Rating: 
Summary: Poignant, weird, wonderful
Review: "Flow my tears" is a sad, moving, very personal story by one of the world's Science Fiction greats. It is an adventure, a love story and a Science Fiction tour de force. In one of his favourite themes Dick has taken an idea originated by the philosopher Kant, and expanded it into a story. Simplified Kant reasoned that an individual experiences two universes, the common one (Koinos Cosmos) and a personal one (Einos Cosmos). The common cosmos could be a sum of all personal cosmoses, plus reality. (Don't blame Kant for this, I'm oversimplifying.) Dick extrapolates from there: What if one person's cosmos is disproportionately influential in the perception of the common cosmos? and what if that person is insane? or on drugs? The universe could well become a very weird place. Dick's huge intellect, experiences with drugs (especially LSD) and often unhappy personal life come together to make a hugely involving novel which has to be counted among the very best of the genre.
Rating: 
Summary: A writer of powerful and pure imagination.
Review: A serious and exciting detective story which is also a thriller - intelligent, ingenious and suble.Nightmare adventures in an American Police state too likely to become true. With a delightful leaps of imagination Dick outdistances nearly all of the most popular star trekkers.
Rating:
Summary: Strangely familiar and yet totally original
Review: After the first couple of chapters of this, I had an overwhelming sense of familiarity with the story line. There were shades of Iain Banks "The Bridge", probably being the foremost. However, as usual with PKD, things were just not quite what they appeared to be.
Once more I found myself drawn into PKD's dark wit and cynicism. A police-state where celebrities are seemingly exempt, and the results of genetically manipulating humans are walking around.
The reason this did not rate the full 5 stars was really to do with the explanation of why Jason Taverner's life was turned upside-down for two days. This was not explored fully enough for my tastes, but that's the only criticism I can level at this.
Rating:
Summary: well worth reading
Review: As someone mentioned in an earlier review, Kathy Nelson is one of the most memorable characters from all of the PKD's novels (although I'd forgotten her name). Those early chapters would be reason enough to read the book, and to re-read it on occasion. But it's also a fairly complete and detailed rendering of many of the themes PKD explored throughout his work, and in places as well-executed as anything he wrote.
Rating: 
Summary: perfectperfectperfect...and then it all comes apart.
Review: Classic Philip K. Dick through and through...and then you get to the ending. I suppose I've probably read a dozen or so PKD novels, and I must say none had a weaker, more anti-climactical ending than this. I must say, it really did feel like a cop-out. The majority of the novel is wonderful, but if Dick had just spent a little more time crafting a proper conclusion, the book as a whole would have been much, much better. I suppose my favourite PKD to date is probably The Game-Players of Titan...or maybe Now Wait for Last Year...or UBIK...oh, forget it. I can't decide. Just read 'em all, but you'd probably be best-advised not to start with Flow My Tears.
Rating:
Summary: Intriguing charcters, slightly re-hashed plot
Review: First: Kathy Nelson is one of the most memorable characters to ever appear in written form, either by PKD or another - and she isn't even a major character. I wish she had appeared more in the story (she's only in the beginning), but I guess that just shows PKD's genius - even a minor character can move you.The story mainly concerns the efforts of Jason Taverner (one night a famous celebrity, the next a never-was) trying to discover how and why no one, even his closest friends, knows who he is. Jason isn't as likable as other PKD viewpoint characters due to some disagreable traits (such as his bigotry). I suppose this does make him seem more human (instead of heroic) but that doesn't mean I have to like him, right? The policeman of the title, Felix Buckman, a good cop (a rarity in this police-state world) with his own problems tries to first discover why Taverner is unknown, and then, due to an important incident later, attempts to nail him. His relationship with his sister Alys, (a sadomasochist, to be blunt) is interesting, to say the least. Although the story is a familiar one by this time in PKD's career (the concept of a changing reality), the characters more than make up for this defect.
Rating:
Summary: The plot's a little stale, but the writing's superb
Review: FLOW MY TEARS was written at the absolute nadir of PKD's life, when he was burnt out and, eventually, suicidal. And this shows in the plot, which is generic PKD, almost going-through-the-motions (although it probably still seems ingenious to PKD neophytes!) Fortunately, it also shows in the writing -- this is one of his best-written books, with unforgettable characters and a devastatingly emotional ending. One of PKD's many musings on the nature of evil, of our fallen world where evil must be fought with evil. Like Tagomi in THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, Rick Deckard in ANDROIDS, and Donna in A SCANNER DARKLY, the title character in FLOW MY TEARS (who is *not* the protagonist) is forced to do something bad in order to bring about what he feels is a greater good. And, to his astonished disbelief, it breaks his heart. One of the great moments in all of PKD, and well worth slogging through some of the tired mechanisms of the plot to get to.
Rating:
Summary: I had no idea what I was reading
Review: Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is a book with a straightforward enough plot to follow. But there is so much muck that Dick throws into the story that, should you let it, it can bog you down. There are many useless details that Philip Dick assaults you with that it almost foreshadows his mental problems towards the end of his life.
The lead character, a popular television personality who wakes up one day to find that he somehow doesn't exist anymore, is supposed to be a central piece to the puzzle in which Dick constructs a paranoid and disturbing society in our future. But it's hard to pinpoint the paranoid components when so much of the book plays like an esoteric rant entirely within the confines of the author's head.
But nowadays, it's hard to realize just how ahead of his time Dick was. It seems to be common knowledge today that every bit of information about every human being in the nation is on record somewhere. When this book was written, the idea was probably considered insane.
But when it comes to flying cars, random checkpoints, top 40 songs with rampant profanity, and three-dimensional stamp collections that feature buffalos, Dick just can't introduce things on the reader's level.
This books goes further to prove my opinion of Dick: the man had superb ideas. The execution, most of the time, is lacking.
Rating: 
Summary: Generic sci-fi novel with no character
Review: Flow My Tears, this is how I felt after completing this novel. The book was dry, and boring. It was a complete failure compared to Dicks other works. The characters were barely described and the plot was resolved all too quickly in the end.
Rating:
Summary: A strange and psychedelic book.
Review: From the beginning this book reads like a drug induced hallucination. Jason Taverner loses his identity and finds himself caught in limbo in a controlled police state where those without papers are criminals. Can he get back to his reality, or did his reality ever actually exist. Are all his memories simply a narcotic trip that has ended? In case you are wondering where you have heard of this idea before, it is explored in the short story "We can remember it for you wholesale" which was made as the movie "Total Recall". Taverners new state of being introduces him to a side of life that he was unaware of, a frightening no mans land that he is unequipped to survive in. The characters he meets are equally disturbing, the manic identity card forger, the incestuous police chief with a penchant for weeping and his fetishistic sister who comes to police HQ to sleep off her drug overdoses. In the book the author makes some interesting predictions of things that have happened, cybersex (which he calls telephone orgies) being the most luridly notable, surround sound music systems is another, and he points to the growth in use of cellular phones. Other predictions are either way off the mark or have not happened yet. Cars have not been replaced by flyers, and the black population of the USA is certainly not an endangered species. And if the US military has a H-bomb the size of a seed that can be planted under the skin they aren't broadcasting the fact yet! He also briefly explores the concept of genetic enhancement and a race of superhumans. But what is most interesting about this book for me is the style of the prose. It seems disassociated from the subject, poetic at times, and objective. You never feel as though you are within the experience, everything is viewed through a lens, or a TV screen. This makes the story less personal, and as a result, less believable. The reader is less inclined to suspend disbelief, so you are always aware that this is fiction and not reality.
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