SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

Post your thoughts about the book overall, especially the ending.

Just finished today. Man it was a downer. Well written and all I'm talking about the story . This was my first PKD, he seems to have a passion for conspiracy. it just felt kind of hopeless, which I guess was the point.

I finished it today: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

In short, I recommend the audiobook. The narrator is very good, with distinctive character voices. I think that the style and prose of this book fit just right in audio form. I might not have liked it quite as much by just reading it.

I very much enjoyed the overall character arc for Bob/Fred, and the way PKD gradually split the two personalities. I also appreciated that it was done without really informing the reader what happens (until later in the book at least). We just see the change unfold, as Fred originally knows that he is also Bob, but then later believes he is a separate person. This was the most interesting aspect of the book to me.

I must say I really loved it when Fred/Bob/Bruce comes out the other side of crazy and paranoid, where the participant becomes the observer, and in reviewing images becomes depersonalized from himself ... interesting expression of classic schizophrenia symptomatology.

Incidentally, I spent 20 years working in a mental health facility, and now am in (working!!) a drug rehab. The idea of the rehab being a self-sustaining business by controlling both ends of the supply chain amused me greatly.

I have that quote from the afterword pinned up on my desk ... the paragraph that begins "drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision."

i think its marvellous but in the rare occasion in that the movie tops the book.

I didn't care for this one at all!

I've read only Androids by Dick, but it was a long time ago. This one I had to force myself to read the first four chapters or to page 54. I got it about surveillance, drugs fracturing the self, but the one thing that made me sit up and notice was when Bob saw that gas was $1.10 per gallon.

That was science fiction!

$1.10 a gallon. Makes me think this should then be historical fiction.

Nostalgic for me too ... but I think that gas was under a buck when he was writing this, wasn't it? the $1.10 was meant to shock the reader. If I remember right, that would have been close to a 300% increase on the price.

Though not my favorite PKD book I enjoyed A Scanner Darkly. I think I liked the way Fred/Bob split more and more as the book went on. Later Bruce was kind of what was left after Fred/Bob burnt themselves out.

I'm of two minds about Dick's book.

I liked it. But I don't buy the basic premise that Bob/Fred/Bruce would take Substance D since they knew it bifurcated the brain. Wasn't he a cop, faking being a druggie? He was taking other drugs, which while he enjoyed, would alone would have given him access. Why would Fred addict himself to Substance D when he knew upfront that it took a hit or two to become incurable addicted and it led invariably to permanent brain damage? Fred's behavior was more like a druggie who had been co-opted into being a narc. Why would an on-the-job dedicated narc take a drug like Substance D? It is a bit like willingly drinking cyanide so your cop friends could follow your body to the funeral home for an investigation. Or was it he took Substance D, by accident? If he didn't know he was taking it.....but I didn't have that impression.

What did I miss?

I think he was just like a lot of addicts. He thought he could handle it, that it wouldn't affect him even though he knew what it could do, maybe even because of what he knew. That somehow made him safer than others. But in the end of course he was just like everyone else.

The two things I look for in a PKD novel are:

1. Tensely exerted inquiries into compact phenomena of experience, sometimes to a beautiful result in the prose. This novel delivers many intervals of literary bliss as Dick squeezes various features of his regime to estimate their nature. Check out the imaginary flies!
2. The referential loop. In this case it's signaled by the title itself, and you can't exit the story without confronting its recursive scheme.

Bob Arctor is spying on himself, but Dick contrives to amplify just the character of his surveillance, letting the rest of the story develop in this constantly narrowing reverberation of object and observation. "If a scanner sees darkly," he warns... then self-revelation will converge to nihilistic nothing with the inevitability of a mathematical limit--the teleological mirror gone blinding black.

I was trapped like Arctor when this book came to me, and it said the only thing I really needed to hear: Follow the light!

I liked the book overall; it's not my favorite type of book (except the ending and the larger picture of things), but it was okay. Even though in the end, P.K.Dick says "there is no moral in this book," I found one, and it's "don't do drugs!" :)

I'm at 80%. I couldn't get through it on my own so I looked up study guides online and read a few of those -- it is helping.

The German bits I have looked up have been Goethe poems, Goethe's Faust, and an opera called Fidelio, Fidelio: English National Opera Guide 4.

Breaths of air from the '70s :

-“Far out,” Fred said, “I can dig it. Thanks, man.”
-“Hey, Donna, this is a buddy of Bob’s, you know? Hey, man, he’s in a bad way, I’m not jiving you. Hey, he—” I can dig it, two voices thought inside his mind
-From the box of tapes on the floor of the car she took the Carole King Tapestry tape, her favorite of all she had, and pushed it into the tape deck
-stealing bottles of Coca-Cola off the truck

I didn't really enjoy it; too difficult for me to keep stringing the pieces together to achieve a narrative story. Like if Fred/Bob are the main characters, why did he/they only show up halfway through Chapter 3? He was not also Charlie Freck.

I got some themes: paranoia, distrust, questioning reality. Cynical ending with New-Path's farm. So, even though people think Substance-D is wholly synthetic, actually the new-agey rehab centers are growing it?!