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