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Tom Quinn's Reviews > A Scanner Darkly
A Scanner Darkly
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This is exactly what living with addiction feels like. Unwell delusion at odds with unstoppable consequences. Sick thinking that comforts as it kills.
Beyond that gritty and discomforting topic, which already makes it well worth reading, it's a damn good science fiction story. Entangled in paranoia, PKD delves into the seemingly hardwired "Us vs Them" dynamic while featuring strange technology that extends real social ills out to their most striking metaphorical forms.
5 stars. Raw, intense, engrossing
Beyond that gritty and discomforting topic, which already makes it well worth reading, it's a damn good science fiction story. Entangled in paranoia, PKD delves into the seemingly hardwired "Us vs Them" dynamic while featuring strange technology that extends real social ills out to their most striking metaphorical forms.
5 stars. Raw, intense, engrossing
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Reading Progress
Finished Reading
(Kindle Edition)
May 26, 2014
– Shelved
(Kindle Edition)
October 23, 2021
–
Started Reading
October 23, 2021
– Shelved
October 24, 2021
–
11.0%
"This is TMI, but first time I read this I was a college stoner with a "can't happen to me" attitude, dabbling in drugs and getting a voyeur's thrill by pressing my nose to the window of a dangerous other world. But dabbling grew more frequent and led to habit and beyond, and before long I was on the other side of the glass myself. I've since gone straight and I must say: reading this definitely hits different now."
October 25, 2021
–
30.0%
October 26, 2021
–
61.0%
October 28, 2021
–
70.0%
October 28, 2021
–
Finished Reading
October 29, 2021
–
91.0%
Comments Showing 1-10 of 10 (10 new)
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Matthew Ted
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rated it 3 stars
Oct 29, 2021 06:31AM
Great review, Tom. Glad it holds up for you, always the best feeling when a book you love still strikes the same chords again and again.
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I don't need to write a review. I'll just post a link to this one.
I love PKDs writing. Im adding this to my list. 😀
Megg wrote: "I love PKDs writing. Im adding this to my list. 😀"Can't wait to hear your thoughts about it!
Matthew Ted wrote: "Great review, Tom. Glad it holds up for you, always the best feeling when a book you love still strikes the same chords again and again."Quite so! Lots of my 5-star reads from my teens and 20s are pretty embarrassing in retrospect, but this one's gone mainstream for a reason.
Richard wrote: "I don't need to write a review. I'll just post a link to this one."Why thank you! And in true Dickian style I expext I'll forget you said that, see your review a few months from now, wonder how you came up with it, and confuse which of us is real and which isn't.
Nice review. This is another of my all-time-favorites. It's so recursive and disorienting, but in a fascinating way. An unraveling.PKD is such a unique author. It seems to me that writers of his era weren't afraid to take a 90 degree turn at page 30 and then hit the warp drive on that bearing. It's really admirable and the works can take you to some really unexpected places. It's a lot less common now.
Any other sci-fi you've been digging lately? I'm poking around some of my favorites and seeing who has similar tastes to me.
Elliott wrote: "Nice review. This is another of my all-time-favorites. It's so recursive and disorienting, but in a fascinating way. An unraveling."Thank you! It's a trip and the sum of its parts packs a huge punch. Plus it's more conventionally readable than some of his other, murkier works. After this one I like VALIS best.
"PKD is such a unique author. It seems to me that writers of his era weren't afraid to take a 90 degree turn at page 30 and then hit the warp drive on that bearing. It's really admirable and the works can take you to some really unexpected places. It's a lot less common now."
Definitely in a class of his own. PKD is sort of like the Hunter S Thompson of science fiction. For a similar vibe I like to read Robert Anton Wilson (the Illuminatus! series comes to mind, for a more tongue-in-cheek look at paranoid delusion)
"Any other sci-fi you've been digging lately? I'm poking around some of my favorites and seeing who has similar tastes to me."
I haven't read sci-fi nearly as much in my 30s as I did back in high school, so I'm not up on the new stuff. Lately I've been revisiting the classic authors of the 50s and 60s. Asimov and Heinlein both have novels I'm going to tackle next, having mostly read their short stories. And I'm also keen to get through Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human again soon.
And of course my favorite sci-fi title is still The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - I've always loved sci-fi as philosophical metaphor, not really into the hard science questions of "how would this actually work in real life?"
Hitchhiker's is great! I'm a soft sci-fi guy myself. Nothing wrong with the hard stuff, but not my favorite. It's three pages of how the ship is working to land on Mars.Meanwhile, Ray Bradbury: The rocket ship landed on Mars.
Then you get into the fun stuff of how the technologies or situations impact humanity. Which is my favorite aspect of Sci-Fi. I'll take a peek at some of those short stories!
Elliott wrote: "Then you get into the fun stuff of how the technologies or situations impact humanity. Which is my favorite aspect of Sci-Fi. I'll take a peek at some of those short stories!"Agreed 100%, hard sci-fi feels like a pissing contest to me at times. Give me an allegory, not a physics lecture.
There's also this great collection of 100 short short stories to look for. Perfect for busy readers on the go.
