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Fiction. Science Fiction & Fantasy. HTML: Pop star Jason Taverner is the product of a top-secret government experiment that produced a selection of genetically enhanced people forty years ago. Unusually bright and beautiful, he's a television idol beloved by millionsâ??until one day, all records of his identity inexplicably disappear. Overnight, he has gone from being a celebrity to a man whom no one seems to recognize. And in a police state, having no proof of his existence is enough to put his life in danger. As Jason races to solve the riddle of his disappearance, Philip K. Dick immerses us in an Orwellian atmosphere of betrayal, secrecy, and conspiracyâ??a world in which everyone informs on everyone else and omniscient police have something to hide. Painting a horribly plausible portrait of a neofascist America, he explores the meaning of identity and reality in a world skewed by drugs, genetic enhancement, and a culture of celebrity. His bleakly beautiful novel bores into the deepest bedrock self and plants a stick of dynamite at its center… (more)
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OK, enough about movies, other than I could see Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said being filmed, too, if one squeam-inducing plot thread were changed.
Jason Taverner is a genetically enhanced Six, top of the heap, and the host of a hugely popular TV show. He's also full of himself and a womanizer. Our world has become a police state, with tabs kept on every citizen and problematics sent to forced labor camps. When one of his abandoned trystees expresses her anger and injures him with an ugh-toss, he ends up waking up in a world that doesn't know him. His fame has disappeared. His identity is missing from all databanks. In a police state, he's a disaster waiting to happen. What to do?
His quest to first acquire some identity so he can survive, and to eventually recover his own identity, connects him with some memorable characters. They include a 19 year old ID forger and police informant who craves his bod and may do him in, an old flame who likes to wax philosophical, and the whacko sister of a police captain who may be behind all that has happened.
Dick is a good writer, with a great imagination. The police state is a convincing backdrop, and the storyline is irresistible: why is his reality so changed? Will he be able to regain his identity? Will he be betrayed, chewed up and spit out into a forced labor camp? Along the way we have characters engage in deep discussions about grief, love, life, death, and what exactly is reality. Written in the 70s, drugs play a role in opening eyes and also potentially destroying lives. A bit of disturbing societal racism at the beginning comes full circle at the end.
The author does provide an occasional clunker, e.g. a character making a remark in "his doglike panting voice." But mainly the story zips along, packing a remarkable amount of ideas, developments and story into approximately 200 pages.
I also learned a good Latin phrase from it: De gustibus non disputandum est. In matters of taste there's no dispute. This may not be your cuppa, but for those who are intrigued by this sort of thing, it's a cinematic trip with a master.
The book starts off by introducing us to the main character, Jason Taverner. He is a famous celebrity, and has a syndicated TV-show, watched by 30 million viewers a week. Jason is also a “six”, the product of a genetic-modification program that has made him smarter and more beautiful than the average human being. Jason’s life seems idyllic, but one senses that he is lonely for all that. Then, something strange happens. Jason is attacked by one of his former flames, and rushed to hospital. But when he wakes up, he isn’t in the hospital. Rather, he finds himself in a trashy hotel room, unable to explain how he got there. All of his identity cards are gone, which is a big problem in the security state in which he lives. Not only are they gone, but his identity itself seems to be gone; no-one recognises him, a world-famous entertainer. Jason needs to find out what has happened to him, and the rest of the novel is concerned with how he accomplishes this.
But not really, or at least, not mostly. Although there is a plot, in which Jason gets caught up in the police-web tightening around him, this doesn’t really matter as much as one would think. The more important aspects of the novel are Dick’s ruminations on identity and loneliness. Dick asks us to place ourselves in Jason’s position: who are we really, and what really matters in our lives? Existence for its own sake? Making a mark in history? Or the connections we make with others? Jason meets various characters, all of whom are struggling with these problems. My favourites were Kathy, the police informant who makes contraband identity documents, and the policeman of the title, Felix Buckman, who is actually a Police General in charge of the Los Angeles department. Both of them are sad, melancholic characters, with Kathy working for the police to free her (probably deceased) husband from a labour camp, and Felix worrying about his drug-addicted sister.
