A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
One Of Pkd's Best
Mind- and reality-bending drugs factor again and again in Philip K. Dicks
hugely influential SF stories. A Scanner Darkly cuts closest to the bone,
drawing on Dicks own experience with illicit chemicals and on his many
friends who died from drug abuse. Nevertheless, its 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 theres no way off the addicts 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

Personal Review: A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick
We're coming into the home stretch, folks. You and I have gone through
some of Philip K. Dick's best work, such as "Martian Time-Slip" and "Dr.
Bloodmoney" and "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch ". There are
only a few PKD novels left, and I've saved some of the best for last. Of "A
Scanner Darkly", for instance, the author said "I believe it is a masterpiece.
I believe it is the only masterpiece I will ever write." Wow.
In old usage, a "masterpiece" was a piece of work that a journeyman put
together to advance to the rank of master within a guild. By that measure,
Philip K. Dick was a master long before he wrote "A Scanner Darkly" in
1973. Nevertheless, this novel marks a sort of leap in his skill. He was
always concerned with some pretty big issues, such as the need for
empathy and the question of what makes a human being. He also
returned to certain themes several times, including drugs, paranoia and the
uncertain nature of what we call reality. In this novel, he dug deeper into
all of these matters than maybe at any time before. What's more, while he
always seemed to love his characters and grieve over their pain, he clearly
took "A Scanner Darkly" much more personally. In his Afterword, he goes
so far as to say "I am not a character in this novel, I am the novel." It
shows.
Like a lot of great sf, but unlike most of PKD's speculative work, "A
Scanner Darkly" reads pretty much like a mainstream novel except for the
few technological developments. In this case, there are two such
advances, if you can call them that. The first, since this is PKD, is a new
recreational drug. It's called Substance D, and it's scary. It gets you high
in some fashion, but if you take it, you run the risk of dividing the
hemispheres of your brain so that they don't work together anymore. They
function separately, or in extreme cases compete with each other. Either
way, that's pretty much it. You thought you had one personality? Guess
again.
The other technological advance is something called a scramble suit,
which is composed of a material that broadcasts a huge number of facial
and body features on its surface. Put it on and you're a vague blur that no
one can identify. Very useful for undercover narcotics officers; in
anonymity lies their security.
So one day Bob Arctor, a Substance D addict and undercover officer
(who's called "Fred" when in his scramble suit), receives orders from his
superiors (who don't know who he is) to bug the home of Bob Arctor the
suspected dealer and collect evidence to be used against him at trial.
Because he is an addict, and because the use of the scramble suit
confuses him even beyond the drug's effects, he shortly loses track of
himself and begins to suspect that Bob Arctor might really be a dealer.
The activities of his paranoid housemate Jim Barris don't help his state of
mind, and neither do his growing feelings for his friend Donna.

In short, both Substance D and the scramble suit tend to divide a person's
personality into two untenable parts, and Bob Arctor has to deal with both
technologies under increasing emotional tension. Like most great novels,
then, the various parts of "A Scanner Darkly" work together to reinforce
each other until you can't put the thing down. But does that make it a
masterpiece?
Not by itself. While all of these wheels within wheels spin around and
around, though, Bob Arctor and his friends maneuver through the precisely
described physical world of Anaheim, California, with all its prefabricated
plastic fast-food joints and gas stations and similarly denatured
landscapes. With a few exceptions, they're actually very nice people - you
wouldn't think a bunch of head cases could live together peacefully for any
length of time, but with a few exceptions they do. Masterful characters in a
masterful setting.
Also, this may be PKD's finest prose. He always wrote very fast, and
therefore his style could get a little crude, but in 1973 his output had
slowed. He took his time. He placed the information he wanted to convey
into his characters' thoughts rather than in his own authorial voice, which
makes his wild ideas touching rather than simply interesting. So when you
discover that some character, by chemical means, has entered into a
whole new mode of perception but can't communicate it to anyone, it's
almost enough to make you cry.
If you ask me, the most devastating aspect of "A Scanner Darkly" is the
way the characters hope for a better world even while the one they inhabit
crumbles around them, either because of the effects of Substance D on
their personalities or because of what they're forced to do to survive. The
novel's title, of course, rings a change on the famous passage from 1
Corinthians in which Paul says that although we now perceive as through a
glass darkly, one day we will see clearly. The rest of the chapter implies
that when our perception is thus cleared up, we will experience _agape_,
what the Jews call _chesed_, or selfless love. It's the kind of love that Bob
Arctor, watching his mind crumble away, surrounded in his own home by
police videoscanners that see him at all times but don't know him at all,
continues to believe in.
The author informs us in his Afterword that many of his characters were
based on people he knew - he lists several of them along with their various
fates, mostly death, brain damage or psychosis. He says he loved them
all, and in "A Scanner Darkly" he did right by them. You bet it's a
masterpiece.
Benshlomo says, You don't stop loving people just because they mess up.
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