A scanner darkly

Dick, Philip K

ISBN 10: 0385016131 / ISBN 13: 9780385016131

Published by Doubleday, 1977

About this Item

1977; New York; Book club edition, H13 at gutter of page 216; brown paper covered boards w/ illustrated glossy paper jacket; brown titles; rubbing on jacket; front of jacket contains tear from the top; interior clean and unmarked; 8vo - over 7 3/4" to 9 3/4" tall; 220 pages.

Seller Inventory # SKU1143700

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A scanner darkly
• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication Date: 1977
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385016131
• ISBN 13: 9780385016131
• Binding: hardcover
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Weight: 48 ounces

About this title

Synopsis

A haunting graphic version of one of Philip K. Dickâ 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 doesnâ t know is that Substance D gradually splits the userâ 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; itâ 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, richly detailed animation that translates beautifully to the page.

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