Dick paints a bleak picture of humanity. In his future, black people have become a protected minority, and homosexuals, although tolerated, are viewed with contempt. That gives a flavour of what Dick describes, but not a very accurate one, as Dick handles these issues quite sensitively. One has to admit that Dick isn’t the greatest prose-stylist, with his writing being workmanlike at best. But his ideas are luminous and serious, and he uses science-fiction tropes to address them in interesting and imaginative ways. The book could have done without its epilogue, in which Dick reductively enumerates what happens to each of the characters after the story, weakening the impact of the novel. But it’s a minor fault, and some might enjoy reading about the further exploits of the characters. I also realise that Dick was trying to accomplish something other than merely telling what happens afterwards, but it isn’t quite successful.
So, on the whole, a fascinating book of ideas. I read this years ago (well, more than a decade ago, at least), yet I still enjoyed it now. A great read for those interested in seeing how science-fiction can be emotionally mature and affecting.
So Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? isn't, really, a futuristic gumshoe PI noir about killing replicants (though it functions pretty well on that level) but an examination of what really makes us human: what *is* empathy, and what consequences would there be for the way we relate to each other if we could achieve it artificially? And here, in Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, Dick ruminates on identity: what am *I*, if not a collection of relationships, impulses and memories in other people's minds? - and reality - what, when it comes to it, is the world itself, if not a collection of relations, impulses and memories in *my* brain?
What if we really could alter brains to change these things - how would that alter the way we see ourselves and the world? How, given the limitations of the above view, do we know we cannot? These are big themes, not the sort of thing that science fiction, in the main, handles awfully well. But because Philip Dick is so concerned with his characters, all of whom feel real, human, fallible and contrary - that is, they react in ways we can relate to - it is easy to forget this is a science fiction book at all (it is a matter of record that Philip K Dick despaired of his pigeonholing as a writer of pulp fiction).
Flow My Tears is characteristic of Philip Dick in other respects (not the least its idiosyncratic title!). As in Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and A Scanner Darkly, narcotics - Dick's equivalent of the red and blue pills from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - play a significant role, and his paranoia, by 1974 well documented and approaching the psychotic, is well on display. Dick tended to portray his futures as governed by dystopian states not out of political disposition or dramatic impetus but, I suspect, because he believed that's where the world was inevitably headed.
Flow my tears isn't a perfect novel - the motivations of secondary characters aren't always easy to divine and it's difficult to know which of Jason Taverner and Felix Buckman is meant to be the "emotional axis" of the book - it feels as though it should be Taverner, but Buckman is drawn as a far more complex and carefully worked out character. Ultimately I would not put it in the same category as The Man in the High Castle or Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, but it's certainly readable and entertaining and linear in a way that later novels weren't.
Exiled forever, let me mourn;
Where night's black bird her sad infamy sings,
There let me live forlorn.
Down vain lights, shine you no more!
No nights are dark enough for those
That in despair their lost fortunes deplore.
Light doth but shame disclose.
Never may
Since pity is fled;
And tears and sighs and groans my weary days
Of all joys have deprived.
From the highest spire of contentment
My fortune is thrown;
And fear and grief and pain for my deserts
Are my hopes, since hope is gone.
Hark! you shadows that in darkness dwell,
Learn to contemn light
Happy, happy they that in hell
Feel not the world's despite.
