A Scanner Darkly (the film) Directed by Richard Linklater

 A Scanner Darkly (the film)

Directed by Richard Linklater

So imagine a movie starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr.(Doing his best Jeff Goldblum impersonation.), and Winona Ryder and it's produced by George Clooney because Hollywood is like that. Now consider that film is an adaptation of a Philip K Dick novel, that shows the destruction of drug addiction and sheer insanity of the War on Drugs. Now instead of just doing a live-action film, animate over everything and the actors using an advanced computer-driven rotoscope technique. This will give the film an air of unreality. Oh, there's also a brief cameo by Alex Jones being brutalized by the police and thrown in a black van (If only that happened in real life.  Join the communist revolution, and you can help make that dream a reality. {But I don’t want anyone brutalized or thrown into a black van}Not even Alex Jones? {I’ll settle for him having to admit on air that he was lying and being financially ruined.}). That's A Scanner Darkly, the 2006 film that only saw a limited release in the United States.

Let me recap the plot in case you missed last week's review of the novel. Unlike the book that takes place in a 1990s that never was, the movie is set seven years from now. America has lost the war on drugs and somehow failed to realize it (Kinda like now, only the drug in question is far from benign.). Over 20% of the population is addicted. Now in our world the reaction has been to grudgingly legalize the least harmful and most socially acceptable drugs; although that's happening with considerable push back. In the film, Law Enforcement and the government that it, in theory, works for, although we see zero civilian oversight, turns to increasingly sophisticated technology and surveillance (which our current government is working to obtain for other reasons) to try and stem the tide.

That tide has a name, Substance D, a highly addictive drug that causes brain damage through repeated use. To be honest, I have to wonder at a society where one out of five people are so riddled with despair and/or boredom that they turn to a drug that causes the hemispheres of your brain to be unable to communicate with each other (It probably isn’t that much different from a society in which 38% of adults have at one time or another met the clinical definition of having a substance abuse disorder of one sort or another…{Not quite the same as 1 out of 5 is hopelessly addicted to a drug we don’t even have a decent treatment for and will have their brains burnt out}True.  But it isn't that far.). Basically turning your mind into a chunky slurry incapable of really interacting with the outside world in a meaningful way. That said, there are drugs on the market today that literally eat your flesh and people voluntarily turn to them so maybe my grasp of human nature just isn't as tight as I thought.

Keanu Reeves plays Bob Arctor, aka undercover police officer Fred, who has to wear an advanced piece of equipment, the scrambler suit, to hide his identity from his own superiors (Because the corruption is that rampant. {fending off infiltration can be difficult}). Bob/Fred is a man with many problems, one of his roommates is trying to frame him for a variety of crimes. His girlfriend won't be intimate with him and his boss just assigned him to build a case against himself. All of this while his addiction to Substance D is slowly destroying his grip on reality. Keanu plays Bob/Fred pretty well honestly, capturing his mood swings and confusion as he slowly loses his grip on the world, while we maintain an iron grip on our empathy for Bob/Fred's struggles. You honestly feel bad for the guy as you watch him being destroyed right before your eyes.

Robert Downey Jr plays Bob/Fred's roommate James Barris and I feel that he was slightly miscasted here. It's not that he does a bad job, in fact he does a pretty good job. It's just that Downey's native charisma makes Barris a lot more likable than he should be. In some ways, though it does feel like Downey is channeling some of Jeff Goldblum's mannerisms into the character who is an overly pretentious, pseudo-intellectual, drug addict. Which also strangely works, to be honest, but I find myself wondering if a less likable actor might have been a better choice. (I differ in my opinion of the character.  I suspect that Our Dear Reviewer read certain mannerisms into the character in the text, and Robert channeled Jeff to capture his.  The reality is unless such a person were personable, he likely would have gotten himself killed.  I’ve known some addicts, dated one for a bit, subset: booze.  They can be charming as fuck, even while being completely toxic.)

Our female lead, Donna is played by Winona Ryder (Almost unrecognizable, and praise be unto Her.) and she does a really great performance using mostly her body language in this role. Now in the novel, I didn't really feel that Donna was all that invested in Bob as a person and her empathy for Bob/Fred's fate was more driven by general compassion. This may be because of Dick's reoccurring issues with women honestly (Yes.). However, Winona, likely comfortable with Reeves because of their past work (they did accidentally marry each on the set of Dracula after all) is able to affect a sort of causal intimacy with him. I'll admit that this is more important for me, due to being a child of deaf parents, but body language is something I have to tell myself to pay less attention to. ASL, the first language I ever learned, uses body language heavily, it's not just your hands. So a deaf person or another native ASL speaker is frankly a bit more sensitive to it than the average. I wouldn't worry about deaf people being able to read your secrets from body language however folks, because most of you throw out such conflicting messages using it that ASL speakers try to ignore it when dealing with you. Anyways, Ryder does a great job with her body language of adding depth to her relationship and by making it a point of only allowing Bob/Fred to actually touch her even casually.

