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Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (S.F. Masterworks) by: Philip K. Dick

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Rating: - Not one that I would recommend.

...annoyingly this his book seems to finish before it even gets going. The idea of turning the story away from the main protagonist at the end does not work and the odd plot device used to explain what starts off as an interesting idea is deeply unsatisfactory. Also wouldn't a 6 find it suprising that someone claiming to be a 7 is in fact older than them? But i wont worry about any mistakes in this book... its just too forgettable...

Rating: - No one has an imagination like Philip K Dick

This is a totally weird and wonderful book, like a lot of Dick's books and material its focus is his sort of schizoid imagination and perspective on reality.

It's difficult to review this book without running the risk of spoiling the book for anyone reading it for the first time. It features a main character in crisis, possibly an identity crisis but this becomes clearer as the plot proceeds to its conclusion, a drug of the most amazing and incredible, impossible character and lots of details about a distant future which perhaps to any other author would have formered the basis a complete story but for Dick are nothing more than window dressing to the main tale. For instance a purpose bred "celebrity class" and an ethnicity driven to extinction by favourable treatment and protected status!!

This book holds together very well and progesses to a very sure conclusion, it satisfies in a way that a lot of similar or weird fiction aiming at the same effects fails to and I didnt feel it had the anti-climatic feel of some of Dick's books (Time Out Of Joint, The Cosmic Puppets). I recommend this book to all readers and particularly to anyone who is new to Philip K. Dick's unique talent.

Rating: - Picking Apart Reality

In a time and place where the pols (US Police) and nats (national guard) carry out random ID checks to catch escaped students and send them to forced labour camps, what would happen if you woke up one day with no identity? Jason Taverner, host of a hit TV show with thirty thousand weekly viewers, find's himself in exactly this position. Not only have his ID cards disappeared, but his whole identity. One day a worldwide celebrity, the next a nobody, someone who no one has ever heard of before.

What makes Flow, My Tears, The Policeman Said such an excellent novel is that Dick spends more time concentrating on building solid plots and involved believable characters instead of bombarding the reader with far-fetched imaginations as many sci-fi authors can do. Through the novel you get to know interesting and unique characters, learn new fears and desires, and become totally immersed in a post-totalitarian future.

All in all a brilliant novel in Dick's own inimitable style, bleak, dystopian, and involved, a great read whether you are a fan of sci-fi or not

Rating: - Mediocre Dick

There are plenty of interesting ideas here, in Dick's usual manner of paranoia, and many of them will be familiar to fans of his, but I feel the author didn't work too hard on this novel and it's not very well written. It reads as though he made it up as he went along. The characters are vague and inconsistent. Plot devices are introduced, but then forgotten. Many of the background elements are never fully developed

If you're Dick fan it's worth reading for the ideas and the occasional funny moment, but I found this one of his lesser works. I recommend A Scanner Darkly and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, but Dick's oeuvre is very hit and miss.

Rating: - C'mon Dick, you're better than this man!

This is the 11th book I've read by the generally mind blowingly brilliant Dick. It's been my least favourite so far.

It feels like Dick is coasting for a lot of this and although the end is quite nicely constructed the journey there is far from interesting. I'm not going to plough through the plot but it does contain some standard Dickian tropes i.e. untrustworthy realities, strange drugs, characters that struggle through their dysfunctional tendencies in an authoritarian world (especially female), intense paranoia...

My gripe with this particular novel is the apparent lack of interest that Dick has in developing any of the ideas that he throws out there. The idea of the '6' is just left hanging from start to finish but on reflection is fundamental to a number of characters, the parasite at the start is never mentioned again (even though it at first reads like the primary plot mechanism), the protagonist seems at times so stupid and yet he's supposed to be genetically enhanced etc.

This strikes me as either Dick going through a bad patch with his mental health, it was the start of his whole Gnostic psychosis so it's quite possible, or he was just so desperate to get the book out to make some cash that he didn't spend the time to edit some narrative sense into it.

I love all of the books I've read by him bar this, so it's not going to put me off reading more, but this was nothing special.

If you've not read Dick before I'd go for UBIK or maybe MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE which are just magnificent novels and aim to get to the truly mind expanding VALIS. I'd skip this one though, it's not worth the price of admission and he's explored these ideas more thoroughly in lots of his other novels.

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