What can I tell him? Jason Taverner asked himself as he sat mutely facing the police general. The total reality as I know it? That is hard to do, he realised, because I really do not comprehend it myself. (p.119)

It is 1988 and Jason Taverner is the host of the immensely successful Jason Taverner Show which attracts 30 million viewers to its regular Tuesday evening slot. On this particular evening he’s featured guest star gorgeous, red-haired Heather Hart with whom he just happens to be having an affair, sharing his jet-set lifestyle, although she is impatient for him to actually marry her so they can settle down, have kids etc.

Part of their success is down to the fact that they are sixes. It is not explained, more hinted at in stray references, that sixes were genetically imprinted with superior genetic qualities, and that his happened at his birth, back in the 1940s (rather implausibly).

Jason and Heather complete another chart-topping show and are on board their Rolls Royce jet rocket (!) shooting up over Los Angeles when he gets a call from an ex, Marilyn Mason, a little flit of a thing who begged for help getting into show business, who he wangled a few auditions, and who he slept with him rather a lot before tiring of her. Heather is furious at the call, but Marilyn screeches down the phone that she’ll kill herself if he doesn’t visit her NOW, so Jason says we better go and check she’s OK.

Jason has barely got down into her flat before Marilyn, furious at having been dumped and ignored for six months, throws a bag at him containing ‘the gelatin-like Callisto cuddle sponge with its fifty feeding tubes’.

There’s no explanation of what this thing is or where it comes from, simply that the feeding tubes swiftly enter the human body and kill if not counter-acted. Jason has the presence of mind to grab a nearby bottle of alcohol and pour it onto the creature which falls off him, onto the floor, dead. But it leaves its feeding tubes inside him, and he passes out. He regains consciousness on a hospital gurney being rushed to an operating theatre with Heather peering over him, weeping, and then he blacks out.

The alternative world

All this happens in just the first chapter. In chapter two Jason wakes up and the world has changed. He awakens in a seedy motel room to discover that nobody knows who he is. In this world there is no Jason Taverner Show on TV, the motel manager has never heard of him, nobody has heard of him. When he phones his agent, then his producer, both say they’ve never heard of him and put the phone down.

He also has no ID cards and now, for the first time, we begin to learn about the world of 1988, namely it is some sort of military dictatorship. All across America identity checkpoints run by the national guard or the police pop up at random to check people’s ID cards. If you don’t have one or have a forged one, you are sent off to a Forced Labour Camp (FLC).

So, while he is still reeling from the fact that nobody recognises him, Jason is all-too-aware that down here, in the world of the ‘ordinary’ people, he needs ID cards fast. Luckily, he’s wearing the same clothes he had on when Marilyn attacked him which, conveniently enough, contained a big wad of cash. Now he bribes the desk clerk, Ed Pricem, to recommend a forger. The clerk (who, in a casual aside, mentions that he is a telepath – putting us in mind of the universe of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?).

Ed the desk clerk takes Jason through darkened streets into Watts which was, when Dick was writing, a slum. In a darkened garage Ed introduces Jason to a very young woman, Kathy Nelson, maybe only 17 or 18 (she eventually tells us she’s 19), who takes him to her workshop and turns out to be a master forger.

Here commences the troubled relationship which last for the next third or so of the book, for Kathy has impressive mental problems. Initially the conversation is fairly rational and, while she’s making him the forged IDs (he needs half a dozen in this police state) they recap a bit of future history, namely how there was some kind of Insurrection led by sixes like Jason, but it was repressed and most of the sixes were rounded up and shot and the government became even more repressive.

(In what I presume is a humorous / paranoid reference to the student unrest of the time the book was written, the early 70s, the narrative informs us that all universities have prison walls round them. Any students or lecturers caught escaping are sent to forced labour camps. Later we are told that up to 10,000! students at Stanford were massacred in one particular police action back during the Insurrection.)

(In another throwaway reference, we learn that Congress passed a bill led by someone called Tidman to solve ‘the race problem’ by restricting black couples to only one child. Over the generations this will or has hugely reduced their numbers. So much so that black people are now endangered and it is a crime to hurt them, p.29.)

But Kathy is odd, very odd. She’s convinced that her husband, Jack, is in a forced labour camp but approves of her sleeping with other men, something they discuss at length. She confesses that she was placed in a mental hospital for eight weeks. She is convinced she met a number of famous celebrities there, and slept with them.

