A Scanner Darkly

BSFA Award, 1979

Paperback / ISBN-13: 9781780220420

Price: £10.99

ON SALE: 7th June 2012

Genre: Fiction & Related Items

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A brilliant sci-fi novel from one of the last century’s most influential pop culture figures

Substance D – otherwise known as Death – is the most dangerous drug ever to find its way on to the black market. It destroys the links between the brain’s two hemispheres, leading first to disorentation and then to complete and irreversible brain damage. Bob Arctor, undercover narcotics agent, is trying to find a lead to the source of supply, but to pass as an addict he must become a user, and soon, without knowing what is happening to him, he is as dependent as any of the addicts he is monitoring.

Reviews

One of the most original practitioners writing any kind of fiction, Dick made most of the European avant-garde seem like navel-gazers in a cul-de-sac
Sunday Times
The most consistently brilliant SF writer in the world
John Brunner
My literary hero
Fay Weldon
Dick quietly produced serious fiction in a popular form and there can be no greater praise
Michael Moorcock
For everyone lost in the endlessly multiplicating realities of the modern world, remember: Philip K. Dick got there first
Terry Gilliam
In all his work he was astonishingly intimate, self exposed, and very dangerous. He was the funniest SF writer of his time, and perhaps the most terrifying. His dreads were our own, spoken as we could not have spoken them
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
Dick is Thoreau plus the death of the American dream
Roberto Bolaño