Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (S.F. Masterworks) by: Philip K. Dick
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Publisher: Gollancz
Release date: 8th November, 2001
Media: Paperback
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Editorial Review
Philip K Dick notoriously charted SF's most dangerous, booby-trapped realities. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974) is a relatively straightforward tale of paranoid unease at finding the world isn't what it should be.
Jason Taverner is world-famous for his songs and regular TV show. "Thirty million people saw you zip up your fly tonight." "... It's my trademark." Although this future US is a grim police state with labour camps in Alaska and Canada, jetsetting Taverner enjoys being one of the winners.
Then he wakes up in a sleazy hotel room, still well-dressed and flush with money, but no longer the famous Jason Taverner. No ID--that's a forced-labour offence. His agent doesn't know him. Nor do his closest friends. He's even vanished from police databanks.
Forged documents are needed, hand-drawn by teenaged expert Kathy--one of Dick's most alarming women, a neurotic petty criminal who's also a police informer, who entraps and manipulates Taverner until he's terrified of her. He may deserve it: this self-obsessed megastar inflicts small, unthinking cruelties on virtually every woman he meets.
The title's policeman is another interesting character: Police General Felix Buckman, a mostly good man (and fan of Elizabethan songs: "Flow, my teares...") trapped in a horrible system. Is Taverner, the man with no past, a threat? Less so, maybe, than Buckman's amoral sister Alys, who takes special interest in Taverner and seems to have the world's only copies of his music albums...
Paranoid wrongness is expertly conveyed, and resolved with a typically offbeat SF notion. A sunny finale concludes one of Dick's most approachable novels.--David Langford
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Rating: - Flow my tears, the policeman said
I really enjoyed the book and read it within a weekend. It is the usual style by Dick. You get the dark future, humour and the sense that the novel has been hastly written. I am a massive P.K.Dick fan and love all his novels.
The novel is about a man that is what society refers to as a 'six' which is a generation of genetically enhanced humans. Jason Tavenier is the protagonist (and a six) who in the first chapter is a very popular television/chat show type host.
Very early on Tavenier finds himself in a hotel room with no idea how he got there and with no I.D. Soon he discovers that everyone he knows doesn't remember him at all. The entire novel is about Taveniers quest to regain his identity and solve the mystery of what has happened to him.
The bulk of he novel consists of Tavenier meeting different woman, all of whom have unique personalities and are some what complex individuals (Which woman are) and how the benifits of being a 'six' help overcome his perdicaments, (dealing with the woman, evading police and generally charming his way about).
Dick sets the scene brilliantly in a future governed by a police state and how hard and darkly unusual the world has turned out to be.
The novel was written in the 70's and this is aparent, but still has disturbing merit on todays society. I recommend this book for any sci-fi fan. the ending is slightly abrupt, when the mystery is revealed. But i still thought the book was a worth while read.
A suggestion for anyone wanting to read Dick. My personal favorites and what I feel was Dicks best would be titles such as; Ubik, Clans of a Alphane moon, Man in the high castle and of course - Do androids dream of electric sheep which was made into the cult classic 'Blade runner'
Hope this helps.
Rating: 
- Second-rate Kafka
I read Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle" and absolutely enjoyed it. Then I searched for other things by the same author and read them: "Now wait for last year", "The three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" and finally "Flow my tears, the policeman said" with increasing disappointment and impatience. All three of them display some brilliant situations, particularly at the starting point, but then in all of them the author reveals his absolute lack of command of the plot, of its goals and rhythm. As you go on reading, you get more and more entangled in a confusion of facts and characters coming out of nowhere. Reality becomes a kind of nightmare, yes, but not in any enjoyable way (at least for me). These novels appear to me as the genuine products of an intoxicated mind. Art is about control, and there's nothing of it in them.
Rating: - What maketh the man
Philip K Dick was an unusual science fiction writer in that, while he tended to write in (usually dystopian) alternative universes, the "space opera" aspect - the act of universe creation (which so obsessed Tolkien, for example) isn't what interests him. If Star Wars was the ultimate piece of fantasy escapism, with a ludicrous morality play veneer thrown in for an emotional punch at the end, then Dick's works tend to exist at the other end of the spectrum: the world is described incidentally, the ingenious devices and drugs means of locomoting and teasing out the existential questions they pose the characters. There is always little bit of scientific hocus pocus thrown in, but never for the sake of it: it is always a means to crystallising Dick's theme.
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 [ASIN:0575079932 Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?]], but it's certainly readable and entertaining and linear in a way that later novels weren't.
Olly Buxton
Rating: 
- Where Philip K. Dick meets David Lynch
This book is like a Lynch movie; think it of it as a sci-fi Mulholland drive but with much better plot. For once more, with his usual exquisite writing style, Dick swirls the conception of his character's reality mixing identities, time and space.
Wonderfully satirical and scathing of the arrogant and shallow Hollywood lifestyle this novel contains all the features that made Dick a distinctive figure in science fiction literature. Drugs, hallucinations, identity fusion, corrupted authority, rotten bureaucracies and competing irreal universes create a noir narration which, if had to be adapted to a film, only the complicated, mad genius of David Lynch could ever satisfyingly handle!
Although not as celebrated as his other novels, definitely one of Dick's best.
Rating: - A damn good read
This may not be one of Dick's best novels but it certainly isn't a dud. It's set in the future of course, a typical Dickian dystopic police state where Jason Taverner, a rich successful television star in the Tony Bennett mode wakes up to find himself in a downtown flop house having lost his identity. The world doesn't know who he is and as a nobody is fair game to be picked up and sent to a labour camp by the ever present police. All students are hunted and sent to labour camps, a sign of the times of when the book was written, the early 70's.
As usual with PKD he predicts a future which is pretty close to where we are at now. In Flow my Tears... he nails the modern day phenomenon of Internet porn and social networking sites in his description of mass electronic orgies that gradually corrode the participant's soul.
Flow my Tears...shares similar themes to 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' and is steeped in the druggy counter-cultural background of a lot of his books. This book it is well paced and a damn fine yarn to be sure.
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