Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

Philip K Dick notoriously charted SF's most dangerous, booby-trapped realities. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974) is a relatively straightforward tale of paranoid unease at finding the world isn't what it should be.

Jason Taverner is world-famous for his songs and regular TV show. "Thirty million people saw you zip up your fly tonight." "... It's my trademark." Although this future US is a grim police state with labour camps in Alaska and Canada, jetsetting Taverner enjoys being one of the winners.

Then he wakes up in a sleazy hotel room, still well-dressed and flush with money, but no longer the famous Jason Taverner. No ID--that's a forced-labour offence. His agent doesn't know him. Nor do his closest friends. He's even vanished from police databanks.

Forged documents are needed, hand-drawn by teenaged expert Kathy--one of Dick's most alarming women, a neurotic petty criminal who's also a police informer, who entraps and manipulates Taverner until he's terrified of her. He may deserve it: this self-obsessed megastar inflicts small, unthinking cruelties on virtually every woman he meets.

The title's policeman is another interesting character: Police General Felix Buckman, a mostly good man (and fan of Elizabethan songs: "Flow, my teares...") trapped in a horrible system. Is Taverner, the man with no past, a threat? Less so, maybe, than Buckman's amoral sister Alys, who takes special interest in Taverner and seems to have the world's only copies of his music albums...

Paranoid wrongness is expertly conveyed, and resolved with a typically offbeat SF notion. A sunny finale concludes one of Dick's most approachable novels.--David Langford

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Where Philip K. Dick meets David Lynch - Rated
This book is like a Lynch movie; think it of it as a sci-fi Mulholland drive but with much better plot. For once more, with his usual exquisite writing style, Dick swirls the conception of his character's reality mixing identities, time and space.

Wonderfully satirical and scathing of the arrogant and shallow Hollywood lifestyle this novel contains all the features that made Dick a distinctive figure in science fiction literature. Drugs, hallucinations, identity fusion, corrupted authority, rotten bureaucracies and competing irreal universes create a noir narration which, if had to be adapted to a film, only the complicated, mad genius of David Lynch could ever satisfyingly handle!

Although not as celebrated as his other novels, definitely one of Dick's best.

A damn good read - Rated
This may not be one of Dick's best novels but it certainly isn't a dud. It's set in the future of course, a typical Dickian dystopic police state where Jason Taverner, a rich successful television star in the Tony Bennett mode wakes up to find himself in a downtown flop house having lost his identity. The world doesn't know who he is and as a nobody is fair game to be picked up and sent to a labour camp by the ever present police. All students are hunted and sent to labour camps, a sign of the times of when the book was written, the early 70's.
As usual with PKD he predicts a future which is pretty close to where we are at now. In Flow my Tears... he nails the modern day phenomenon of Internet porn and social networking sites in his description of mass electronic orgies that gradually corrode the participant's soul.
Flow my Tears...shares similar themes to 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' and is steeped in the druggy counter-cultural background of a lot of his books. This book it is well paced and a damn fine yarn to be sure.

A relatively straight-forward Dick tale - Rated
Jason Tavernor cares little for the society he lives in. Although life for most people is tough, he's rich and famous and life's a bowl of cherries. One day all that changes. He loses his identity card and suddenly nothing is quite the same again...

This is another of Dick's easily readable books that he seemed to knock out with barely a strain. It's short, it contains plenty of detail about a harsh and destructive government controlled world, yet it is never depressing or down-beat.

This just tells a simple story of a man who has everything and who one day wakes up to find he has nothing, but then gradually finds his true self through adversity. Within the simplistic scenario there is a richness that few other sf authors could manage with numerous great throwaway ideas. Most of Dick's obsessions are downplayed to concentrate on a classic paranoid situation, and although it is not as popular or as acclaimed as some of Dick's works, I reckon this is a good light-weight starting point for anyone who is unfamiliar with the author's work.

Not one that I would recommend. - Rated
...annoyingly this his book seems to finish before it even gets going. The idea of turning the story away from the main protagonist at the end does not work and the odd plot device used to explain what starts off as an interesting idea is deeply unsatisfactory. Also wouldn't a 6 find it suprising that someone claiming to be a 7 is in fact older than them? But i wont worry about any mistakes in this book... its just too forgettable...

No one has an imagination like Philip K Dick - Rated
This is a totally weird and wonderful book, like a lot of Dick's books and material its focus is his sort of schizoid imagination and perspective on reality.

It's difficult to review this book without running the risk of spoiling the book for anyone reading it for the first time. It features a main character in crisis, possibly an identity crisis but this becomes clearer as the plot proceeds to its conclusion, a drug of the most amazing and incredible, impossible character and lots of details about a distant future which perhaps to any other author would have formered the basis a complete story but for Dick are nothing more than window dressing to the main tale. For instance a purpose bred "celebrity class" and an ethnicity driven to extinction by favourable treatment and protected status!!

This book holds together very well and progesses to a very sure conclusion, it satisfies in a way that a lot of similar or weird fiction aiming at the same effects fails to and I didnt feel it had the anti-climatic feel of some of Dick's books (Time Out Of Joint, The Cosmic Puppets). I recommend this book to all readers and particularly to anyone who is new to Philip K. Dick's unique talent.