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Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

3.95 of 5 stars 3.95 · rating details · 11,318 ratings · 529 reviews

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick about Jason Taverner, a genetically enhanced pop singer & television star who loses his identity overnight. The story is set in a dystopian version of the year 1988, in which America has become a police state in order to deal with a 2nd Civil War. The novel was awarded 1st prize in the John...more

Paperback, 231 pages

Published October 24th 1974 by Gollancz (first published 1974)

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Aug 01, 2008 Phoebe rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sciffy, loved-it

Despite my four star review, this is a very, very uneven book. The first hundred and seventy pages or so are plodding, not particularly exciting, and lack the strong sense of setting that many of Dick's better books (Scanner Darkly, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) possess. However, the novel's conclusion picks up tremendously. I'm not entirely convinced that Dick had figured out the reason for Taverner's unexisting until the book's end, but once he resolves that issue, the prose becomes mo...more

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Aug 04, 2012 Chloe rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: dystopian-fiction, scifi-fantasy

Jason Taverner is on top of the world. He has it all- a house in the Swiss Alps, a beautiful girlfriend, an illustrious singing career, and a hit late-night talk show. In a sense, he is Justin Timberlake (yes, Timberlake doesn't have a talk show... yet). Until one morning he awakens to find that no one knows who he is anymore, all of his IDs are gone and, in the matter of a few hours, he has become an unperson. Which, in the militarized post-Real ID future this book is set in, makes him a very o...more Jason Taverner is on top of the world. He has it all- a house in the Swiss Alps, a beautiful girlfriend, an illustrious singing career, and a hit late-night talk show. In a sense, he is Justin Timberlake (yes, Timberlake doesn't have a talk show... yet). Until one morning he awakens to find that no one knows who he is anymore, all of his IDs are gone and, in the matter of a few hours, he has become an unperson. Which, in the militarized post-Real ID future this book is set in, makes him a very obvious and tempting target for the military police.

As he goes about trying to reclaim his identity, Jason becomes enmeshed in all sorts of various interactions with various damaged women. First there's Kathy, a 17 year old psychotic forger who provides him with a fake set of papers to move through the police checkpoints and then proceeds to toy with him as to whether she gave him a valid set of papers or not. She seems a stand-in for Dick's fifth and final wife, Leslie "Tessa" Busby, to whom the book is dedicated. If Kathy is in any way based on Tessa, it is understandable that during the time he was writing this book, Dick was committed to a psychiatric ward, went on multiple amphetamine benders, and feared for his safety so much that he placed the manuscript into the care of his attorneys to protect it from the insanity of his home life. She baits him again and again, spins stories about an imprisoned boyfriend out of thin air, and continually wavers between saving Taverner from the police and turning him in herself.

Next there's Alys Buckman, the bdsm-obsessed drug addict sister/occasional lover of the Police General who is investigating Jason Taverner's lack of identity. She inveigles Jason into her home with promises of protection and then doses him with an exceptionally strong amount of mescaline and further complicates his life in ways I will not spoil for future readers. Finally there's Mary Anne, a kindly shut-in neighbor of Alys' who Jason momentarily kidnaps before having a series of existential discussions on the benefits of taking risks and who gives him one of her cherished ceramic vases.

This book is incredibly scattered, even for Dick, and there are numerous plot points that are brought up, expounded upon at length, and then forgotten almost as quickly. For instance, Jason Taverner is a Six- one of a group of genetically-advanced experimental children whose aptitude for logical thinking, persuasiveness, and sheer sexual charisma have been elevated beyond that of normal humans. Yet this has absolutely no bearing on the story whatsoever. Taverner never uses that fabled Six intelligence to find the source of his removal from high society, never acts in any way like the advanced human he is and, in fact, is easily manipulated by normal humans on a number of occasions. There is an ex-girlfriend who attacks him at the beginning of the book but who is never mentioned again. There is a police investigator hot on Taverner's trail who is summarily dismissed from the story.

Taken as a work of science fiction, this is a mediocre effort. Too chaotic and scattershot for me to ignore without comment. However, taken as a bit of autobiography- Dick trying to make sense of his failed relationships and wondering, from the depths of his benzedrine benders, whether his paranoid impulses are correct and all of the women in his life are, in fact, out to get him, the book succeeds admirably. None of the women in the story are purely evil, but mere damaged souls who are re-visiting their own damage upon his character. Definitely worth reading, but I would not recommend this to neophyte Dick readers.(less)

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Oct 20, 2010 Alexandra rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, usa

Das ist zwar eine gute Science Fiction Geschichte, aber für den Anspruch, den ich bisher an Dick hatte, nicht gut genug. Es fehlen die für Dick so typischen ironischen und abstrusen Zukunftsideen.