Now let me talk about the rotoscoping, which was done via a computer program called rotoshop. Rotoscoping is an animation technique that animators use to trace over motion films of real things frame by frame to create fluid movement and more realistic action than hand drawing is capable of. It was invented by Max Fleischer, a Polish-American animator in 1915. Walt Disney used it in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Ralph Bakshi used it extensively in his works including his version of Lord of the Rings, Ice and Fire, American Pop and Cool World as well some sequences in Wizards. Don Bluth used it in American Tail, Secret of NIMH and Titan AE (And George Lucas used it for the lightsabers in the original Star Wars films.).

Rotoshop is a software producing much the same effect only replacing the long and tedious hand technique with computer animation to create the same effect. In A Scanner Darkly the result is a dream-like atmosphere which increases the unreality of Bob/Fred's world while keeping it real enough that you can't shrug it off. It's honestly both rather beautiful and disturbing (It was incredibly surreal.). I don't think I would want to see this become a staple or mainstay of animation but for works like A Scanner Darkly, it honestly works incredibly well. (It is one of those techniques that is used to communicate the sensory reality of the viewpoint character from the third person.  Like Dutch Angles to portray being off-balance, or…the whole of Come and See in its use of sound design to portray auditory exclusion  Bob/Fred’s reality is breaking down, and the rotoscoping gets that across.)

Now, as is our tradition in this review, adaptions get two grades. The first grade is of the adaption as a stand-alone project and the second is how good of an adaptation it is. As a stand-alone movie, I would consider A Scanner Darkly very good. It's well written, very well acted, and while the story is bleak and only ends with the barest glimmer of hope, it still keeps you on board. It's not quite to an A, however. Maybe it's the bleakness or the sense of the uncanny running through it but I can't quite hold it up as a film you would watch again and again. But it is a film that you can watch and it stays with you and you certainly don't feel like you wasted your time. So A Scanner Darkly gets a B+ from me. As an adaptation, it's bloody amazing. While large parts of the book are skipped and we don't get a lot of the slow slide into irreparable damage with Bob/Fred that we do in the book, these changes are due to the medium. The only real changes actually help streamline and improve the narrative honestly. So as an adaptation I'm giving it an A-. 

Obviously, I watched this too, and will be giving it my own grade.  Actually grades.  I cannot grade it as an adaptation, but I will grade it on two criteria.  The first is how much I subjectively enjoyed the film.  The second is the artistic merit of the film.  There are some movies that are absolutely amazing films that everyone should watch, as art, but that aren’t really enjoyable.  Think “Come and See” which is a soviet war movie about partisan fighting in the Great Patriotic War.  It was so accurate - because the guys who made it fought as partisans in Belarus against the Nazis - that it hospitalized veterans.  It is absolutely amazing, but you only ever watch it once.  There are other movies that are complete schlock with little artistic merit or social commentary to be had that are just great fun to watch.  Dante’s Peak is a good example of this.  It is a terrible movie that makes geologists weep, but I secretly love it.

As a piece of entertainment, I give this movie a C-.  It isn’t terrible, I would watch it again to make sure a friend saw it, and I’d be able to emotionally stand doing so.  But it wasn’t enjoyable. As a work of art that everyone should see, it is a straight A for me.  The cinematography, the writing, pacing.  Technically, it is a masterpiece.  More than that, it is also a poignant commentary on people in a broken society that hits very close to home.

With that, we bring another month of Philip K Dick reviews to an end.  These works were all chosen by our ever wise patrons, through a vote at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads for as little as a 1$ a month.  We’re also considering some changes which will be put to patron vote so if you’d like a voice in that, please consider joining us.  Next week is Breach of Trust by Gary T Stevens and Daniel Gibbs. 

