A Scanner Darkly (S.F. MASTERWORKS) [Paperback]

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

A brilliant sci-fi novel from one of the last century's most influential pop culture figures.

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.

On the streets of Los Angeles, undercover narcotics agent Bob Arctor helps to convict dealers in the sinister drug known as Substance D – D for Death. To protect his cover as a dope addict, Arctor is officially titled S.A. Fred and reports to police headquarters wearing a scramble suit. The suit turns all of him into a vague blur. Only the low-life dopers and dealers he moves amongst know his name and his face and an identity crisis is about to overtake him. Not only is he in love with one foxy dealer named Donna, he has a new assignment, his toughest yet. The name of the target user is known to him. The name of the target user is Bob Arctor.

Philip K. Dick, like William Burroughs, knew first-hand the attraction – and pitfalls – of drug abuse. In this immensely compassionate, funny and thoughtful novel set in the near future, the founding father of modern science fiction threads the maze of an addled mind to confront the quailing human remnant of a user of Substance D.

“If it is ideas that you want then Philip K. Dick is the author to read”
VECTOR

“One of the most original practitioners writing any kind of fiction”
SUNDAY TIMES

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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.