Ein internationaler Fernsehstar erwacht und stellt fest, dass ihn plötzlich keiner mehr kennt, obwohl sich die Welt ansonsten nicht verändert hat. Auch seine kompletten Identitätspapiere sind futsch, was in einem totalitären Polizeistaat zu erheblichen Problemen führt. Mit einem Bündel Geldscheinen, das...more

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Oct 29, 2009 Marvin rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

Phillip K. Dick is a philosopher in a pulp writer's body. His books reads like pulp fiction in style but are loaded with philosophical inquires regarding reality and perception. Sometimes so much so that the text can't keep up with it. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is one example. The plot centers around a celebrity who finds himself no longer remembered. To be more precise, he no longer exists. All his identity is wiped out and no one knows him not even his friends. This is actually one of...more

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Mar 09, 2011 Richard rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Experienced readers of Philip K. Dick

Recommended to Richard by: Borderlands-Books.com

Shelves: scifi, classic, bookclub

This is a somewhat typical Philip K. Dick novel, albeit not quite as good as I expected.

PDK is mostly famous for the movies that have been made from his novels. His books are a bit obscure, even among many Science Fiction fans, and for a good reason: he's not a very good storyteller.

Now, scifi fans are frequently a tolerant bunch. Among them are fans that will tolerate abysmal writing because the author nails the science (typically physics). Others couldn't care less about hard science, but want...more

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Aug 17, 2008 Shiv rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In a time and place where the pols (US Police) and nats (national guard) carry out random ID checks to catch escaped students and send them to forced labour camps, what would happen if you woke up one day with no identity? Jason Taverner, host of a hit TV show with thirty thousand weekly viewers, find's himself in exactly this position. Not only have his ID cards disappeared, but his whole identity. One day a worldwide celebrity, the next a nobody, someone who no one has ever heard of before.

Wha...more

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Dec 17, 2007 Gray Emerson rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I've read two other novels by Philip K. Dick and a lot of his short stories. He's one of the best American novelists (if not the best) of the later 20th century and this book is the best I've read so far. It's about a television/music star who suddenly discovers no one knows who he is anymore. Even the totalitarian government has no record of him ever existing. His struggles to reassert his identity cause him to question the authenticity of the reality he had been living in. More important than...more

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Mar 26, 2012 Matt rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I've read a couple of other of his more widely known and popular pieces, but this one is my favourite. I'm not sure why, but there was something about the strangeness and the honesty in the way it was written that I really liked. The love undertone surprised me a bit, and the way he wove a tender moment into a totally bizarre situation was both creepy and poignant. I really like his work.

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Mar 16, 2009 Michael rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: sci fi fans, conspiracy theorists, Dickians

Recommended to Michael by: Tom Maddox

Shelves: science-fiction

This is one of Philip K. Dick's most "literary" novels, which is to say that it reads as if he took some time to edit and think about the plotline, rather than just getting cranked up on speed and hurling out the words as fast as they would come. Decades of that style of writing had already taken their toll on the paranoid genius, however, and anyone hoping for the lyric poetry of a Samuel R. Delany will be disappointed.

One does not read Dick for the subtle crafting of the English language, how...more

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Jun 14, 2013 Saul Bennett rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Mar 30, 2013 Henry Glover rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The narrative is kind of jerky and meandering, yet I can't deny that when this book works, it works incredibly well. Most future dystopia yarns are told strictly from the view of the oppressed, whereas this one dares to be a bit different. Much of the book follows the plight of Jason Taverner, a famous talk show host who wakes up to suddenly find his identity lost, and his fame erased. Taverner's plunge into a dingy new reality leaves him confused and shaken, and with nobody to trust. With no of...more The narrative is kind of jerky and meandering, yet I can't deny that when this book works, it works incredibly well. Most future dystopia yarns are told strictly from the view of the oppressed, whereas this one dares to be a bit different. Much of the book follows the plight of Jason Taverner, a famous talk show host who wakes up to suddenly find his identity lost, and his fame erased. Taverner's plunge into a dingy new reality leaves him confused and shaken, and with nobody to trust. With no official identity, he must resort to going on the run, pitting his own genetically enhanced mind against the dogged pursuit of the police. All of this is pretty standard stuff, though the psychological implications of Taverner's ordeal are fascinating. But what really sets the book apart is when we get to see events from the point of view of the police, who are not your typical totalitarian villains. Some of them are bureaucrats, yes, and some are small-minded, but their general, Felix Buckman, proves to be more than that. He has his own issues, his own qualms with his station, and his own view of how the world ought to be. He philosophizes about the situation even as he tightens the net around his quarry. The chapters from Buckman's POV become a thoughtful counterpoint to the struggles of Taverner, and by the end Buckman emerges as a pretty compelling character in his own right.

