A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick

A Scanner Darkly is a shockingly anti-subversive novel from one of the most subversive novelists of the 20th century. It is a most realistic work of a science fiction master. It is Philip Dick's most vulgar, most fatalist, most subtle, most humane, most modern, and arguably his best novel.

The story's central conceit is that drug distributors and dealers have so completely infiltrated law enforcement, undercover narcotics officers must hide their identities even from their own police supervisors. This means that a narc must report on his own dealings as a suspect so as not to identify himself to the other detectives working the case. It is in this situation that Bob Arctor finds himself, playing the double role of up-and-coming dealer as "Arctor" and "Fred", the incognito undercover narc. Arctor's mission is to work his way up the drug distribution ladder and move up through the organization to find out the source of a drug called Substance D, known on the streets as Death.

The novel's critical moment comes when a drug-addled Fred sees Arctor on the scanner for the first time and doesn't recognize himself. The novel begins to subtly veer off into a paranoid delusion as Arctor suspects that someone is trying to kill him while Fred makes it his life's work to bring down Arctor. This would be a fine set-up for a by-the-numbers Philip Dick novel, but Scanner is so much more.

During the 1960s, Dick went through a period of feverish creativity and intense production, often churning out several novels per year. Scanner marks the beginning of a new era of his career in which his novels became more autobiographical and earnest, maintaining the same basic themes, but bearing a maturity and discipline not present in even some of his most famous works. Dick writes in his poignant afterward that this book was inspired by the years he spent sharing his house with itinerant young people who came to his house to do drugs and crash. As a result, Scanner is shockingly authentic in the language of this California drug culture, and endearing in the genius of many of its characters.

Though the book is something of a celebration of the sub-culture of the dopehead, Dick makes it clear, both in his afterward and in the novel's chilling final act, that drugs are a kind of pestilence on our lives and our society. Dick's personal paranoia – of the government, of the police, of power in general – is a misdirection from the true villains of the story. The authorities, often working at odds with themselves, are far less sinister than the disciplined organization that sells the promise of a view into a larger reality, but only shows our own world through a scanner darkly.