In “Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said”, taken from “Flow My Tears” by John Dowland
This is one of the books that changed me in ways I’m still trying to come to terms with, and I’ve read it more than 30 years ago. At the time I lacked the tools to properly tackle this. That’s why I’ve been wanting to re-read it and analyse it in the light what I currently know. I still remember the feeling I had the first time I read it back in the day. Mind-boggling to say the least. 30 years later, can I define what reality is? Doesn’t reality belong to the subjective objectivity realm, i.e., isn’t it the highest degree of objectivity possible for a human being? Reality can only be a subjective objectivity as it falls back on whether I chose to accept it as the truth or deny it completely. This means objective reality does exist, but I can only perceive it with my own perception filters. I have to decide what is reality as best I can, and may choose to assert some prepositions even though everyone else denies it (Copernicus comes to mind). It’s to my advantage to seek to make my perception filters as little distorting as possible, but I doubt I could ever achieve that completely, because I’m the product of my own culture to start with, to say the least. This leads me to the question whether uncertainty in reality is a psychological phenomenon. Does it exist only in the mind, and not in the world? We’re dangerously delving into the quantum universe continuum…Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, dudes who I think knew what they talking about. At the time I knew zilch about these matters. Now I only know little bit more. Now I know reality does not exist until it’s measured. Regardless of that, I firmly believe in the fact that asymptotic convergence theorems are meaningful. Even in the realm of quantum physics, I believe that through asymptotic convergence I can get very meaningful on some states of information, but that state of information is sometimes not maximal, i.e., deterministic for observables. When the best I can do is some probabilistic function over observables, it's because I've left out essential details, not because the observables are random. That’s the nature of the quantum world for you. Quantum mechanics tells me I only perceive at most a tiny sliver of reality. The rest is just fuzzy stuff…The direct consequence of this is that the world of our perception is just a projection of a fantastical high dimensional space continuum. The space of all those space continuums has its existence and properties quite independent from our observations, i.e., from the “objective” reality as perceived by us. But once again, this n-dimensional space is unavailable to us — we can only see the ripple effects it has within our much smaller 3-dimensional space.
One of my plans for 2017 is to re-read some of my old-time favourites, being Phil Dick one of them. As I was reading “Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said” I kept thinking and trying to pinpoint what makes Phil Dick the writer he was. A hasty analysis tells me he had a peculiar way of delivering information (what some of us call “the act of writing” …). Dick usually set up an ecosystem that seems pretty much ordinary, except for a few tiny, bitsy details that on first reading go unnoticed (e.g., remember the electric animals in “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”); everything else about the universe created and depicted is relatively unchanged. This way of keeping things down-to-earth except for a few changes creates a bounded sense of realism in his writing; this is a very smart way to tell me not dismiss anything unusual. He uses this approach of make-believe realism to uproot his own philosophies on a subject into my head. What he does is he gives the main character a common frame-of-reference on something, and utilizes the other characters to change the main character’s frame-of-reference to what the minor characters are thinking. He does this with Taverner in “Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said” regarding love. Pretty smart for a SF writer, don’t you think? Many Mundane Fiction writers are incapable of doing this successfully.
Coming to the theme of what reality is. Reality is being able to find beauty in Andreas Scholl singing several John Dowload ayres, particularly “Flow my Tears” while reading this novel.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said published in 1974; Philip K. Dick began writing the novel in 1970. These, the late Sixties up to 1974, were turbulent times not only in the U.S., but also in Dick’s life. The Vietnam War raged on (would not end until April 1975), war
It’s the future, as usual with Dick, the near future, 1988. This world itself is a different reality. A civil war has taken place and students carry on the resistance, barely subsisting in campus kibbutzim isolated by the police (pols) and National Guard (nats). A police state rules, led by a director, with marshals and generals under him. Authorities, employing a vast web of informants and surveillance devices, ferret out resisters, mostly students, and confine them in forced labor camps.
In this world reigns Jason Taverner, a widely liked television and recording celebrity, probably achieved by virtue of his “six” attributes, the result of discontinued genetic engineering that set him and a handful of physical and intellectual superiors above “ordinaries.” One day, after an argument with a former lover, she attacks him with an alien life form. He awakens in his world but as someone with no identity, devoid now of the status and fame of Jason Taverner. Without IDs, he can’t move about, so he pays a flophouse front desk man for help finding a documents forger. Kathy Nelson, very young, proves skillful, but also a government informant. Soon, Taverner ends up in the clutches of the L.A. Police Academy and subject to interrogation by police General Felix Buckman. As the police can find no past for him, they release him loaded with surveillance bugs and a pea-size nuke.
Alys Buckman, sister and incestuous lover of Felix, immediately scoops Taverner up and relieves him of the bugs and bomb. She’s wild and crazy, into drugs and unrestrained fetish sex. And she, unlike everybody else, knows who he is. She doses him with mescaline and he loses touch with reality. When he recovers, he discovers Alys dead, a yellowing skeleton. Turns out she took a new experimental reality-warping drug, later discontinued because of its deadly consequences.
