A Scanner Darkly

K. , Dick, Philip

ISBN 10: 0879979232 / ISBN 13: 9780879979232

Published by DAW, 1984

First DAW Printing. This book is in good condition; page edges tanning with age. It does have some cover shelfwear. Inside pages are clean. ; Height: 5 Inches, Length: 7 Inches, Width: 1 Inches; 1 pages. Seller Inventory # 06GW23-629-064

Synopsis:

A haunting graphic version of one of Philip K. Dick s most popular and best-selling novels. Bob Arctor is a dealer of the lethally addictive drug Substance D, which he also takes in massive quantities. Fred is the police agent assigned to tail and eventually bust him. What Fred doesn t know is that Substance D gradually splits the user s brain into two distinct, combative entities, and that he is, in fact, in frantic pursuit of himself. A Scanner Darkly is caustically funny and razor sharp in its depiction of drug-induced paranoia and madness; it s an industrial-strength stress test of identity as unnerving as it is riveting. The novel is captured in this brilliant graphic vision, composed entirely of stills from the movie. Writer/Director Richard Linklater shot a live-action film, starring Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, and Winona Ryder, and then animated over the underlying images. The result is an eerily lifelike,

Review: 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 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

Bibliographic Details

Title: A Scanner Darkly
Publisher: DAW
Publication Date: 1984
Binding: Paperback
Condition: Good
Edition: 1st Edition