Author: Philip K. Dick
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…
Dick was an interesting man, to say the least. For starters, and for those who don't know, the man was certifiably stark raving mad. He repeatedly had "visions" that he thought revealed religious… Philip K. Dick is a very well known writer of science fiction. But here, in "A Scanner Darkly" he wrote more than his regular sci-fi. The book is a cautionary tale about drug abuse, based on his own…
