A Scanner Darkly
Bob Arctor is a dealer of the lethally addictive drug Substance D. Fred is the police agent assigned to tail and eventually bust him. To do so, Fred takes on the identity of a drug dealer named Bob Arctor. And since Substance D--which Arctor takes in massive doses--gradually splits the user's...
show more
Bob Arctor is a dealer of the lethally addictive drug Substance D. Fred is the police agent assigned to tail and eventually bust him. To do so, Fred takes on the identity of a drug dealer named Bob Arctor. And since Substance D--which Arctor takes in massive doses--gradually splits the user's brain into two distinct, combative entities, Fred doesn't realize he is narcing on himself.Caustically funny, eerily accurate in its depiction of junkies, scam artists, and the walking brain-dead, Philip K. Dick's industrial-grade stress test of identity is as unnerving as it is enthralling.
show less
Format: paperback
ISBN:
9781400096909 (1400096901)
ASIN: 1400096901
Publish date: May 23rd 2006
Publisher: Vintage
Pages no: 278
Edition language: English
I'm a big Pynchon fan, too, so don't get me wrong here, but it seems to me like the main difference between Dick's writing style and Pynchon's--or at least, the difference that mostly accounts for Dick being treated as a "pulp" author with some interesting ideas whereas Pynchon is considered a major...
At first I wasn't liking this book very much, but I persevered and I must say after the story really got going I thoroughly enjoyed it.Bob Arctor/Fred is an undercover nark who, due to the nature of his work, becomes a drug addict himself. As Fred he is also ordered to start surveillance on Bob Arct...
This book is so open to pastiche. Chicks, straights, narks and like that could all do one. So I won't bother; there are a bunch of them on Goodreads already. PKD here writes a Requiem for a Dream decades before that film came out, showing from a convincing internal viewpoint what the disintegratio...
Sieczka z mózgu. Tak można krótkim stwierdzeniem streścić tę ksiażkę. I to nie tylko o nasz mózg chodzi, lecz bardziej o stan umysłu głównego bohatera. Przywykłem już do tego, że Dick serwuje literaturę wymagajacą, skłaniającą do przemyśleń i głębszego zastanowienia sie nad tym, co właśnie przelecia...
I started reading Dick with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and now five novels in have enjoyed every subsequent novel more than my first. This book is very much a Dick novel in that it is first and foremost concerned with personal identity. It is also concerned with the symbiotic relationship...
7 years ago
Log in with Facebook 
