A Scanner Darkly

Rating:
Summary: An excellent book
Review: This is the first Dick book I read, and have re-read it a number of times. It dives deep into the drug culture of the late sixties and early seventies. It leaves you unsure as to the authors opinions about said culture. If Dick condemns drug use or promotes it, you will enjoy the intricacies of this splintered mindset! An excellent read, highly reccomended! CIAO...--Terrapin

Rating:
Summary: One of Philip K. Dick's greatest books
Review: This is easily my favorite Dick novel, next to "The Transmigration of Timothy Archer". Set in an approximation of the 1960's/1970's world that Dick actually lived in, this novel concerns the destruction of the minds and lives of those people who intentionally and unintentionally got hooked on drugs. What seems like a pretty straightforward tale of addicts and narcs, complete with some hilarious stoned conversations ala Cheech and Chong, changes into a harrowing, gripping descent into addiction, paranoia and brain damage. The last section of the novel is both heartbreaking and hopeful. One of Dick's most emotional works, and not to be missed

Rating:
Summary: This book will destroy your brain.
Review: A Scanner Darkly delivers to the reader in full force the psychosis that the main character, Bob Arctor, develops from taking the ultra-addictive Substance D. I read the last half in one sitting, and by the end my mind had deteriorated right along with Arctor's. This book is amazing! If you are thinking of giving up your crack habit, this may be the next best thing.

Rating:
Summary: SELF SURVEILLANCE
Review: SCANNER DARKLY is not one of PKD's best works. The reader must plow through 200 pages of doper drivel to reach the nitty-gritty dessert. At the end the prose rises high like a cloud of smoke, albeit from a hash pipe. The dope called Death could turn one into "just a lump of flesh grinding along, eating, drinking, sleeping, working, crapping." (P. 232).

Dick's anti-hero is Bob Arctor, who becomes "Fred" while wearing his ingenious scramble suit. Arctor must wear this suit to disguise his identity from fellow undercover narc officers. Arctor's addiction to the dope, Death, required to pose as a dope dealer, also scrambles his brain. The poor guy's brain is severed, right from left hemisphere, thereby causing loss of his own identity. To put it mildly, there was no happy ending, perhaps no ending at all.

Although Dick claims to present these characters in a non judgmental way, it is difficult to see how he could have accomplished this goal. This became a real anti dope story. What was noteworthy is how the author found a way to work parity, left & right handedness, brain topology and mirror imagery into his perennial search to answer -- what is real? Is an image reversed as in a mirror real? Could the bifurcated human brain ever record anything but a distorted reality? Is an integrated view from the brain ever possible? Must man forever gaze through the glass darkly?


Rating:
Summary: Dick's best
Review: DUring the mid eighties, DIck was my favorite author, and I read everything that was in print and even tracked down imported copies of his domestically neglected works. Dick was a prolific writer so were talking maybe a couple dozen books. After reading three of his books you can start to notice a pattern: the love triangle and the paranoia, the metaphores based on colloquialisms.

I found A SCANNER DARKLY to be his best. Like "Valis," a scanner darkly is very autobiographical. It deals with specifically with the narcotic enduced paranoia that he had inflicted upon himself and the consequences, saturated with 1960s hippie head shop big brother paranoia.

I highly recommend reading this book as soon as possible. Because Hollywood is about to deficate all over this book, and rub out the possibility of reading the book with an open imagination. Its a good sign that linklater is going to direct, hes done at least one decent film, but hes highly inconsistant. but heres the bad news - it stars keanno reeves. so obviously this movie is going to suck - casting one of the worst most retarded actors in hollywood says it all.

so this message is for all fans of PK DIck: read this book now before its too late. or wait ten years for the bad memory to fade.

Rating:
Summary: PKD at his most personal
Review: Overall, this a pretty uneven book but I just got so wrapped up in these quirky and tragic characters and pathetic plights. The story could be a straight fiction novel about junkies were it not for the oddball sci-fi elements that are thrown in (scramble suits, holo-scanners, freaky car radios, etc.) which make this a really oddball story. Funny, sad, deeply moving for reasons I can't quite grasp. Maybe it's because, of all the books of his that I've read, this is the one where his personality and experiences seem to loom largest. It feels so personal. I'll definitely read it again sometime.

Rating:
Summary: This book scans *you*.
Review: Though sometimes crushingly depressing, A Scanner Darkly also hums with humor, humanity and deep insight. And although I felt, at times, deep contempt for the dingy, drug-obsessed lives of the characters in this novel, I was also regularly surprised by their tenderness toward one another. Their strange considerations and unexpected priorities. The underlying intelligence of even their most drug-addled conversations. The moments of naivete from even the most hard boiled characters.

By showing us how each charcter is slowly (or not-so-slowly) losing their mind to Substance D, Philip K. Dick is also implying that there is *much* to be lost. That even in their most depraved state--individuals are complex, surprising, and mysterious, even to themselves.

The effect, ultimately, is that it's impossible not to compare their lives to your own. What are the risks and rewards of *your* most compulsive behaviors? How do you justify them to yourself? What have you lost as a result of your compulsions?

And finally, the oldest question of all: what is reality? Is a recording of life an accurate depiction of it? Or does our inevitable need to manipulate that recording mean that we will forever struggle to know what is real and what isn't?

Philip K. Dick asks these questions through character depictions that are both chilling and heartening. I highly recommend this book for readers who are unafraid to explore the darker elements of human nature.








Rating:
Summary: What spoon
Review: I got this book from the library. I'll be forthcoming:
If you read it as a novel it's a horrid incorent horribly edited read. If taken as an anology and alagory (as it seems it's suposed to be.), and with the syntaxt that this was drafted in the 70's ... then it's a much better read. Iether was it's a dreadfully dificult read that is very much unpolished, in my print their's a few pages where the naritivite text merely ends with no coherent start. For instance he describes Arctor's car "He drove up to her and " [...]

Rating:
Summary: A great plot - an addled delivery
Review: He may have a cult following, but like the characters in this novel, P.K. Dick appears to have been drug addled at the time he wrote 'Scanner'. The author in fact admits to this in his postscript. The plot is intriguing but fatally flawed with inconsistencies. The last fifty pages are so laden with filler as to be virtually unintelligible. If he intended this as a cautionary tale of drug abuse, PKD succeeded in ways he never suspected.

Rating:
Summary: Realize what is being done
Review: A previous reviewer commented on Dick's inability to draw characterization. Interchangable are Arctor, Fred, Freck etc. This is all very true. The simple reason is Dick was portraying drugs as 'mind wrecks.' These were not characters, but paranoid puppets being conducted by the same string, drugs. Would one expect much character diversity when each man lives in the same broken down room. Their about as mechanical as the adroids that flood Dick's other stories. Everybody is portrayed as an addict or a stright. There is no middle ground. In fact, at the beginning of the read, I thought Freck was actually Arctor. They never spoke to each other. Now, whether or not this was my ignorance or Philip's plan, this can be said; he wrote at a rapid pace and was not meticulous in proof-reading. Anyways, this story is driven not by auxilliary characters but by substance D. If you want out of this trip, just don't pick up the book. Deciding to read this is your choice, but once picked up, it will be a disease.