Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2006 15:49:09 -0400
From: "Michael Walsh" <MJW at press.jhu.edu>
To: <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>,<wsfa-forum at yahoogroups.com>
Subject: [WSFA]  Scanner Darkly, further thought...
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>

So... all those folks who've seen the various movies based on PKDs short
stories (Bladerunner being the exception) who are expecting lots of
things to get blown up and the like, boy... are they in for a
surprise..... heh.

Here's Dave "Lotsa Hugos" Langford's description from
Amazon.com/Amazon.co.uk:

"Mind- and reality-bending drugs factor again and again in Philip K.
Dick's hugely influential SF stories. A Scanner Darkly cuts closest to
the bone, drawing on Dick's own experience with illicit chemicals and on
his many friends who died from drug abuse. 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."

mjw