A Scanner Darkly

"This was written in 1972, and they made a movie out of it, a rotoscoped movie, with Winona Ryder and Woody Harrelson and a lot of famous actors…. The movie’s pretty close to the plot of the novel. Phil was married five times. Between one of the wives and another he got lost. His wife left, took the kids, and he was by himself in his big house. He couldn’t handle being alone. He invited in all the people off the street, all the hippies – you know, this is 1969, 1970. They were doing this weird cornucopia of street drugs. He wrote a memorial at the end of the novel, where he memorialised the people who he’d known: this guy here died of pancreatic fever, this guy here lost his mind… a list of these people ruined by drugs in the 1970s. And he says, A Scanner Darkly is science fiction in the sense that it’s in the future, because that’s a convention of my writing, but really it’s a story about now. It’s a story about 1970s drug abuse in Southern California. If you got caught smoking pot at that time, you’d be breaking little rocks out of big rocks, just for smoking marijuana. So, it was a paranoid time, and he captures this paranoia perfectly. But he’s not using marijuana; the drug in A Scanner Darkly is something called ‘substance D’, or substance Death. It’s totally addictive. It’s a pill. All the characters are regular street type people, dealing amongst themselves, buying and selling this thing. This drug has an effect on the characters’ brains and causes the two halves of their brain to not be able to communicate – so they have split brain personality. They just disintegrate before your eyes. The main character is a guy named Bob Arctor. He’s an undercover agent for the police, and he’s spying on himself. He’s spying on his friends, all sitting around smoking dope, and he doesn’t even know it – because he’s also addicted to substance D. And you see how his mind disintegrates over the course of the novel. I won’t go into the end of it, but he gets put into a place for people who can’t handle things mentally – not a mental institution, but a place for care. All he can do is swab the floors with a mop: he can’t think, his brain’s gone. But he manages, unknown to himself, to bring down the people who are behind substance D. Phil called it an anti-drug novel, and it is in a sense, but it’s not just anti-drugs. It’s pretty much anti-capitalist. Drugs is just one example, but we could use homelessness or we could use racism. It illustrates one aspect of American life at the time. Another brilliant novel. Yes! The third Philip K. Dick Festival will be held in Fort Morgan, Colorado, on June 13–16, 2024."