Red text was your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text was your reviewer Garvin Anders

A Scanner Darkly By Philip K Dick

 A Scanner Darkly

By Philip K Dick

"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known" 1 Corinthians 13:12 King James Version

I've written a decent amount covering the life and times of Philip K Dick, so I'm not going to burn space repeating it. I will encourage everyone to use the link at the bottom to take a look if you need a refresher. A Scanner Darkly was published in 1977, by Doubleday books. It is very deeply tied to a part of his life after his 4th wife Nancy left him. During that point, he dove fully into the counterculture of the 1970s and allowed a great number of younger folks, most of them otherwise homeless, to use his house (This is very good Praxis, Mr. Dick.). Many of these people would become the basis for characters in the story. 

During this period between 1970 and 1972, he stopped writing and became hooked on amphetamines which he had been using on and off throughout the 1960s (I don’t write, all is bright, I’ve got no teeth but I can still bite! Oh Meth!  Hooo Meth!  Seriously kids, don’t do meth.). It was when he left for Canada and got involved in a Synanon style rehab clinic, which was a style of the clinic that battled drug addiction by cutting people completely from their old lives and... Well brainwashing them through brutal communal sessions of intense criticism by the other patients (Yikes.  So… rehab and a cult combined with The Bad Kind of Maoist). These clinics were eventually shut down by the federal government after evidence of mass assault, threats against neighbors, and attacks on people who left the program surfaced. 

His fifth wife Tessa spoke extensively about the writing of the book, saying that the first draft only took two weeks but the rewriting took three years due to the sheer emotional toll it took on Mr. Dick. She would describe waking up in the morning to find him quietly weeping in the living room after an extensive round of writing the book (Jesus Christ, that is some dedication right there.  Self-triggering your PTSD over and over again intentionally…). Considering the fate of many of the characters in the novel and the fact they were based on the real people who met the same fate... I can see why. Philip also wrote out a contract claiming that Tessa was at least half responsible for the completion of the novel and was due half the profits. 

For that matter, Tessa wasn't the only person who aided Mr. Dick in writing this novel. Originally conceived as a literary work that would be heavily autobiographical in some ways, Mr. Dick decided he would rather make it a science fiction novel. Part of that was the failure of earlier attempts of his to break into the literary novel market. Another part is, bluntly, that people in the literary novel market often turn their noses up at writers from “genre fiction” as they call it (There is likely another reason that might have gone unspoken.  Making it too close to what he lived through might have made it impossible for him as a human being to finish it.). I could write reams of rants of how the literary genre of writing is the most shallow, pretentious, and quite frankly up its own rear section of work but then we'd be here all month. Instead, Mr. Dick decided to make a science fiction work and received a lot of help from Judy-Lynn del Rey who suggested moving the time of the book to the far-off future of 1994, and such elements as the scrambler suit. 

Upon release, the book received mostly positive but some mixed reviews in the United States and Canada. Its sales were middling but nothing special. However, over in Europe the book was very warmly received. It would receive awards from the British Science Fiction Association and in France was awarded the Graoully d'Or, an award for novels decided by a selected jury of readers. It was also nominated for the Campbell award in North America. I can't help but think the book would have been very popular in the eastern block if it had been published there. Now that we've covered all of that, let's look at the novel itself. 

Our protagonist Bob Arctor is a man with problems. Once upon a time, he was an insurance salesman with a nice wife and nice pair of daughters, and a nice house. He hit his head hard one day and realized that he actually hated his life, his wife, and he wasn't entirely sold on his kids either. Now, Bob is living a double life, in one he's a drug addict, who shares his once nice house with a couple of other addicts. In the other, he's an undercover police officer named Fred. Now as Fred, his job is to winkle out the suppliers of drugs hitting the streets in the decaying United States of 1994. He also has to do so while hiding his identity from his bosses and his fellow addicts (Which gets head-trippy very fast.). To aid in this, when reporting in or operating as a police officer openly, he wears a scrambler suit; a piece of high technology that ensures that no one can actually get a good look at his features or really nail down his voice. 

The scrambler suit ensures that if any moles are working for the cartels in the police force, they can't out him and get him killed. On the flip side, when Fred is assigned to watch and gather evidence on Bob Arctor on the suspicion that he's an up-and-coming drug kingpin... He can't tell anyone that it's a waste of time and all the large amounts of drugs he buys are not only bought with taxpayer funds but mostly used by Bob and his friends instead of sold on the street. This also puts a crimp on his romantic pursuit of fellow drug dealer Donna, who he has been avoiding arresting with the excuse of trying to find her suppliers so he can arrest them instead. Also, Bob draws the line at trying to talk a woman he's arrested into having sex with him (Which puts him miles above pretty much every vice cop who has ever existed. {It is science fiction after all}). 

