Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (GOLLANCZ S.F.) [Paperback]

Jason Taverner is world-famous for his songs and regular TV show. "Thirty million people saw you zip up your fly tonight." "... It's my trademark." Although this future US is a grim police state with labour camps in Alaska and Canada, jetsetting Taverner enjoys being one of the winners.

Then he wakes up in a sleazy hotel room, still well-dressed and flush with money, but no longer the famous Jason Taverner. No ID--that's a forced-labour offence. His agent doesn't know him. Nor do his closest friends. He's even vanished from police databanks.

Forged documents are needed, hand-drawn by teenaged expert Kathy--one of Dick's most alarming women, a neurotic petty criminal who's also a police informer, who entraps and manipulates Taverner until he's terrified of her. He may deserve it: this self-obsessed megastar inflicts small, unthinking cruelties on virtually every woman he meets.

The title's policeman is another interesting character: Police General Felix Buckman, a mostly good man (and fan of Elizabethan songs: "Flow, my teares...") trapped in a horrible system. Is Taverner, the man with no past, a threat? Less so, maybe, than Buckman's amoral sister Alys, who takes special interest in Taverner and seems to have the world's only copies of his music albums...

Paranoid wrongness is expertly conveyed, and resolved with a typically offbeat SF notion. A sunny finale concludes one of Dick's most approachable novels.--David Langford --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Jason Taverner is a Six, the result of top secret government experiments forty years before which produced a handful of unnaturally bright and beautiful people – and he's the prime-time-TV idol of millions until, inexplicably, all record of him is wiped from the data banks of Earth. Suddenly he's a nobody…in a police state where nobody is allowed to be a nobody. Will he ever be rich and famous again? Has he ever, in fact, been rich and famous?

'Dick is vastly more than a sci-fi chronicler of the future. He has spun here a rare gothic tale with vivid dialogue…addicts of his controlled, literary, mindblown style will find the saga of Jason Taverner a strange, rewarding tale'
NEW SCIENTIST

'You just have to read on'
EVENING STANDARD

'Buy this one and brace yourself'
THEODORE STURGEON GALAXY