false 72682211 585893 216367 0679736654 9780679736653 53 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172783389m/216367.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172783389s/216367.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/216367.A_Scanner_Darkly 4.01 764 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 55173 4032 1977 4 0 false Tue Sep 15 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sun Sep 27 14:11:45 -0700 2009 Sat Oct 17 10:01:00 -0700 2009