Meanwhile, someone is sabotaging his stuff and his life. Whether it's ripping apart his electronics, or screwing up his car; these acts of physical sabotage place his life in immediate danger. On top of that are actions to try and frame him for various petty crimes. This gets Bob worked up because again, the fact that he's an undercover cop is no protection because he can't tell his bosses he's Bob Arctor. With the cops already gunning for him, even check fraud could end up with him landing in the federal pen given the sheer amount of illegal drugs stashed in his once nice but decaying home. Drugs are ironically paid for with money given to him by the police force to buy drugs so he can find the suppliers and get them arrested (Which is pretty much exactly how those things go.  The same is true for cops who go after arms and human trafficking, and corruption is common. {Sure but I’m not sure how else you find the suppliers and in the of human trafficking, I really want to get the people up that specific ladder}). 

Another problem is that Bob/Fred is addicted to Substance D, also called Death, Slow Death, or just D. It's a drug whose exact makeup is eluding the US government so they have no idea where it's coming from; but among the cops, it's widely suspected to be a foreign plot. Substance D seems to cause people to suffer impaired judgment and lethargy, as well as hallucinations and paranoia. In the novel, we're told that repeated and sustained use of the drug breaks down the ability of the two hemispheres of your brain to communicate (Which was decent science for the 70s, but doesn’t hold water today.). In the end, addicts suffer crippling brain damage and something like Dissociative Identity Disorder. I would decry Substance D use as unrealistic but Meth and Krokodil are real drugs, with Krokodil literally causing your flesh to rot and people are willing to get themselves on that (Krokodil is illicitly and sloppily produced Desomorphine, hard-hitting and fast-acting opiate.  The toxicity is because people are making it in home labs and lack the equipment or skill at organic chemistry to remove horrifically toxic side-products and reagents used in the bathtub synthesis.  People do it, because opiate addiction is one of the worst addictions a person can have, and Krokodil is cheap.  Seriously kids, don’t do opiates.). So I guess Substance D isn't that big of a jump. 

While there are chapters written from the viewpoint of other characters, the vast majority of the book is told from Bob/Fred's point of view. So we basically get the front row of witnessing his brain turn itself into a barely working slurry as his ability to distinguish fantasy from reality falls apart. To the point that he forgets that he is Bob Arctor when he's Fred and forgets he's Fred when he's Bob Arctor. As Bob/Fred grows increasingly incoherent and disconnected from reality he takes the reader right along with him and you find yourself questioning what is actually happening and what isn't? Which might be the point. 

While it gets a lot of details wrong in its future predictions, the novel is eerily on point on a lot of things. Mr. Dick portrays a US government losing or having already unknowingly lost, the War on Drugs. The biggest reason for this is the US government being its own worst enemy. I mean right here we see massive resources wasted to arrest an undercover operative by his own department that could have been avoided with some basic sanity and forethought (Honestly, it’s a pretty solid indictment of secret-squirrel operations and drug criminalization in general. The government ends up creating a black market it then has to fight a war against.).

On top of that, the Police behavior and actions in the streets make unnecessary enemies while enabling the most violent and brutal drug dealers and pushers. There's one scene where Bob/Fred convinces a young woman in an abusive relationship to call the police on a drug-dealing boyfriend who’s clearly ramping up the violence to kill her when the cops show up. They not only don’t a damn, but they also ignore evidence that would let them make an arrest and remove a violent dangerous person from the streets.  All because they don't care about his victims (This is also very common.  Cops will straight up ignore missing persons cases unless they’re white kids.  {I would love to argue against this but we have to many true stories about cops refusing missing person reports on black kids} Transwomen get killed - sometimes by cops - and no shits are given etc.). Meanwhile, they're gleefully happy to haul in random burnt-out street junkies. This means all they're doing is keeping the streets clear for new customers to get to the dealers. 

The book does end on a slightly hopeful note, as Bob/Fred can retain just enough memory and sense of self that he might be able to deliver evidence of the domestic source of Substance D to a federal undercover agent. Yeah, on top of everything else Substance D isn't a foreign problem, it's a completely domestic one. In another eerily on-point prediction, the problem isn't an outside attack but an internal corruption. Or to put it more poetically, the call is coming from inside the house (Which reminds me of two things.  The first is the CIA using drug money to fund the shit congress won’t pay for, and the second are pharmaceutical companies creating an epidemic of opioid addiction.) 

