Category: Books

B

ooks about an individual being pestered by an authoritarian government are often difficult to read because of their hopeless nature, and a sense that it’s preaching to the choir (me, the reader). There’s also sometimes the problem wherein the author doesn’t make the government antagonistic enough, allowing paths for the hero to rebel that don’t exist in the real world. But Philip K. Dick’s “Radio Free Albemuth” (1985) avoids those traps because it has so many layers. And of course, it’s a PKD book, so it’s easy and fun to read, although in this case he tries out some uncharacteristic approaches.

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M

y sharpest memory from my first read of “A Scanner Darkly” (1977) was the very Philip K. Dickian scenario of a police detective investigating himself, but not realizing he’s investigating himself. Broadly, it’s a delicious jab at the absurdities that can result when a government agency goes beyond investigating crimes and starts getting into long-term stings where it artificially creates the surrounding reality in order to nab an individual under the law. And indeed, if one wants to read “A Scanner Darkly” as a critique of the War on Drugs, it can play that way.

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