Then she reveals that she is a great forger but embeds electronic tagging devices into her forged documents and tips off the police about the customers. Why? Because the police have promised her that if she helps them catch enough criminals, they’ll release her husband, Jack. (Later, when we meet her police controller, McNulty, he tells Jason that all this is a delusion: Kathy’s husband is in fact dead, died in a car crash, but she hasn’t got over it.)

Kathy insists that Jason – tall, handsome, confident – sleeps with her, which he is initially cheerfully in favour of until he begins to grasp how nuts she is. This is forcibly demonstrated when he takes her to a (terrible) restaurant of her choosing and when she doesn’t get her way, falls off her chair onto the floor screaming at the top of her voice. Till the waiters throw them out.

Walking back to Kathy’s flat, Jason manages to give her the slip. He phones his partner back in ‘the real world’, Heather Hart, on her personal vidphone but of course she’s never heard of him. He pesters her with several calls despite her repeatedly hanging up, and freaks her out with his intimate knowledge of her anatomy (she has a false tooth she calls Andy, p.58) and all her phone numbers. But he has clearly erupted into a parallel universe in which he was never born, never existed. Nobody knows him.

Puzzling this over Jason almost immediately walks into a pop-up police checkpoint. Paranoia and fear while they check the papers Kathy just made him. But they pass. Grudgingly the ‘pols’ let him go. But the checkpoint has given Kathy time to catch up and find him and once again he finds himself, immensely reluctantly, walking back to her flat. Here is horrified to find Kathy’s ‘control’, Inspector McNulty waiting for both of them. McNulty, in the way of scary totalitarian cops in this kind of fiction, now becomes politely but firmly interested in Jason and asks him along to the station.

There he makes him wait while the cops search the (global) database for him. By mistake the machine spits out the details of a ‘Jason Taverner’ born about the same year, but in the mid-West to farmers, a very ugly redneck. Thinking on his feet, Jason claims to be the same guy and makes up a story about him running away from the farm and using his grandfather’s inheritance to get comprehensive plastic surgery.

Yeeeees, McNulty says, staring at him, not really believing it. After several false releases – being let go then called back for ‘a few more questions’, which ratchet up the pressure – Jason finally gets to walk away. He had to hand all of his ID papers over to  McNulty to be triple-checked, but the cops handed him a week-long total pass (a ‘pol-pass’) in exchange. So he has a week to figure out what the hell is going on, which gives the novel a sense of urgency and a clear timeframe.

Recap

So the first hundred pages of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said are set in an America of the future which has become a police state (what Jason calls ‘a betrayal state, p.58) in which a genetically engineered man has made himself a successful career as a rich and famous TV star. But, after a near-fatal experience, he wakes up in a parallel universe where he appears never to have existed, is thrown down among the plebs, the ‘ordinaries’, stripped of his wealth and fame, and experiences life on the run.

Part two

Part two introduces new characters, namely McNulty’s boss, Police General Felix Buckman. He scares and intimidates McNulty, who tells him about this Tavern guy they just picked up. By this stage McNulty has discovered that the mid-West story is a fake. What puzzles him is that ‘Taverner’ has no records of any kind.

‘Jason Taverner doesn’t exist.’ (p.82)

Buckman is intrigued but has to cope with his no-good, drug addict, bondage addict sister, Alys who has, yet again, got past the guards and into his office where he finds her sleeping off another dose of something.

He wakes he up and gives her a sound telling off for being an addict.We learn that she paid for the removal of the ‘responsibility’ parts of her brain, leaving her just the pleasure centres, which she stimulates by ‘diddling’ (presumably masturbating) all day long.

Jason, with a week to find out what the hell is going on, takes an air taxi to Las Vegas hoping to find a woman whose pad he can crash in, maybe a woman he knew in the other life. Sure enough he has barely settled himself at the bar of ‘the Nellie Melba room of the Drake’s Arms’ in Las Vegas (p.85) than he spies an old flame of his, Ruth Rae. Knowing her sex addiction, he finds it easy enough to chat her up and soon they head back to her place, first for championship sex, and then for a long discussion about love and, unexpectedly, the power of grief.

But then the police burst in, having detected Jason via the microtransmitter the slipped into his clothes.