Through A Scanner Darkly, is honestly bleak reading. It can be difficult to slide deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole of Bob/Fred’s growing incapacity to think coherently. Mr. Dick does not pull punches here in showing the brutality of the drug dealers, the cops, or anyone else in this situation. Even the afterword doesn't spare us as Mr. Dick lists the fate of the real-life people who inspired the novel, most of them dead and most of them dead before they hit their mid-20s, is the implication. 

The thing that makes me really roll my eyes is Mr. Dick claiming there is no anti-drug message here and he is not engaging in anything as “bourgeoisie” as putting a moral to the tale. It also riles up the Anthropologist in me. We've been spinning morality tales since before we discovered fire. The fastest and most effective way to communicate a lesson is to embed it into a narrative, our very brains are wired to think in narratives and to derive lessons from those narratives. Now I'll believe Mr. Dick that he didn't intend to write an anti-drug novel but sometimes what you set out to write and what you actually write aren't the same. On the flip side, the novel also functions very well as an intense criticism on the War on Drugs and pointing out that the tactics of arresting addicts and ignoring crimes done to them just isn't going to work. (I think maybe you read him wrong.  He’s not moralizing. {Having a moral in your story is different from moralizing, I’m not saying that the book is a sermon.  I’m saying that the text is an explicit drug story and Mr. Dick was in denial about what he wrote at best} Saying that drug addictions wreck people’s lives is different from moralizing at people {Sure, because moralizing at people is ineffective, Mr. Dick is just bluntly telling us what happens.  That still creates a moral in the story}.  I think it’s safe to say he was indicting a system that creates addicts, and then brutalizes them.{I can agree with that})

It also works as a surreal character piece of a man who had a nice life, decided he didn't want it, and ended up sunk in madness and self-destruction. Parts of the book are a hard slog and several characters are just pitiable and sad. This can make this book very hard to read. That said I can't deny the sheer artistry in how Mr. Dick depicts Bob/Fred's slow-motion slide into utter self-destruction and how he held my fascination even through my mounting horror. Because of that Through A Scanner Darkly gets an A-

 So like Screamers, this was chosen by our ever wise patrons.  If you would like a vote on upcoming reviews, join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where you can vote on next month’s reviews for only a dollar a month.  March’s poll is up and still open! Next week we review the film version of A Scanner Darkly, until then stay safe and keep reading! 

Red Text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text your reviewer Garvin Anders

Read more about Philip K Dick here:

http://frigidreads.blogspot.com/2019/02/philip-k-dick.html

Screamers 1995 Directed by Christian Duguay

 Screamers 1995

Directed by Christian Duguay

Christian Duguay was born on March 30th, 1956 in Canada. He graduated from Concordia University in 1979 and started working as a cameraman, taking work in documentaries, commercials, and music videos. Besides Screamers, he also directed Art of War, the 2000 film with Wesley Snipe as well as an incredible number of television movies of the week and mini-series. I don’t think this impacted his work on Screamers but we get to that. An additional fun fact: Screamers was written by Dan O'Bannon who some of y'all may remember as one of the writers of the 1990 Total Recall and Alien. He wrote Screamers in 1981 and the film was stuck in development hell for over a decade.

Screamers takes place in another solar system. The planet Sirius 6b is the only hot front in a war between the Alliance which started as an alliance of miners and scientists and The New Economic Block (My Soviet Stand-in Sense is Tingling…{Oh nononono, the NEB is made up of ruthless capitalist to a man.  They talk about them being led by corporations}). The crux of the war was the discovery of a new element on the planet that allowed for cheap energy; one character claimed that a spoonful would allow you to power a starship from Earth to Saturn (So, antimatter, but not.). It does allow them to build one-man starships that can fly from Sirius 6b to Earth without needing provisions so clearly, it's a powerful element. There is no free lunch, however, as the mining releases powerful, man-killing bursts of radiation. The miners and local scientists banded together to close the mines, refusing to commit suicide for distant taskmasters’ profits.  We find this out via an opening crawl and voice over which is a failed attempt to copy Star Wars.  Also, don’t do a voice-over and a text crawl together…  It just comes across as not trusting your audience.  Pick one. 

