false 41058033 1203986 14817 057507681X 9780575076815 255 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1211494268m/14817.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1211494268s/14817.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14817.A_Scanner_Darkly 4.02 4089 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. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk]]> 4764 3.88 55170 4032 1977 3 0 false Thu Apr 23 23:26:01 -0700 2009 Sat Dec 27 20:52:15 -0800 2008 Thu Apr 23 23:26:01 -0700 2009