On the downside, the pacing seems a little off. Much of the first half of the book is simply Taverner running, hiding, acquiring forged IDs, etc. He meets a lot of characters who aren't very helpful or enlightening, although they tend to drive home the point that Taverner is screwed, and that reality is warped. Characters who seem like they are going to be important early on are forgotten. Several of them could have been combined into one character, and I'm not sure why a couple of them are really necessary.

In all, this is a fascinating but flawed gem from P.K.D. I consider myself a fan, and I can forgive some of the flaws, but I can't really recommend this over his better known works. (less)

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Feb 27, 2013 Smcleish rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Originally published on my blog here in July 2006.

Philip K. Dick was not an author who concerned himself greatly with the scientific plausibility of the backgrounds to his novels in the way that many of his contemporaries (Larry Niven, for example) did. However, there are many contemporary echoes thirty years on of his paranoid tales; he writing is of now in a way that most writers in any genre can only dream about. What we get in this novel, apart from one of Dick's weirdest titles (the policem...more Originally published on my blog here in July 2006.

Philip K. Dick was not an author who concerned himself greatly with the scientific plausibility of the backgrounds to his novels in the way that many of his contemporaries (Larry Niven, for example) did. However, there are many contemporary echoes thirty years on of his paranoid tales; he writing is of now in a way that most writers in any genre can only dream about. What we get in this novel, apart from one of Dick's weirdest titles (the policeman is a fan of Elizabethan composer John Dowland, one of whose best known songs is named Flow My Tears), includes resonances with identity theft and the possibility of unknown celebrities as we see in so many "celebrity" special editions of reality TV shows at the moment. There is also an element of parody of the fairly common science fiction idea of a genetically superior race within mankind, as described in all seriousness by writers such as A.E. van Vogt (and to which the back story of many superhero comic strips can be related, from Superman to the X Men).

Jason Taverner is a product of genetic engineering experiments - a "Six", because he was produced by the sixth series of such experiments - and host of the world's top-rated TV show. But one morning he wakes up in a sleazy hotel, and discovers that not only is he unable to prove who he is and regain the privileged life that used to be his, but nobody even recognises him or remembers his work. While not precisely identity theft - identity loss would be more like it - this fits in with current fears, in the UK at least, of what might happen with the introduction of identity cards tied to a single central database, obviously due to become the country's biggest hacker target.

As our society continues every day to become more dependent on technology for smooth running, the consequences of any breakdown become proportionately more serious. Increasing complexity makes it harder to ensure the security of even the most crucial systems, as well as taking the technology as a whole beyond the grasp of a single engineer. However, introducing measures to deal with these consequences can compromise the security of the entire system: to put in a "back door" to recover a stolen identity, for example, can provide a new method to steal one in the first place.

In the end, though, Dick ends up copping out. Jason Taverner recovers his identity, but effectively this happens through Dick going outside the system he has used to set up this novel. The story slips into drug taking and the insights it gives into the nature of reality; this time the abundance of ideas in one of Dick's novels undermines the plot. Effectively, it reads as though he paints himself into a corner, but then discovers the ability to walk through walls; frustrating for the reader, who wants to know what clever idea will be used to get round the problems. Both the drugs and the nature of reality (specifically, how we know that what we experience is real and not a hallucination) are long term preoccupations of Dick's, and both are better dealt with elsewhere in his fiction. So this ending is a major disappointment in what could have been a fascinating novel.(less)

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Feb 20, 2013 John Xero rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Four and a half stars.

Flow My Tears is a difficult novel to describe, beyond the basic blurb - A famous TV star wakes up in a seedy motel and finds that the world has forgotten him, completely and inexplicably. His official records have been erased, old magazines don't carry his listings, people simply don't remember him.

From that jumping off point the novel is more an exploration of the future world that Philip K. Dick envisioned. Of police systems and social systems (but far more interesting t...more

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Feb 10, 2013 Gavin Felgate rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This story opens with the main protagonist, Jason Taverner, as the presenter of a popular TV show; that is, until he wakes up in a dystopic alternate reality that is controlled by the police; a reality where he faces an identity crisis because he legally does not exist. A lot of the story seems to be about the nightmares that can come about as a result of bureacracy, and presumably paranoia about the Police force and its influence; there is a kind of sense of Big Brother being omnipresent throug...more

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Jan 04, 2013 Bengt rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I've always heard others complain about PKD suffering from good ideas but bad writing, but I never agreed until I read Flow My Tears.