He is transported in a police ‘quibble’ (Dick’s humorous word for car or transport) back to LA, to the 469th Precinct Police Station, where he is ushered into the rather luxurious room of General Buckman. Buckman is one of only a handful of police generals in the country. Clever, he proceeds to bluff Jason that he is a seven (Jason didn’t even know sevens existed, but Buckman knows enough about the head of the research programme which developed the sixes to bluff him), trying to get him to spill the beans about the plot or conspiracy which he is convinced Jason must be involved in.

Eventually Buckman comes to believe that Jason really doesn’t know what he’s doing in this dimension. He decides to let him go, but to tag and trail him. Next morning Jason walks free into the LA sunlight (and the thick traffic pollution).

Someone calls his name. It is Alys Buckman, six foot, dressed in leathers with a metal chain. Where’s the whip, Jason thinks. Clearly she is visually meant to look like a bondage dominatrix. Alys explains she’s Buckman’s twin sister. She hates him. She tells him he has a microtransmitter and – surreally – a minute nuclear bomb – embedded on his person. She removes both with a kit she has. She flies him in her quibble (these ascend vertically and, apparently, have rotor blades) to the general’s luxury mansion which she shares with him. On the way she says she knows who he is! She is a big fan! She has two of his long playing records in the back of the quibble!

My God! Maybe she knows how to get back to his own world.

But, immensely frustratingly, Alys refuses to answer any of his questions, instead politely offering him some mescaline (‘Harvey’s yellow Number One, imported from Switzerland’, p.134) and, as he begins to trip out, fills the time with what appears to be a series of inconsequential chatter. She shows him her brother’s rare and precious stamps, his collection of snuff boxes.

As Jason’s trip reaches extremes Alys realises he’s too far in and offers to go get some thorazine to counter the mescaline. Jason staggers to the record player and, through his hallucinations, manages to get one of his records out of its sleeve and turn on the record player and drop the needle with a bump onto the play-in groove, but…. there’s just static. There’s nothing on the records. They’re blank! (p.144)

Part three

Jason staggers upstairs, looking for Alys and then, to his horror, opens a bedroom and finds… her leather clothes and stilettoes on the floor and inside them, wearing them, a long, long-dead shrivelled corpse! Horrified, he blunders, half falls down the steps, across the lawn of the mansion and to the guard by the gate. His drugged slurred speech alerts the guard who runs inside – he hears a shout – and the guard comes running back after him, letting off a few shots from his laser gun, obviously thinking Jason murdered his employer, before running back inside.

This gives time for Jason to escape from the grounds and blunder into a young woman just getting into her ‘flipflap’. Yes, flipflap. Like Kurt Vonnegut, you have the strong feeling that Dick, by now, in the early 70s, has taken enough drugs, written enough fantasy sci-fi books, to realise that he can make up anything, say anything, the more ludicrous the better – and people just as stoned as him will lap it up!

So he begs for a lift in this young lady’s flipflap and, although reluctant, she (name: Mary Anne Dominic) lets him fly her downtown (so she can post the ceramic pots she makes for a living) then they go to a coffee shop.

Jason is trying to make sense of Alys’s fate. For a start how come she knew who he was, the only person in this world to do so? But then again, how come the records were blank?

While he’s thinking out loud the young woman he’s sort of kidnapped picks up on the fact that he thinks he’s a famous TV star and singer and says, ‘Shall I go see if they’ve got any of your songs on the jukebox?’

To his amazement they have, and she puts a coin in the machine to play it. What? And the people in the café start to recognise him, applaud when the song ends, and some shy kids come up asking for an autograph. It’s all coming back, the ‘normal’ world he lives in, bit by bit, faster and faster.

Jason says goodbye to Mary Anne (after she has insisted on giving him one of her most beautiful deep blue pots, carefully wrapped) and sets off to see Heather.

On the way he speculates darkly: maybe the reality is that he’s an unknown pauper living in a crappy motel and it’s the drug which Alys gave him which takes him out of that world and into the world of fame. Maybe the world of fame is the drug-induced fantasy, which he needs Alys to regularly supply him the drugs to experience?

Meanwhile we cut back to the cops back at the death scene of Alys. The LA police forensic scientist says Alys died from an experimental new drug. There follows a long pseudo-scientific explanation that the drug suspends the brain’s ability to distinguish between fixed blocs of time and space i.e. the ability to compartmentalise events into before and after, and to compartmentalise space into separate, well, spaces. In a bit of a leap, they claim the drug allows more than one reality to exist at once, and in a further leap, that this leads to multiple universes existing at the same time. Alys’s use of the drug created an alternative universe into which Jason was pulled.