Said taskmasters responded by sending in mercenaries (I’m so happy my senses were wrong.  We’re dealing with the real enemy here.  Capitalists.)  to force the mines open and when that didn't work they escalated to the point of nuking the planet into a frozen ash-choked wasteland. Because nuking the resource you're fighting over is a rational response to workers calling for safety measures (I… that makes no sense.  In fact, that makes negative sense.  Not even Captain Planet villains are that dumb.). I have to assume given this and other decisions that future humanity here has suffered a plunge in intelligence, common sense, or both. That or everyone is taken out behind the school at the age of 13 and smashed over the head with a brick a few times. (That would create a lack of intelligence.  More likely, however, this is just a society that never stopped using leaded gasoline in engines.{that’s possible but I feel my brick theory is more satisfying}) Well, as you can imagine word of the N.E.B atrocities got out and half the planet promptly rose up against it. On Earth, a simmering cold war holds, as no one actually wants to turn the homeworld to ash. On Sirius 6b, however, as many civilians as possible were evacuated and the dogs of war were unleashed.

At the point the movie starts, said dogs of war are nearly exhausted. Both armies huddle in their fortress bunkers and just kind of rot in place. In between the bunkers is an irradiated wasteland, now the troops have anti-radiation meds, amusingly taken by smoking them. This is kinda a funny way to excuse everyone smoking like a chimney in this film (It would have been funnier if they snorted their meds…). However, the status quo is broken by an N.E.B soldier rushing to the alliance bunker with a message in hand asking for peace talks, sadly that soldier is taken apart by screamers.

Screamers are an artificially intelligent autonomous weapon system. What that means is they're a bunch of self-controlled robots that in theory work for the alliance but the alliance troops have utterly no control over or even communication with (Why? Why would you design this?  A bunch of scientists with enough technical skill to program an AI, and exactly no one ever considered the control problem!? {See brick theory}). Even the factory they're built-in has no human input at all. This is a situation that is just begging for the robots to develop out of control and kill us all. It's also further evidence for the brick theory bluntly, as there are certain things you should always strive to have some level of control over, like your source of food or you know... Your insane weapon platforms! (This goes beyond a brick to the head.  These idiots were all lobotomized.)

Our main character is played by a frankly wasted Peter Weller of Robocop fame and God bless him he's trying but he just can't make the character work. I can tell that our main character Commander Hendricksson is supposed to come across as an intelligent man driven to dourness by his circumstances, but he comes across as a moody, pretentious prick to me instead. Screaming at his subordinates for making reports to him and flipping out and reaching wild conclusions on fragments of data. (Lead poisoning plus TBI? {This character does make a strong case for that})

For example, a troopship crashes near the base, despite being bound for a completely different system (how is this not suspicious?) with a single survivor. That survivor claims to him that the guy they've been reporting to the whole time was actually arrested and deposed on Earth two years ago by Alliance high command and he just buys it (That should definitely be suspicious.  And that is not something anyone should buy…). In fact, he declares it's proof that Earth has abandoned both armies on the planet and things are going to go hot across the galaxy. I'm left asking... Why? Armies are expensive and if you abandon one, people ask questions. It's hard to get people to volunteer if they think they'll be left to rot. I mean, we've proven you can keep unpopular wars going for decades on volunteers but if volunteering for army service meant you never came back from Afghanistan I have doubts we could have kept that going (Are we sure it’s a volunteer army? {People talk about volunteering so I’m pretty sure}).

Commander Hendrickson decides to take the lone survivor of the crashed troopship with him as his lone escort to the N.E.B base to hammer out a truce, instead of taking any of the troops he's led and trained for years and who know how to survive in the wasteland (No!  You don’t do that!  You don’t do lone-escorts at all, let alone the lone new and completely unvetted guy!). I'm throwing this on the pile to support the brick theory. They run into a trio of survivors and learn by almost being killed by a new type of screamer built to look like a small boy that their uncontrollable weapon system has developed into something that is a danger to both sides. Gee, who could have seen this coming? (It is shocking and a complete outside context problem!  Oh wait…) Hendrickson insists on heading over to the N.E.B bunker despite being told it's full of human-style screamers and learns that there's an additional unknown type while there (Excuse me, as my head repeatedly impacts my desk. {No! Don’t ! That just sets you for the brick, it’s a trap!}).

