Excellent dystopias in literature - A Scanner Darkly

Sometimes, my fiction-reading follows a trail of books of the same genre or with somewhat similar motifs. Lately, the shared motif was being dystopias and I’ve read these ones in quick succession:

• A Scanner Darkly, P K Dick
• The Testaments, M Atwood
• The Man in the High Castle, P K Dick
• Brave New World, A Huxley
• Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?, P K Dick

They’re all beyond excellent - This blog pens some thoughts about the first one. Warning: There are spoilers here, so if you want to read the book you know what to do.

I’d never read anything by Dick before and I can’t remember how I ended up starting with this one (it was probably a recommendation from somewhere) but it was brilliant: themes are the surveillance state, substance addiction, personal identity and the subtle tension between truth and fabricated piles of lies. The book is intensely symbolic and multilayered.

The title

The title is inspired by a biblical passage, possibly taken from the King James version of the Bible (a translation commissioned by King James VI/I of Scotland/England & Ireland):

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”</br> – 1 Corinthians 13:12 (King James version)

The passage reflects on the fact that while at the moment we don’t see and understand clearly, we will at some point (in the afterlife?). Here’s the identity theme front and center.

The setting

This wasn’t clear for me immediately but it gradually emerged with reading: we are in a violent authoritarian society, in an unspecified near future, near enough that it would preserve common traits with Dick’s present (the book was written in the ’70s) but far enough that it would exacerbate them into a sinister atmosphere. The main factor is a widespread drug addiction, which the government fights via several branches of law enforcement and (purported) addict rehabilitation programs.

It is also a heavily consumeristic society flattened onto the repetition of the same offerings over and over again, a setting that must have been very much inspired from reality. Two of my favourite quotes:

In Southern California it didn’t make any difference anyhow where you went: there was always the same McDonaldburger place over and over; like a circular strip that turned past you as you pretended to go somewhere.

Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed.

There’s a pervasive sense that nobody knows who others really are: addicts (the “dopes”) lose perception of themselves and others, but non-addicts (the “straights”) are also partially in the dark with respect to identities. A significant element is the special suit that governmental narcotic agents (the “narcs”) wear in order to conceal their identity to everyone (including other narcs) - the suit hides someone’s features by showing a rotation and overlap of random faces: narcs have no identity, they are slaves to the system as much as dopes are slaves to the drugs.

The most popular drug is “Substance D” (never made explicit but likely standing for “death”, though it could also be in combination with “destruction” or “damage”), which has extreme addiction power and ability to destroy: users will gradually lose use of their brains because the connections between hemispheres get severed. People get onto weird obsessions (the book opens with a guy who’s convinced there’s insects all over him and his place and takes a shower after the other). The all vibe is, appropriately to the title, dark.

The protagonist Bob is a narc, but he’s also a user, because he’s undercover and needs to fit in. He thought he was above abuse, but he’s not - he gradually turns into one of the same people he’s supposed to investigate. Bob is tasked with discovering who produces Substance D, as it is known there’s only one root source and the drug is organic.

There’s lots of clever turns of the story, like when Bob, who lives in a house with other dopes, finds himself in the condition to have to investigate himself - the narcs have installed cameras all over the house, they know there is a narc in there but not who’s who, and Bob has to watch the recordings and report, reporting himself. His degradation follows a spiral, and he does realises he’s losing his cognition, medics give him tests which prove it, yet he has to keep going. Who is who becomes even more mixed-up.

Bob’s surname, Arctor, reminisces of “actor”, perhaps a reference to his acting of himself.

Dick was a heavy drug user himself. In the appendix he writes

This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did.

There is no moral in this novel, it is not bourgeois […] it just tells what the consequences were.

If there was any “sin”, it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but […] the punishment was far too great

There’s also a list of names with the “punishment” they received, in which a “Phil” with “permanent pancreatic damage” is himself.

The language

The rhythm is fast and the prose is raw, at traits jargony, the conversations reported are often trippy, which is a testament to Dick’s writing ability: despite the addicts’ nonsense (words and actions), you as a reader never fail to understand what is happening.

There’s lots of science-like talk about the human brain too, which proves research.

Then, there’s some German quotes, which is a constant in Dick. He appreciated philosophy, including German thinkers, and understood the language.

It’d be largely reductive to brand him as “just” a science-fiction writer. There are plenty of cultural allusions and references you can pick up, the more I read reviews and opinion pieces about this book the more I see them myself.

The ending

Bob ends up in a rehab clinic, one of those cruel government-sponsored places for the supposed recuperation of addicts. Except that they get enslaved instead. He’s been “betrayed” by his girlfriend who is in fact a upper-level governmental agent herself. In the very final scene, while there in a working farm, in a rare epiphany now that his brain is completely gone to mush, he finds the source of Substance D (some flowers) and hence realises that the government itself is the producer.

Authoritarian regimes always need control systems, and control systems need to control each other. It is a chain of power where each element only has partial information and acts on a limited sphere. The narcs are actually a cover-up the government uses to pretend to be on the side of citizens and have superior moral status while in fact they, unbeknownst to themselves, are just pawns, serving the purpose of pretend law-enforcement and really doing the dirty job of citizen surveillance. This has Soviet-style elements and points of connection to Orwell’s 1984.

The oligarchs in power perpetuate a rich-gets-richer way of living and for that it is essential to both create the addiction problem and make sure it can never be solved, while at the same time pretending to tackle it. Everyone else is unknowingly playing into the game. This is redolent of Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic.

The derived movie

There is a movie (2006) but IMHO its only worth of note element is the fact that it’s fully rotoscoped. Interesting visuals, but it’s not up to the book at all. It felt to me like it was made into a “story” stripped of all the deeper elements and reduced to a quite shallow rendition. But not everyone agrees.