Unfortunately, this book abides with painfully awkward dialogue and an idling plot. There are a number of interesting tangents that are never followed up (nor explained in any way even remotely causal), and the most interesting part (the end) is too little too late. Furthermore, the big twist for Taverner's non-existence is intriguing, but unsatisfying in its deli...more

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Nov 08, 2012 Derek Davis rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The first Dick novel I read was The Man in the High Castle, which presented an interesting alternate-history universe but seemed dry at the core. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, by comparison, grew increasingly wacky as it moved along, ending somewhere beyond my mental Andromeda, in the land of incomprehension. I liked it a lot more than Castle.
Flow My Tears, from Dick's later period, starts in that land of incomprehension and travels west. It's just barely a novel, just barely SF – more...more The first Dick novel I read was The Man in the High Castle, which presented an interesting alternate-history universe but seemed dry at the core. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, by comparison, grew increasingly wacky as it moved along, ending somewhere beyond my mental Andromeda, in the land of incomprehension. I liked it a lot more than Castle.
Flow My Tears, from Dick's later period, starts in that land of incomprehension and travels west. It's just barely a novel, just barely SF – more of a stream of stewed consciousness. I found much of the book funny as hell but couldn't be sure how much of the humor was intended.
Set in 1988, a decade and a half after the book's composition, it presents a police state in which everyone must carry multiple ID cards, student protestors have been driven into underground encampments and resistors are routinely sent to forced labor camps. Transportation is mostly by individual flying cars called quibbles.
The central character, Jason Taverner, is a world-famous singer and TV showman who wakes one morning in a flophouse without his identity cards. Same world, same people – except that no one alive has ever heard of him and his identity does not exist in any database.
So, we start off with one alternate reality and move into an alternate alternate reality. From there, Taverner bounces around Las Vegas through an wholly improbable (by any known measure) series of interactions and events. I have little doubt that Dick sat down and wrote, without notes or outline, simply spilling out whatever was floating through his drug-addled? sleep-deprived? schizoid? mind.
The male characters are inconsistent in tone and outlook, acting mostly as mouthpieces for short, weirdly-angled essays on whatever caught Dick's fancy at the moment. The woman are stronger and the men are mostly frightened of them. Motivations are fluid yet viscous. It's clear that every so often Dick convinces himself that it all makes sense. Well....
So why fine stars? Because though it's a mess, it's a scintillating, brilliant mess. Much of that humor, I saw by the end, was intended, and the juxtapositions of incongruous statements and elements do make a kind of ineffable sense in that land beyond Andromeda. It pulls you along like few books I've read in recent years – you've just got to find out what these goofs will do and say next. And you realize that Dick, warped as he was, had a deep, broad, eviscerating intellect that couldn't be matched by the fully sane.
(less)

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Oct 07, 2012 Babak Fakhamzadeh rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

Dick is always a joy to read, and though many of his books are a bit rough around the edges, this one is a very good tale of alienation along Kafkaesque lines. Written in 1974, the book's set in the near future of 1988, where a well known TV personality ceases to officially exist from one day to the next, having not only been removed from the public record, but also from people's memories.
Dick's world building is familiar; lunar and Martian colonies exist, as does a globally functioning governm...more

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Jun 30, 2012 Gabriel rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This edition is the dramatized version of the Philip K. Dick book. It's really choppy and hard to visualize. I know that the playwright (Linda Hartinian) knew both PKD and his wife - probably how she got the rights to convert this into a play - but that does not mean that she knew how to get the structure of this complicated story into a play format.

Part of this is personal likes and dislikes. I have a really hard time with plays that have short scenes in them. I prefer the scenes to go on for a...more This edition is the dramatized version of the Philip K. Dick book. It's really choppy and hard to visualize. I know that the playwright (Linda Hartinian) knew both PKD and his wife - probably how she got the rights to convert this into a play - but that does not mean that she knew how to get the structure of this complicated story into a play format.

Part of this is personal likes and dislikes. I have a really hard time with plays that have short scenes in them. I prefer the scenes to go on for a few minutes, not just a couple of seconds. Some of the transitions are poorly written and leave a reader confused as to where the location is (are we in the hotel or are we at the ID forgery place? How did we get here in the first place?) or even why we are there until halfway through the two minute scene. For those of you who've read the book, this is most clearly a problem in the forgery scene where it takes 22 lines (barely two pages) to go from "What do you need?" to "They're all done." Even more amazing is she doesn't start work on them till line 17. Either that means there's lots of silence in this scene (boring) or they talk very slow (boring) or she's super fast at creating a ton of ID cards (unrealistic).

Also, there's a narrator in this play. The narrator doesn't really do his job of tying together scenes either (before the forgery scene, all he talks about is Jason going to the front desk of the hotel, not what he's looking for or anything). Even better is when the characters repeat what the narrator says (Herb: [describes the dirty hotel room] He was not in a hospital room./Jason: This is a hotel room. A lousy, bug-infested cheap wino hotel) or when the characters waste lines (Jason: I'm Jason./Kathy: Hi, I'm Kathy). I mean, even PKD's prose isn't this bad!

