Book Review: A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick

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Venganza Media, Inc.

Tv & Film, Film History, Tv & Film:film Reviews, Film Reviews, Film Interviews

4.5 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2011

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The search for self gets personal this time for Philip K. Dick Books & Nachos is now part of Now Playing Podcast. Before our book reviews were branded as Now Playing Podcast Book Reviews, they were released under a separate show called Books & Nachos. That podcast focused on book discussions, most of which tied directly into films we were covering on Now Playing. We’ve now merged those episodes into the main Now Playing Podcast feed for easier access and a complete archive. But these older episodes still have the original Books & Nachos intro and credits on those older recordings. This week, Stuart examines A Scanner Darkly, the 1977 novel by Philip K. Dick that later inspired the rotoscope film adaptation directed by Richard Linklater and starring Keanu Reeves. Set in a near-future California ravaged by Substance D, Dick’s novel follows an undercover narcotics agent whose dual identities begin to collapse under addiction and surveillance. Written from personal experience, the book blends dark humor, paranoia, and tragedy into one of Dick’s most intimate and emotionally raw works. Stuart explores how the novel handles identity, betrayal, and the human cost of the drug war, and whether the source material hits harder than its psychedelic big-screen counterpart. {Philip K. Dick Series}

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Books and Notchos, a podcast for those of us who find excitement in the pages of a good book.
0:12.5	Fiction and nonfiction, graphic novels, and more.
0:15.4	We are here to help you find something great to read.
0:30.2	Hello and welcome to Books and Nachos, the Vinganza Media podcast about all things in print.
0:36.2	I'm Stuart in L.A., and we have reached the seventh chapter in our ongoing Philip K. Dick book series, which runs concurrently with the
0:38.6	Now Playing Podcast.com's movie retrospective of all the works Hollywood has made of Philip K. Dick.
0:46.2	A scanner darkly is the latest period work we will read. It was published in 1977, but actually was written throughout the early
0:55.9	70s and completed, for the most part, with a lot of outside help in 1973. It's 220 pages,
1:03.6	so it's also the longest thing we've read. It's a special one. Up to this point, I've been
1:08.3	treating Philip K. Dick strictly as a science fiction writer,
1:11.2	albeit a great one, who had the foresight to articulate the ways that modern man's identity
1:17.7	has been fragmented by technology. But here that fragmentation is not really technology science
1:24.6	fiction based. Sure, this is set in a futuristic 1990s where people can wear
1:30.5	holographic disguises and have high-tech surveillance equipment. But really, this is a reflection on
1:37.8	the drug culture of the 1960s that Philip K. Dick was coming out of and trying to dry himself up
1:43.4	out of. I feel like this is the work that Philip K. Dick was coming out of and trying to dry himself up out of. I feel like this is the work
1:46.5	that Philip K. Dick, he finally crosses the threshold to being the writer that he aspire to be.
1:52.5	I think he always saw that the science fiction stories that he wrote were selling out. It was
1:59.0	kind of a shameful thing for him. He wanted to be a beat
2:03.0	generation writer. He wanted to be thought of in the caliber as Alan Ginsberg or William Burroughs,
2:09.5	Jack Kerouac. The writers that wrote about the counterculture and really defined youth rebellion in
2:15.0	the 1950s and 60s, that's what he had been hoping to do all of this
	...

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