Felix Buckman becomes frenzied with grief, and he and his henchman decide to pin Alys’ death on Buckman. Buckman, in flight, meets potterer Mary Anne Dominic, who after a while realizes she knows who Taverner is. He’s back, famous again. He hooks up with his old girlfriend, Heather Hart, who now recognizes him, only to be nabbed by the police and eventually put on trial for Alys’ murder. With skillful legal counsel, he’s acquitted. In an epilogue, readers learn of everyone’s fate over the ensuing years, decidedly peaceful, and the fact that the police state collapses. In the end, there’s but one word to describe things, made in reference to the beauty of a vase created by Dominic but, really, more universal in meaning, “love.”
I think it is similar but better put together than Scanner Darkly. I caught a hint of Demolished Man also, without the high drama ending. Definitely well written.
The main problem for me was that the ending just seemed too far fetched. Drugs often feature in PKD novels, and parallel dimentions or alternative realities are common SF concepts, but the was these two things were combined just didn't seem at
Perhaps I missed something, but the epilogue seemed totally unnecessary: it didn't really add anything to the story.
Currently, I rate Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, A Scanner Darkly, and Ubik higher than Flow My Tears.
One of the cool things about Dick is that he never saves on ideas. Even with a plot that involves questioning the very fabrics of reality in a oppressing state (Matrix, anyone?), he still tosses some killer sponges, psychic hotel clerks, subterranean universities and secret phone sex networks into the mix. And, which I also love about his work, a tender quality. A story about a rabbit which thought it was a cat gets several pages in a slim book, and clumsy, awkward meetings between strangers get much more room than action filled escapes. The tone of this book is melancholy more than anything else.
I had absolutely no idea what to expect before reading it except that I was following a good recommendation; and as it turned out it worked out for the best. I found myself totally immersed in the plot. At times it felt to me like reading parts of William F. Nolan's 'Logan's Run' and Dick's 'We Can Remember It for You Wholesale' in others.
Some of the chapters gave me a lot to think about such as chapter eleven when Ruth Rae discusses her feelings of grief and loss with Jason Taverner. Little things like that sit in the back of your mind as other things overlap to form a rich cocktail of flavours that make this for me a deeply satisfying novel.
As you can see, I've chosen not to give anything away concerning the actual story; so, please do enjoy.
I get a kick out of the mix of technological forecasting that's stirred into such stories. In this depiction of 1988, people travel around in vehicles called "quibbles" that fly, taking off and landing vertically. There seem to be traffic lanes in the sky, but no traffic controllers. There seem to be streets, and people park their quibbles at the curb. Taxis are robotic quibbles, and once at your destination, you can't exit ('cause the door won't open) until you pay up.
The authorities have endless data bases, digital dossiers on ev...er...y...body, that can be accessed quicktime. The phones have video-screens so you can see who you are talking to. They've got microdot tracking devices that can be hidden in a person's clothing, and even supremely miniaturized nuclear bombs (called "seeds") that can be implanted under your skin and triggered remotely if you...uh...you know...drift out of line.
All this BUT, vinyl discs are state-of-the-art for recorded music. All the phones are linked by wires. Wanna call your buddy? Get out some coin and find a pay phone. The computer mavens still depend on punch cards.
Once again Dick takes the reader down the rabbit hole to wonderlands that twist and turn your sense of reality with plots that are thoroughly unpredictable.
Is the memory of his life up until this point just a sham and he's gone insane? Is it a plot to discredit him? Has someone found out his secret and now it's just a matter of time until his internment at one of those camps? Jason sets out to get some answers and also to get his life back along the way.
The feel of this book is very reminiscent of The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester examining the question of who a person really is. Written in 1974 and set in a 1980's dystopian future some of the technology is a little dated but the amount of ideas contained in this short novel more than make up for that. This is a very quick and readable story with interesting characters but does have a slightly weak ending but very enjoyable all the same.
Jason Taverner is a world famous celebrity - his TV show is watched by weekly by 35 million people. One morning he wakes up and no-one knows who he is...
An obnoxious yet famous celebrity wakes up after surgery to find out that no one knows who he is any more. Set in a dystopian police state the novel follows Jason in his increasing desperation to find out why no one knows who he is.
The setting is
Well worth the read, only Dicks tripped out mind could think up this story.
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Omslaget er en collage af en mand der løber gennem en række vægge med udsnit af form som et hoved
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
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813.54 |