In short, this is an awful adaptation taking an interesting story and turning it into a confusing mess. No, I didn't finish it, but I did take a peek at the end and saw that, for an unclear reason, a letter written by PKD about Valis was included in the script right before the epilogue of Flow My Tears ... and I just go, huh?(less)

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Jun 15, 2012 Derek rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is my first dip into the work of Philip K. Dick. After reading a chat board on where to start reading PKD, I kept hearing Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said mentioned over and over again. So, without pause, I went to the library the next day and retrieved a copy.

I sat and read this book in one sitting. It is not often that I read books at once. In fact, the last time I remember reading a book so quickly was Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I am certainly not a fast reader -- I take my ti...more

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Apr 13, 2012 Sandy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Despondent over the failure of his fourth marriage and at the same time stimulated to fresh creativity after his first mescaline trip, cult author Philip K. Dick worked on what would be his 29th published sci-fi novel, "Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said," from March to August 1970. Ultimately released in 1974, an important year in Phil's life (the year of his legendary "pink light" incident), the book went on to win the prestigious John W. Campbell Memorial Award, was nominated for both the Hugo...more
Despondent over the failure of his fourth marriage and at the same time stimulated to fresh creativity after his first mescaline trip, cult author Philip K. Dick worked on what would be his 29th published sci-fi novel, "Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said," from March to August 1970. Ultimately released in 1974, an important year in Phil's life (the year of his legendary "pink light" incident), the book went on to win the prestigious John W. Campbell Memorial Award, was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and has been a fan favorite ever since. Incorporating many of the themes, tropes and obsessions that would later be subsumed under the adjective "phildickian," the novel introduces the reader to Jason Taverner, a popular singer/TV variety show host in the Los Angeles of 1988. It is a typically dystopian Dick future, in which a second Civil War has transpired, college students are in perpetual warfare with the government, and an all-pervasive police state keeps relentless tabs on the citizenry. In a classic opener--the old "what if you awoke one morning to find that no one knew who you were"--Jason is attacked by an old girlfriend with a "gelatinlike Callisto cuddle sponge," a dangerously parasitic creature. Awakening in a seedy hotel room, the popular celebrity finds that he is now a nobody; a total unknown, with no birth certificate on file, no one who remembers him, and no IDs. And in the police state of 1988 L.A., not having an ID is a very easy way to get shipped off to an FLC (forced labor camp)....

During his travails in this new reality of his, the befuddled Taverner encounters a series of women even more striking than the wacky dames that Bobby Dupea met in "Five Easy Pieces." There is Heather Hart, a fellow singer and, like Jason, a genetically engineered "six"; Kathy Nelson, an ID forger with obvious mental problems; Rachel Rae, an alcoholic old flame with a deep insecurity about aging; Alys Buckman, a leather-clad lesbian and twin sister of Police General Felix Buckman, with whom she has had a baby (!); and Mary Anne Dominic, a sweet potter (yes, ceramics and pottery again feature in this story, as they had in Dick's 1969 novel "Galactic Pot-Healer") who helps Jason at one of his lowest points. Interesting and well-drawn characters, all, but it is perhaps Felix Buckman who is the most fascinating of the bunch. Though one of the policymakers in this thoroughly frightening police state, he is shown to be quite a complex person by Dick, a writer who had undergone his fair share of harassment and intimidation by the authorities in his own time. Buckman, despite a certain ruthlessness, is also a lover and collector of old stamps, antique snuffboxes and, amusingly, old issues of "Weird Tales" magazines. Dick shows this authority figure to be capable of a certain liberalness of spirit and even--in perhaps the novel's most startling scene--spontaneously hugging a total stranger in the street. Still, Buckman reflects, in a passage that the justifiably paranoid Dick obviously related to: "Don't come to the attention of the authorities. Don't ever interest us. Don't make us want to know more about you." The real heart and soul of the novel (his are the tears that are referenced in the book's title, as well as his love of John Dowland's lute song of 1596, "Flow My Tears"), Buckman is one of Dick's most memorable and ambivalent characters.

As mentioned, many of Dick's favorite subjects get another workover in "Flow My Tears...." Thus, the book touches on divorce (Ruth Rae is said to have been married 51 times; 46 more than Phil!), cigars (Buckman smokes Cuesta Reys), classical music (Buckman ponders the relative merits of Wagner, Berlioz and others), sex (the legal age of consent in this typically wacky Dickian future is 12!), drugs (Alys is a walking pharmacopoeia, Jason himself undergoes an extremely well-portrayed mescaline experience, and pot is legally sold in packs) and, of course, the tricky subject of the plastic and elusive nature of reality. The novel is consistently inventive and filled with all manner of imaginative touches, from Alys' teeth (which are ornamented with signs of the zodiac) to luxury apartment buildings that float on jets of compressed air. It also features some offhand humor, such as the reference to phone orgy participants Bill and Carol and Fred and Jill (a nod to the 1969 film "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice") and the wall-to-wall carpet depicting Nixon's ascent to heaven! Dick, to add verisimilitude to his novel, employs throwaway references to fictional objects and uses futuristic slang expressions that no one could possibly understand (such as "jeter," "thungly," "rotive," "floogle," "gunjy" and "cheruba") except the characters in his story. A further sense of fidelity to facts is engendered when the author has Gen. Buckman, in the middle of speaking, pause "a moment to quietly fart, then continue...." What other author would do this? You've gotta love that Dick!

