For
whatever reason I've decided to take another stab at Philip K. Dick
and his highly influential science-fiction literature. Flow
My Tears, the Policeman Said is
another one of Dick's full-length novels, fairly short in length, but
because of his writing style you don't feel like a single page was
wasted and this book probably could have been developed much further
into a longer work. It's very interesting and there are a couple of
very insightful passages into human nature within this book,
specifically dealing with love and grief, but everything gets tossed
into a large jumble with a ton of drugs going on as well. Hoo boy did
Philip K. Dick like his drugs.
As I
said in my reviews of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
and Minority Report,
it seems that Dick is much better at writing short stories rather
than full-length novels. When he's working on a short story there's
an arbitrary stopping point that forces Dick to be extremely tight in
his focus and stay on whatever his main topic is about. In
full-length novels, by contrast, Dick has much more space to work
with and so sometimes dozens of ideas just sort of pop up, announce
themselves, then scurry into the background with you saying, “Wait!
You were interesting! I want to see you developed!”
The
main plot in Flow My Tears
is that television personality and famous singer Jason Taverner wakes
up one day to discover he is in a world where no one knows he exists.
No one he talks to has seen his weekly TV variety show, or heard one
of his albums. To further complicate things there's no record that
Jason Taverner exists at all: no birth certificate, no driver's
license, no documented proof anywhere that he exists. In a world
firmly under the heel of a police state where no identification means
instant incarceration in a forced labor camp, Jason Taverner is in a
very, very bad position.
Alone, this plot is
pretty fantastic and could easily make its own novel, or in the case
of Dick he could make a really fantastic short story out of this
premise. Unfortunately, as I said, because this is a full-length
novel, Dick's able to wander off and introduce a bunch of ideas that
never really go anywhere. For example, Taverner is a six, one of a
handful of people the result of genetic experimentation that produced
human beings superior in almost every respect. Despite this being an
aspect of Taverner's character which is mentioned repeatedly, it
plays a very small role on the story overall.
Another really
interesting idea is that to help solve the race problem a ton of
legislation has been passed, more or less protecting blacks as a sort
of endangered species. However, legislation has also been passed
which requires blacks to be sterilized after the birth of their first
child, dooming them to eventual extinction. Writing as he was in the
seventies, a period of great racial tension, this idea could have
been a very interesting reflection on the racial ideology of the day.
However, it's just sort of mentioned and then the story moves on.
A final idea that
Dick talks about, and believe me there are plenty, is the fact that
in this particular world, many of the university campuses in at least
the United States have been walled off from the rest of the world,
surrounded by the police and the national guard who are heavily armed
and informed to shoot anyone who tries to escape. We're never told
why the campuses have been placed into a state of siege, what
horrible political protest (for that's what I'm assuming happened)
allowed the situation to balloon to such proportions. In the novel's
epilogue we're told that the universities eventually surrender and
the students disappear into the forced labor camps, but we never
encounter any students or go to any university campus so it's an
interesting idea that ultimately goes nowhere.
I definitely think
that in the future I'm probably going to stick more to Dick's short
stories rather than his novels. It seems to me that his short stories
work out much better because they're not able to just go all over the
place. I probably will explore some of his novels again, but they're
definitely very different fare from most reading.
- Kalpar
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