, by the end of the book, you are simply boogled at what is presented: a typically Dickian dystopian near-reality.

However, just as this book is a parallel of itself, it is also a book of two halves, from start to finish. Unfortunately, the start reduces much of the impact of the book, in my eyes. Whilst amusing and hip, the first half is Dick the Polemic. Despite what he concludes in his epilogue/footnote, he is making radical assumptions with far reaching implications. For example, the notion of the junkie, which he was himself, and yet completly strips bear of humanity. When reading this, I was amazed that this was written by a drug addict, since the pedestal feel was so degrading to drug abusers. Much is the same for his blatant consumerist critique, which he has SUBTELY portrayed in other books with much more vehemance and power.

Ironically, all of the problems of the initial third of the book are swept away under the torrent of pure Dickian amazement; from the point on which Fred begins to watch Arctor, the book shifts into more classic Dick territory and leaves you bewildered an amazed and confused within his typical claustrophobic and hallucinatory power.

So, what is to be said? Well, I have tried to forget the polemics of this book, and take it with a pinch of salt. With this in mind, again Philip K Dick proved himself to be one of the greatest talents in literature. Nevertheless, I have forever been hounded by the fact that I read Ubik before this. Ubik is his opus, and all other SF pales in comparison.

So, there you go...read this first and then read the sublime Ubik...thats my little piece of advice!

Not a bad book, shame about the film though
This is a dark, depressing, nostalgic and surreal story by a man who had strange experiences on drugs, lost friends on drugs, and possessed a memory tainted by drugs. Philip K. Dick states at the end of the book, effectively in his epilogue, that he dedicated the work to those lost friends 'who were punished entirely too much for what they did'. The beauty of this book, A Scanner Darkly, is that it is very much based on the author's life and experiences. There is bitterness, there is hate, there is lost love and regret. Amongst it all there is satire and humour, but mostly dark and cruel.

I have to say that reading this book is more than just reading a story. You are getting the feelings and emotions of a man - Mr. Dick - whose life was a tangled mess. An innocent person robbed by the world and its merciless devices. The drugs and situations that lead to him forgetting his very own person cause him to forget who he really is. When this work is read in a more earnest and compassionate light, we cannot, as a reader, help feeling a deep sorrow for the outcomes and consequences we witness. Childish decisions arising from a lack of interest in life, a state of boredom and all the other emotions we know from the years we spend doing irresponsible things, without care to others, are paid for in blood. This book can invoke a feeling that ones gets when you think 'I wonder what ever became of so-and-so', and we fall into a moment of nostalgia. Perhaps idealist and exaggerated, but nevertheless craving for times and people gone by.

However, this kind of appreciation of the book may not come for some time. You need a while for it to sit in your belly, so to speak. There is a lot of sacrifice, sometimes not even made by the person themselves, but by a higher power. There are certain lessons the characters learn that we, as readers, can also learn from. The story, I am tempted to say, is not necessarily the core of this novel. The recent film adaptation, in my opinion, didn't work for this very reason: it was focused on the story and dialogue too much and not enough on the deeper aspects - the pains and trials of the characters, their moral development and understanding as individuals, their private thoughts and memories that are never revealed verbally. As far as I'm concerned, the film version was something else altogether. It just didn't work.

Anyway, one should read this as you might read the memoirs of a dying man looking back over his life. If you are mature enough to deeply appreciate the message that Dick was trying to give, then you will doubtless remember this book for years to come. What is sad about Dick's Author's Note is that is that he lists himself amongst the 'people who wanted to keep having a good time forever, and were punished for that'. It then strikes you that the other ten or so friends he includes made the basis for his characters, and that in fact what you were reading was a disguised chapter of his very own life. Or, at least, this was how he chose to express it.

On the other hand, I may be speaking dribble. After all, doesn't every book incorporate something from the author's own life. I don't know. Maybe. You decide.