The Ob-Coms (obsessive-compulsives) are clerks and bureaucrats, the Pares (paranoiacs) rule the government, the Skitzes (schizophrenics) form the poets class, and so forth. Due to planetary circumstances, what was meant to be a pit stop becomes a society of its own, divided into a caste system roughly corresponding to clinical diagnoses. Tone and topic are in perfect alignment here.Ī moon has been designated as a processing station for patients ejected from Earth for their psychiatric deficiencies. But you know what else is bleak? Unremitting surveillance and top-down social control. The bleakness of “A Scanner Darkly” is therefore unsurprising. He contracted double pneumonia and landed in the hospital. Someone had broken into his house and blown up a file cabinet with plastic explosives. The job is complicated when he gets addicted to the drug and is then assigned to narc on himself.ĭick wrote this one in a period of (even greater than usual) psychological disarray. His task is to eradicate a drug known as “Substance D” from the neon hellscape of a near-future Orange County. One of the main characters is an undercover narcotics agent who wears a “scramble suit” that transforms him into an unidentifiable blur. But for uncut rage against the machine, try “A Scanner Darkly” (1977). If you hate authority so much, why are you reading an article in which someone tells you what to do? Wait, don’t leave! Dick loathed authority, too, and since much of his work was “palpably autobiographical” (his words), you, my disobedient friend, can select anything on this list. You may not clock the full effects until you find yourself thinking about it six or 60 months later. If I could propose two essential qualities of Dick as a human, they would be cosmic bafflement and heroic hopefulness, both present in “Ubik.” This is a novel with a long half-life. The novel’s themes of entropy and delusion will swirl in your subconscious like a malevolent cone of soft serve. Objects fade into prior “versions” of themselves: an audio system reverts to a gramophone and a TV becomes an AM radio. A cigarette crumbles between his fingers.

When a character orders coffee, the cream has gone sour. The co-workers narrowly escape and return to Earth, which is suddenly (and mysteriously) decomposing.

In this 1969 book, my favorite of Dick’s novels, a group of co-workers is sent on a mission to another planet. I simply want to read his best - even if it is challenging.ĭo you feel paranoid and distracted? Do you suspect that death is nibbling away at your form, even as you walk and breathe? Try “Ubik.”

O Homem Duplo by Philip K. Dick