I.e it was all her fault. Jason’s entire experience of being pulled into this alternative universe in which he was never born – is solely the result of Alys’s trip on a new experimental drug.

I admit to being disappointed. I thought it was going to be something to do with toxins release by ‘the Callisto cuddle sponge’. Remember that, back at the start?

Now a newly confident Jason phones up Heather and – she recognises him! Darling where have you been, I’ve been so worried etc. But when he flies to her flat to meet her neither of them refer to the incident with Marilyn Mason. What? Last thing we saw in that universe, he was being rushed into surgery with Heather crying her eyes out? Did it not happen? Or has Dick now got bored of it and not bothered to link it to how his narrative has ended up?

To me the complete lack of follow-up to the Caliisto sponge scene doesn’t say anything about Dick’s clever manipulation of reality, it says everything about how he and his tripped-out readers don’t really care about logic or consequences or coherence,as long as the narrative contains loads of gee whizz references to drugs and the police state.

In a nutshell Alys took an entirely new, made-up drug, and this had the entirely made-up effect of dragging Jason (and Buckminster and everyone else around her) into her fantasy in which Jason had never existed. Until she died – at which point the ‘real’ world started flooding back. I still don’t understand this. Why him, why Jason? What is the meaning of the records which won’t play?

Anyway, now a completely new plotline kicks off. Backat police headquarters Buckman’s Machiavellian adviser points out that Alys’s suicide will make the gutter press snoop around, and that Buckman’s incestuous relationship with her is bound to come out, and that this will give his enemies and rivals among the four or so other Police Generals the opportunity to get him demoted or sacked.

Instead, Buckman had better get his retaliation in first, by concocting a scandalous story which somehow implicates them – the other generals. What they need to do is present Alys’s death as a murder resulting from some great conspiracy into which he can drag his rivals, ideally involving some high level, public figure who will divert attention away from the incest.

And it is at just this moment that the latest file on Jason Taverner is placed on Buckman’s desk. The perfect fall guy! They’ll say Taverner was driven mad with jealousy when he discovered that Alys had been having a lesbian love affair with his own long-term partner, Heather Hart, went round and murdered her. The security cop saw him at the scene. The police coroner can be ordered to change the evidence to do whatever it takes to incriminate Taverner.

They agree this plan and make a public announcement they’re seeking Taverner on a warrant for murder. Taverner has just arrived at Heather’s empty apartment feeling mighty happy to have his old life back when Heather storms in waving the newspaper with its front page headline about her and Alys (they did in fact have a lesbian affair) and the cops wanting to arrest them both. Jason and Heather argue and have tantrums and then realise there’s nothing to be done but hand themselves in.

Passivity

Having read four Dick novels in a row, one of the subtler threads or similarities between them is how passive his protagonists are. Frank Frink just accepts it when he’s arrested. Juliana shrugs when she finds out she’s living in a parallel universe. Rick Deckard undergoes mad experiences including inexplicable hallucinations, but ends up chatting sensibly with his wife. Joe Chin has moments of panic in Ubik but by and large functions efficiently and logically, despite finding out he has died and is being kept in cryogenic storage.

Similarly, at every moment when the cops confront him Jason Taverner… just gives up and goes meekly. There’s something very underpowered about Dick’s protagonists. They passively submit to weird hallucinations, mad revelations and terrifying time travel parallel universes.

Maybe the central protagonist has to remain calm and rational, in order to allow the weirdness to really come out.

Coda

I’ve also noticed that Dick’s books tend to get to what is definitely the end of the story… and then have an extra bit tacked on afterwards.

On paper (and in the movie) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? should end when Deckard ‘retires’ the last of the six androids he has been tasking with killing. Sure enough he goes home to see his wife. But then there is an extra and completely unnecessary chapter where he flies north into the radioactive wilderness and finds himself climbing the hill and somehow changing into Wilbur Mercer. And then a further extra bit, when Deckard finds the live toad and takes it home to his wife.

Same here. Having made the reasonably rational decision to frame Taverner for his sister’s death, Buckman then flies home. Job done, game over, right? But in the event he finds himself crying, torn by an impulse to go back and rescind the arrest warrant for Taverner.