In addition to its compelling and touching story line, "Flow My Tears..." also provides the reader with some wonderful discussions on the importance of love ("When you love you cease to live for yourself," Ruth tells Jason), fear (it "can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy," Jason says to Mary Anne) and, fascinatingly, art and critics (Jason grouses about critics discussing the work that he had put out 19 years earlier; in 1974, Dick's first novel, "Solar Lottery," had been released 19 years before!). It is not a perfect novel, and as usual, a close reading will reveal some inconsistencies and minor goofs. For example, the hotel clerk Eddy Pracim leaves a room at one point, but a few pages later is still present. In another scene, Jason has terminals placed on his head to record an "electrocardiogram"; that, of course, should be an "electroencephalogram." And then there are the occasional ungrammatical sentences, such as "Things which even he, at forty-two years, didn't know them all." But these are quibbles. Ultimately, "Flow My Tears..." is a tense, exciting, passionately written, inventive and moving novel, filled with memorable characters and some remarkable situations. Compulsively readable, it is Dick near the top of his form, and for many of us, modern sci-fi does not get too much better. Oh...as to the reason for Taverner's predicament, Phil DOES manage to give us a somewhat plausible, if way-out, explanation for it. But, like Felix Buckman, you might feel the need of some Darvon after hearing it!(less)

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Mar 12, 2012 Tim rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Love, love, love. Every kind of love. Free love, incestuous love, man on man love, lesbians, cold love, hot love, even animal love. Though no sex. Not even animal sex. Except for a strange reference to the Shetland Pony daguerreotype that was mentioned in Slaughterhouse Five - a book I read less than six weeks ago.

It has the clear hippy vibe of a 60s book written about the future - a book inspired by the time when student riots were threatening to tear the US apart, a time when free love, free d...more

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Feb 20, 2012 Joseph rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: on-my-e-reader

When a writer cross-references himself as much as Philip K. Dick does, the absence of certain details becomes as powerful as the details that actually appear on the page. The reader struggles with what he or she knows to have been true many times before. But after repeated attempts to adjudicate the divide between the known past and the unfolding present, the reader is faced with a stark choice: fail and walk away from the novel as a lessened member of literary society or engage the author for t...more

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Nov 22, 2011 notgettingenough rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: adventure, modern-lit, science-fiction, science-sort-of, sociology

You can criticise Dick all you like for being wrong about flying cars, or thinking the LP record was for ever (note: it isn't?), but he is writing science fiction and, as Ray Bradbury points out far more eloquently than will I, that is about ideas. It isn't about sentence construction, plot or character development. If you wanted to, it is easy enough to criticise this book on all these counts, but so what? Why would you bother? What matters is that it is really hard to put down. I found myself...more You can criticise Dick all you like for being wrong about flying cars, or thinking the LP record was for ever (note: it isn't?), but he is writing science fiction and, as Ray Bradbury points out far more eloquently than will I, that is about ideas. It isn't about sentence construction, plot or character development. If you wanted to, it is easy enough to criticise this book on all these counts, but so what? Why would you bother? What matters is that it is really hard to put down. I found myself in bed last night thinking yeah, okay, sex, mmm, nice, but could I first -. OK!!!!!!!. I did finish the book in the morning. But. Couldn't I have my dick AND read it? That's what I really wanted.

It is about ideas. Unlike Banks who very carefully creates the detail of his worlds - a sort of sci fi rivet man, I guess - Dick doesn't give a toss about the technical side of his vision of the future. What he does nail firmly to the page is an understanding of what things will be like for our society in the future, a realisation that is ruthlessly turning out to be true, the idea that it will be about haves and have nots in a way that makes days of slavery look like buddies having a laugh. The cost of technology, whether it be the technology to bear living in a virtually uninhabitable world or to make one superior in some life-strengthening way, will divide us into the few and the many in a way which will become more extreme as the possibilities of what money can buy increase.