This sets the stage for paranoia that to Hendrickson's credit he stomps down pretty quickly. They head back to the Alliance bunker but are, of course, too late, and only he, and the survivor of the N.E.B forces that happens to be a pretty girl, escape from that. They head to the one-man ship and I'm sure you can figure out the twist. I have no guilt if I've spoiled this movie for you by the way. The gynoid he was traveling with, however, decides to fight her sisters to protect him and even gives her life to let him escape, proclaiming that she came to love him. Which... I can't figure out why but then again she's likely less than a year old, maybe it's just because he was the first entity to treat her as a person in her own right even if just barely? (Either that, or she succumbed to the allure of Peter Weller? {In any of his other roles I would agree but the director worked overtime to kill his charisma})

Screamers has the elements of an interesting story in it but the dialogue and characterization are frankly poor and the world-building is kind of meh at best. As usual, I will give two scores for the movie as it is an adaptation. As a stand-alone movie, I'd rate it a D+, although I imagine I'd have more fun if I watched this movie in a group. Don't watch it alone is my advice, give it the full mystery science theater 3000 treatment. As an adaptation... It preserves the major story beats and essential ideas of the story and I don't blame Mr. O'Bannon for dropping the WWIII going hot part of it. However, the love conquers all sting at the end just fell completely flat for me and I feel it's an inferior ending. I'm not usually a fan of downer endings either, it's just this “happy ending” feels really rote and pre-packaged to me.  Of course, there would be the question of what one robot alone on Earth can do, so maybe it would be more interesting if the robots seized the starship and the movie ended there. So I'm giving it a D+ as an adaptation as well. All well maybe A Scanner Darkly will lift my spirits.

      I hope you enjoyed this review, which was voted for by our ever-wise patrons. If you’d like a vote on upcoming reviews, join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads The March poll is up and open for as little as a dollar a month! Join us next week for a look at a Scanner Darkly the novel. Also chosen by our ever-wise patrons. Until then stay safe and Keep Reading!

Red Text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen 

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders

Second Variety By Philip K Dick

 Second Variety

By Philip K Dick

Mr. Dick wrote Second Variety as a novelette for the magazine Space Science Fiction, which was at the time edited by Lester Del Ray. Conflicts between Del Ray and the editor would kill that magazine after only about 8 issues. During that time though it would publish two Philip K Dick stories, the other being The Variable Man and at least one story by Issac Asimov. Second Variety first saw print in 1953, making it one of the earlier works of his we've reviewed so far. Most of his well-known works like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (aka Bladerunner), We Can Remember It it for You Wholesale (Total Recall), and Man in the High Castle were all written in the 1960s. Even then it's interesting to see what kind of themes and patterns were already setting themselves into his work.

A quick review of the plot goes like this; quick note I am going to be spoiling the almost 70-year-old story. It's World War III, launching a surprise attack behind a nuclear strike, the Soviet Union was able to land armies in North America after overrunning Europe and Asia (In what universe was the USSR that aggressive, and in what universe did they have the sea-lift capacity and the manpower to invade NATO western Europe, AND the United States?  I have questions. {These are fair questions, Mr. Dick sets this novel in some point in the future and frankly, I don’t think he grasps military matters very well.  Best answer I have is through the magic of Communism}). This came at a frightful cost because they were not able to stop the American nuclear counterattack from hitting the USSR. The North American governments were able to evacuate a large percentage of the leadership and population to the moon, but many, including a large amount of the troops on the ground, were trapped behind enemy lines. (They could evacuate a large percentage of the population to the moon, but were taken by surprise and defenseless when my comrades attacked?  I have questions. {These are also fair questions, best I can figure is that a lot of the East Coast had to be abandoned but an evacuation of the West Coast was done… Through the magic of Capitalism} And yet they couldn’t… blow up the huge armada of troop transports...).  The result is a stalemate with pretty much all of earth reduced to a gray wasteland by both sides using nuclear weapons of mass destruction.  You know… The reason no one was crazy enough to start World War III in the real world! 

The stalemate was broken by deep underground factories, switched over to local computer control, creating antonymous weapon platforms called claws. Small robotic devices that attacked Soviet soldiers from ambush with claws and whirling blades. NATO and other allied troops were issued tabs that emitted a type of radiation that kept the claws from targeting them. By the beginning of the story, barely coordinated forces are hunkered down in bunkers and fortresses, in an uneasy stalemate. The west lacks the forces to take the dug-in Soviet Troops, who cannot commit to large-scale movements because that causes the claws to swarm (Oh God, this is a Gray Goo scenario…).

