Mon, Oct 12 · 8:00 PM EEST
Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly, published in 1977, is one of his most personal and unsettling novels. Set in a near-future America devastated by a powerful drug known as Substance D, it explores addiction, surveillance, paranoia, identity and the frightening possibility that the self can be divided against itself. At the centre is Bob Arctor, an undercover narcotics agent who is assigned to spy on a group of drug users- including himself. His use of a 'scramble suit', which constantly changes his appearence becomes a powerful metaphor for the unstable nature of identity.
Dick was one of the great visionary writers of the twentieth-century science fiction. Born in Chicago in 1928, he experienced fanancial difficulties, complicated relationships, drug use and profound personal and spiritual experiences, all of which fed into his fiction. His novels Do androids dream of sheep? and Ubik explore unstable perceptions, but beneath the stange settings, he's always asking deeply human questions. What makes us human? And how do we know what's real when we can't even trust our minds?
Amongst his books, A Scanner Darkly is particularly significant because of its semi-autobiographical dimension. Dick drew heavily on his experience with drug culture and on the friends he had known who struggled with addiction. The book is therefore not simply a sci-fi story about a dystopian future; it is also a deeply personal meditation on people he had loved, lost and watched deteriorate.
Dick's extraordinary ability to make reality itself feel uncertain is central to the novel; we are never completely sure what is real, who can be trusted, or where one identity ends and another begins.
Join our Modern book and Cinema club to discuss Dick's fractured, paranoid prose and intensely personal vision together with Linklater's equally unconventional cinematic experience.