That may seem obvious, after all, right now we live in a world where people buy improved parts for themselves from people so poor that their bodies are their most hopeful source of income. That would have been science fiction not so long ago. We live in a world where the 'greatest democracy' in the world, ie the US, brags this figure: the richest 400 men own more than the bottom 50% of the population. Is this not incredible? Is it not incredible that a society run in such a way invades other countries to impose this upon them? With our blessings, at that. Equally, that the life expectancy of its wealthy citizens is the best in the world, that of its poorest worse than many third world countries. Equally that the good guys think if they don't use plastic bags and drink fair trade coffee they've done their bit. Add a few flying cars and honestly, it reads like a horrific sci fi story of things gone wrong. Dick wrote of a future in which WE now live and which we are going to continue to develop along the appalling lines he envisages.

So, this backdrop is persistent in Dick's stories and it is remorselessly accurate. This is the first thing that makes his work so eeny-meany-my next to sex.

The other is his equally persistent fixation: are things really as they seem? ARE they? Have you ever walked into a lunatic asylum to visit somebody and wondered if your whole life is about to irrevocably change? I find the philosphical aspect of this question not particularly interesting, but its practical application is terrifying, Dick's preoccupation is ours. We may indeed, wake up in the morning and everything seems as it was just as we left it as we fell asleep a few hours earlier, only to discover that actually everything has changed. The rug has been ripped out from under our feet in some way that leaves us shocked and baffled and, after a while, unable to tell even if things WERE how we think they were.

He is fantastic at doing this. It isn't just his characters that lose their surety, it is us. We become uncertain of what we read. We become uncertain, indeed, of ourselves. I can't imagine a greater compliment to give to a book than this.
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Sep 16, 2011 Carmen rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Sci Fi Geeks

Recommended to Carmen by: The Internet

I cannot remember what prompted me on to start looking for this author. Maybe there was a new movie coming out that was based on one of his books? Nonetheless, when I discovered that many sci-fi movies I have enjoyed were based on books by Philip K. Dick, I wanted to learn more about him. "Minority Report", "Total Recall", and "A Scanner Darkly" to name a few, are all based on novels or short stories by Philip K. Dick.

Based on reviews, I chose "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said" as my first read...more

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Jul 13, 2011 Lee Selwood rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The story opens at the end of another successful TV show hosted by Jason Taverner, an extremely successful singer in a fictional late eighties environment. Published in 1974 this would have been set in the not too distant future, details of which are touched on but not given a great deal of depth. There has been a second American civil war which has led to the emergence of a totalitarian police state. The population is divided into citizens and the non-persons who are driven uyndergound by the P...more The story opens at the end of another successful TV show hosted by Jason Taverner, an extremely successful singer in a fictional late eighties environment. Published in 1974 this would have been set in the not too distant future, details of which are touched on but not given a great deal of depth. There has been a second American civil war which has led to the emergence of a totalitarian police state. The population is divided into citizens and the non-persons who are driven uyndergound by the Pols (police) and Nats (national guard), everyones movements restricted via frequent check points demanding various papers and identification. Jason Taverner and his current lover are also identified as a six, a possible genetic engineering experiment which has been outlawed with few individuals remaining living in secret.

Into this scenario Jason Taverner the womanising celebrity singer and TV personality is attacked by a former lover with some kind of alien parasite. He repels the attack but not before he is given a potentially fatal wound. He is taken to the hospital where he fades into unconsciousness surrounded by his lover and hospital staff.

He awakens in a cheap hotel, his identity papers missing but a large roll of cash still in his possession. He soon establishes that the world has forgotten who he is, friends, lovers and peers no longer remember him or will help him. Without ID he is unable to travel anywhere without the risk of being sent to a forced labour camp and is forced into trusting starngers and the blackmarket to acquire forged documents.

The story unfolds at a fairly good pace there are some interesting characters introduced along Jason's journey, the escaped mental patient forger, the aged ex lover and in particular the Police General and his sister/lover. The reasons for his non existence slowly unfold and as his existence is intertwined with the Policeman and his sister/lover event lead to the explosive climax. Just a dream? Parallel universe?

I though this was a great read, it had all the classic PKD traits, crazy drugs, dystopian future, mad characters and truly touching pieces of dialogue. My favourite scene was the policeman meeting the stranger at the garage and the outpouring of emotion and grief symbolised by his crude drawing of a heart with an arrow through it. Simply brilliant.