I'm sure most of you already see the problem here. The western forces have given up control of their weapons, which is never a good idea! Seriously the claws do not take orders, they simply attack anything without a tab, which is incredibly irresponsible at best (Tabs or no tabs, they’ve just fucked the remaining earthbound civilian population.  To say nothing of the planet, because an endlessly multiplying and likely evolving robot death apparatus…yeah.  Gray Goo.). Additionally, no one seems to know how to turn them off! Creating a weapon that cannot be deactivated is just insane frankly. Well, our story properly opens with a Soviet runner being mobbed to death by claws before a US patrol can get to him and they're asking for a truce and a meeting. Our protagonist Major Joseph Hendricks on his travels finds out that a new model of claw has been unleashed on the surface world. One modeled to look and sound like a human being (Come with me if you want to live.  But fantastic.  The Gray Good is sapient.  Great. {Wasn’t intended to be but when you leave a system alone with no oversight… I mean, no one is coming across as all that intelligent here}The Gray Goo is never intended to be sapient, but it happens anyway!).

There are two identified models, the first are the crippled soldiers designed to look like soldiers who are in need of medical attention. The second are called Davids, they are modeled to look like small boys. Both models are able to at least superficially communicate with humans in order to attempt to get into the bunkers and fortresses. The wounded soldiers, when killed, have plates inside their chest identifying them as the first variety model but the Davids have a plate identifying them as the third...

Which means there's one more variety, a third variety. Major Hendricks links up with the survivors of the local Soviet forces, two conscripts, and a young lady named Tasso. They decide to attempt a run back to western lines to warn the folks on the moon. It's too late for local western forces, however, as the bunker has been overrun (So much for those tabs…). During the fighting, a couple of things are revealed, first, one of the conscripts was one of the hidden claws. Second, Tasso was hiding a special anti-robot grenade that helped her and the Major escape. The Major is injured and leads her to a ship that can take her to the moon.

It's at this point that the truth is revealed that Tasso is a robot herself. She leaves the Major to die at the hands of a mass assault, taking off to infiltrate the moon. Major believes humanity is doomed but takes comfort in the fact that the robots are already designing weapons to kill each other. To his mind, that means they won't outlive humanity for very long.

So this is a very bleak story and I'm not going to linger on Cold War politics. I'm not sure I agree with the Major that humanity is doomed from one robot reaching the moon (Airlocks bro, airlocks.), but it's certainly clear that the Earth is lost and it's all our fault. In a lot of ways, Mr. Dick is simply retreading robot themes that go all the way to the first modern Robot story, the Czech play R.U.R, where a synthetically created race of workers rise up and cause the extinction of the human race because humanity wouldn't stop treating them like crap. There are different morals to take from these stories but one I've always taken is don't treat sapient beings like crap or property even if you made them from a lab/factory. Sapient beings should be treated with dignity and respect no matter their origin. Also maybe don't make a factory robot smart enough to realize it's a factory robot and unpaid labor.

When you read the story, you clearly see the preoccupation with identity and memory starting to form. This is something that would be recurring in his later works. Here it's not as well fleshed out, just conversations between the characters where the robot's memories are not well made and they avoid discussing them. You also see the pattern of Mr. Dick casting women into antagonistic roles, especially women that resemble his wives (He needed therapy. {Every science fiction writer I’ve done a deep dive on needed therapy, I’m left with troubling implications}I know I need therapy.  That is why I have a therapist.). In this case, Tasso is a small, slender brunette, the type that Mr. Dick would repeatedly show an attraction to in his real life, and well, read my entry on his life for more information on that. It's a straightforward story and the twist is honestly not that surprising to a modern audience, especially one that grew up with Terminator and various human-like robots in fiction. Still, this was written in the 1950s so the idea was newer and shinier back then.

It's not bad work but it's nothing I would consider groundbreaking or stand-out. It's rather short at around 100 pages so there's not a lot that is done with the characters, a lot of space is taken up just getting the reader spun up on what happened. Even then a lot of questions remain.  Mr. Dick does a good job of giving us the directly plot revelant stuff, without wrecking the gray, brooding atmosphere of the plot or the pace of it. My main issue is how mind-boggling stupid the decisions leading up to the story were.  Once you get into the story itself though, it’s a good read and none of the characters are idiots.  They’re just put in a terrible situation that could have been avoided if two braincells were rubbed together by the higher-ups.  Altogether I've got to give Second Variety by Philip K Dick a C by modern standards and I don't think it would have been higher if I had read it in 1953. Keep in mind that just means it's a rather average story.

        I hope you enjoyed this first review in the 2022 month of Dick.  This was chosen by our ever-wise patrons if you would like a vote https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where for a dollar a month you can help choose what gets reviewed.  Join us!  The poll for March is up and running!  Next week the 1995 science fiction film Screamers will be reviewed and after that the novel, A Scanner Darkly.  Until then, stay safe and Keep Reading!

Red Text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black Text is your reviewer Garvin Anders