Instead he pull up (i.e. descends to) an automated gas station in the middle of nowhere. One other quibble is there, its owner a smartly dressed black guy, pacing up and down as he waits for his quibble to be topped up with gas. On impulse Buckman takes a piece of police notepaper and draws a heart with an arrow through it and gives it to the black man. The black man looks at it, looks at Buckman, looks at the paper again, then lets it drop and blow away. Buckman gets back into his quibble and flies off.

OK, so far so far out, man. There’s still ten or so pages of text left so you’d expect to return to the plot, right?

But no. Buckman cries more tears, veers his quibble round and goes back to the gas station. Black guy is still there. This time they talk, and the black guy turns out to be remarkably perceptive, realising Buckman is in a weird emotional state, sympathises, gives him his card, says ‘Call me sometime’. Buckman gets back in his quibble and this time does fly back to his fine home.

What was that about? Is Dick playing with the format of the novel by consistently adding these overspill sections (rather as he plays with various conventions in this novel by dropping characters and forgetting loose ends – e.g. ‘the gelatin-like Callisto cuddle sponge with its fifty feeding tubes’)? Is he screwing with our heads, man?

Drugs

The four novels of Dick’s I’ve read all feature drugs as a common-or-garden, accepted element in the societies he describes.

Even in The Man in the High Castle, supposedly set in a parallel 1962, not only do some of the the characters (Frank Frink) smoke marijuana cigarettes, but these are commercially available i.e. not illegal.

In Ubik the owner of the half-life moratorium casually offers Runciter amphetamines when he looks like he needs pepping up, not as some illicit substance but as a perfectly ordinary element of polite society.

In this novel the cops not only smoke weed but offer Jason a joint after they arrest him. McNulty’s boss mentions that he should take some amphetamine.

And then there’s Dick’s prolonged portrayal of a mescaline trip at the police general’s mansion.

At the time (the late 1960s, man) I think this familiarity with drugs, drug paraphernalia and experiences and risks, gained Dick a vast audience among students and dropouts, and a reputation as a prophet of the alternative culture. So cool, man.

45 years later America is hooked on opioids which result in 122,000 deaths in 2015, not to mention the massive worldwide organised crime associated with heroin and cocaine trafficking. Only the relatively young and naive can any more think that any form of drugs is cool.

Sex

Sex doesn’t have the centrality in Dick’s work that it does in many other writers. It comes across as more of a plot device than an end in itself, designed to amplify the more important ideas around it such as fractured identity, altered mental states, parallel universes, and the general unreliability of ‘reality’ – whatever that is.

What’s interesting is the way the sexual element becomes more overt as you track these novels from the early 1960s through to the mid-1970s.

Following the trend, sex plays a bigger role in this story than all previous ones. The fact that he’s had sex with so many different women marks Jason as a product of the Hugh Hefner Playboy era. The introduction of Alys in particular, the leather-clad bondage girl, reminds me of all the leatherclad cartoon women from the 1950s.

But Dick piles on the perversion by having Alys and Buckman (whose name, if you replace the B with an F, would become more counter-cultural and, like, subversive,man) be not only twins but incestuous. really incestuous. So incestuous that they have had a son, Barney, who they’s packed off to boarding school in Florida. Weird enough for you, man?

And it is Alys who introduces Jason to the idea that there is a matrix or ‘grid’ of people who all go online to make mass phone calls at the same time, during which they live out their sexual fantasies. Alys explains that this can quickly become an addiction and that you can tell the people who are addicted to it by the way they look aged and drained. Nowadays, of course, we call this the internet.

Although the story is meant to be about a parallel world brought about by someone’s fantasies, it would not be hard to do an entry-level feminist critique of the narrative to bring out the way it is a picaresque story in which a tall, handsome rich man encounters a whole succession of women who represent different female stereotypes:

• mature girlfriend Heather who wants to marry and have his babies
• psychotic 19-year-old Kathy, with her undeveloped body (she laments her lack of bust) and paranoid possessiveness
• Alys the six-foot, bondage lesbian
• Mary Anne Domenico, the plain, sensitive, ‘artistic’ virgin

When Jason gets to Heather’s flat at the end, after what we can all agree has been a very trying two days, she’s out and he finds her faithful maid, Susie, at work. So he sidles up, slips his arm around her and grips ‘her firm right boob’ (p.178), behaviour which would see him arrested and sent to prison these days.