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Mar 21, 2011 Patrick Gibson rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

Philip K. Dick's strength isn't in his prose or his dialogue or his characters. He didn't have the time to write beautifully polished sentences or to explore his protagonists deeply. What he did, and did magnificently, was tap into the wellspring of existential angst which we all possess.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said does this by having Jason Taverner, world-famous variety show host and singer, wake up in a world where he doesn't exist. No one recognizes him, and there is no record of his b...more

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Jan 03, 2011 Michaelbert Humperdink rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Stephen Baxter once said in a talk on H.G. Wells that Dick had "majored on empathy." I am often impressed by Dick's fractured poetic sense and this book is no exception. Combining the corniness(flying cars), melancholy(John Dowland), and Dick's trademark questioning reality, Flow My Tears is a book that I fear could not be written today. The zeitgeist is just too media-weathered. I envy people who were young in the 60s and at the same time curse them for giving up on changing the world for the b...more

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Aug 20, 2010 Jacqueline Tao rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Flow my tears,
fall from your springs
Exiled forever let me mourn
Where night's black bird her sad infamy sings
There let me live

The style of this novel seems to be a bit erratic to me, perhaps PKD was really high on hallucinogens at the time he wrote this novel, but it is consistent with his earlier works. The protagonist of this novel is Jason Traverner, he is the popular host of a NBC variety show. He has about 30 million viewers watching him. He has it all: fame, fortune, good looks, and all the...more

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Jun 11, 2010 Matthew Snope rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Disappointing. It tried to achieve the same gritty philosophic beauty as A Scanner Darkly, but missed the mark. The plot is humdrum (man wakes up knowing who he is, but rest of world does not), anachronistic 70s lingo and cultural items distract from what's supposed to be set in the future, the narrative wildly switches over to a more minor character right at the story's end, and the epilogue is hamfisted and immaturely written. Each chapter is pretty much the main character (well, main up until...more

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Apr 18, 2010 ElSeven rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'm not sure if this was the wrong book to use as an introduction to Philip K. Dick, but, I came away from this very underwhelmed.

As a piece of science fiction, it was a descent affair. I made it though in one reading, with is saying something. Lots of Sci-Fi grates on me, and consequently I don't end up finishing lots of what I try. Asimov got thrown down in disgust, Bradbury got forgotten about, Orson Scot Card never interested me enough to even buy a book. But this held me through until the e...more I'm not sure if this was the wrong book to use as an introduction to Philip K. Dick, but, I came away from this very underwhelmed.

As a piece of science fiction, it was a descent affair. I made it though in one reading, with is saying something. Lots of Sci-Fi grates on me, and consequently I don't end up finishing lots of what I try. Asimov got thrown down in disgust, Bradbury got forgotten about, Orson Scot Card never interested me enough to even buy a book. But this held me through until the end.

PKD isn't the best writer in the world, and the narrative suffers for it. But then, I don't think the narrative isn't really the point of this book. It's only a device to keep Dick's protagonist moving from one conversation partner to the next, so that Dick can expound to you through the dialogue. It's a welcome device, especially in a work of science fiction, where authors are so fond of expounding The Truth though deific characters.

I also rather liked Dick's characters. They're slightly over the top in certain regards, both in the way they're written and the way they are but that comes with the territory. In spite of this Dick dwells just enough on each one, letting details come out through dialogue, and internal monologue from other characters. I like this. It made them interesting. Whether that interest was born of simple curiosity, or schadenfreude, I don't know, but the fact that I was interested says much for Dick's powers as an author.

It was a promising book, almost a great book, but in the end it was almost as if Dick couldn't keep it all together. The best way for me to describe how I feel about is is to compare it to a joke that has a great setup, but with a punchline that falls flat. The explanation for the book's main conceit was --- lacking. Why would an alteration of one person's perception of reality affect reality itself, and not merely remain a personal dream world? If this had happened before to other people, why hadn't reality shifted around them as well? Why did General Buckman and his aide have to relearn the things they had forgotten, while Heather Hart has no memory of her memory lapse? The book had a promising setup, but the payoff just fell flat. Perhaps this is losing sight of the bigger question, all the questions on the nature of identity and whatever, but damn it all, if you're going to try and explain your book rationally, you'd better do a good job of it.

Oh. Also, the epilogue felt really unnecessary and tacked on, but that's a minor quibble.

Two Stars. I call it a noble failure. It hasn't put me off of PKD, but I don't think I'd recommended this to anyone else.(less)

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About Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. He briefly attended the University of California, but dropped out before completing any classes. In 1952, he began writing professionally and proceeded to write numerous novels and short-story collections. He won the Hugo Award for the best novel in 1962 for The Man in the High Castle and the John W. Campbell Memo...more

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“Reality denied comes back to haunt.” — 143 people liked it

“Grief reunites you with what you've lost. It's a merging; you go with the loved thing or person that's going away. You follow it a far as you can go.

But finally,the grief goes away and you phase back into the world. Without him.

And you can accept that. What the hell choice is there? You cry, you continue to cry, because you don't ever completely come back from where you went with him -- a fragment broken off your pulsing, pumping heart is there still. A cut that never heals.

And if, when it happens to you over and over again in life, too much of your heart does finally go away, then you can't feel grief any more. And then you yourself are ready to die. You'll walk up the inclined ladder and someone else will remain behind grieving for you.” — 78 people liked it

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