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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sorry to lower that 5 star average, but..., 16 Dec 2002
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!
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