Dick fans may see Flow My Tears as a highly artful exploration of themes of identity, reality and mental illness. #metoo activists might not be wrong to see Jason Taverner as a forerunner of Harvey Weinstein.

Swearing

In the same way as sex becomes a more dominant theme, over these four novels I’ve noticed the way Dick’s characters swear more and more.  I’m not sure anyone swears in The Man in the High Castle (1962), whereas only 12 years later pretty much everyone is saying ‘fuck’.

• ‘Do you think I’m a CF, a celebrity fucker?’ (Kathy, p.55)
• ‘Don’t use that “I don’t give a fuck” tone with me.’ (Jason, p.58)
• ‘Fuck off,’ said Ruth Rae (p.101)
• ‘In what fucking way?’ he said, harshly. (Jason, p.104)
• Isn’t it possible they’ll fuck up all down the line? (Jason thinking about the cops, p.107)
• Her face glowed hotly and she said, ‘That motherfucker!’ (Alys, p.135)
• ‘Nowhere Nuthin’ Fuck-Up’ (Jason’s most recent hit, p.155)
• ‘We’ll kill you in the end, you miserable murdering motherfucker.’ (General Buckman, p.188)

Not just ‘fuck’, but a lot of the character use the cool groovy slang of the late 60s, early 70s.

• ‘Can you lay a joint on this brother?’ (a Jesus-freak cop, p. 114)
• a freak thing (Ruth Rae p.103)
• ‘If you dig what I mean’ (Ruth Rae p.104)
• ‘If you split now…’ (Ruth Rae p.106)
• ‘Can’t you hold your hit, man?’ (Alys, p.140)
• ‘Please don’t freak, I won’t hurt you.’ (Jason, p.152)
• ‘You’re really far out,’ Mary Anne said enthusiastically.’ (p.156)
• ‘Let’s get it on’, he said. (p.178)
• ‘It’s OK. I can dig it.’ (the unnamed black guy, p.197)

Yeah baby, lay some skin on me, let’s stick it the Man, tell it like it is, right on sister.

It’s tricky to know whether Dick thought he was just updating his prose style and dialogue to reflect the way people were speaking in 1973 – or whether he was satirising the way people were speaking in 1973.

He’s certainly satirising the shallowness of TV and and the mind-boggling inanity of pop music – like the pretty crude joke that Jason’s most recent hit song, the one which Mary Anne puts on in the café as ‘his’ reality starts to flood back, is titled ‘Nowhere Nuthin’ Fuck-Up’. But then, what modern writer doesn’t satirise TV for its inanity? It’s a cliché of 20th century post-war fiction.

Either way, whatever the motivation, it’s another of the attitudes which – along with the glamorising of drugs and the hero’s casual expectation that he can sleep with any woman he wants to – make the novel seem such a period piece.

This sense – that a lot of the plot and comment is dated late-60s, early-70s satire – was hugely confirmed for me when, in a minor scene, the cops go to Ruth Rae’s apartment building to arrest Jason but break into the wrong room. Before they discover this they tiptoe across a wall-to-wall carpet depicting Richard M. Nixon’s ascent into heaven as God’s Second Begotten Son (p.108)

Over-excited satire of Richard Nixon belongs to a specific time and place which most people alive do not now remember or understand (he resigned the presidency in August 1974, presumably a little after this novel was published, and a long, long 45 years ago.) This really gross satire reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson’s obsession with Nixon in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) and the way Thompson devoted an entire book to Nixon’s re-election campaign, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.

This detail made me realise how much Dick was writing for a very specific audience, addressing the pressing social, cultural and political issues of his day which seemed to be caught up in a really seismic crisis – and therefore how, at least on the level of his attitudes to politics, sex and drugs, his books are not prescient and prophetic but rather backward-looking and dated. Can you dig it, man?

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Related links

• Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said Wikipedia article
• Philip K. Dick Wikipedia article

Philip K. Dick reviews

• The Man in the High Castle (1962) In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns Japanese officials the Germans are planning a surprise attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) n 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped andys
• Ubik (1969) In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after a catastrophe on the moon
• Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974) America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading the human giants to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet trailing gasses through earth’s atmosphere brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke – a thrilling tale of the Overlords who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention – in the near future – of the anti-death drugs and the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish’s Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe

1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke – a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of quicksand-like moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard New York
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke – panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman transformed into a galactic consciousness

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it

1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s