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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Mediocre Dick - Rated

There are plenty of interesting ideas here, in Dick's usual manner of paranoia, and many of them will be familiar to fans of his, but I feel the author didn't work too hard on this novel and it's not very well written. It reads as though he made it up as he went along. The characters are vague and inconsistent. Plot devices are introduced, but then forgotten. Many of the background elements are never fully developed

If you're Dick fan it's worth reading for the ideas and the occasional funny moment, but I found this one of his lesser works. I recommend A Scanner Darkly and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, but Dick's oeuvre is very hit and miss.

C'mon Dick, you're better than this man! - Rated
This is the 11th book I've read by the generally mind blowingly brilliant Dick. It's been my least favourite so far.

It feels like Dick is coasting for a lot of this and although the end is quite nicely constructed the journey there is far from interesting. I'm not going to plough through the plot but it does contain some standard Dickian tropes i.e. untrustworthy realities, strange drugs, characters that struggle through their dysfunctional tendencies in an authoritarian world (especially female), intense paranoia...

My gripe with this particular novel is the apparent lack of interest that Dick has in developing any of the ideas that he throws out there. The idea of the '6' is just left hanging from start to finish but on reflection is fundamental to a number of characters, the parasite at the start is never mentioned again (even though it at first reads like the primary plot mechanism), the protagonist seems at times so stupid and yet he's supposed to be genetically enhanced etc.

This strikes me as either Dick going through a bad patch with his mental health, it was the start of his whole Gnostic psychosis so it's quite possible, or he was just so desperate to get the book out to make some cash that he didn't spend the time to edit some narrative sense into it.

I love all of the books I've read by him bar this, so it's not going to put me off reading more, but this was nothing special.

If you've not read Dick before I'd go for UBIK or maybe MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE which are just magnificent novels and aim to get to the truly mind expanding VALIS. I'd skip this one though, it's not worth the price of admission and he's explored these ideas more thoroughly in lots of his other novels.

A great piece of writing - Rated
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is a perfect example of Philip K. Dick’s ingenuity that mixes paranoia and suspense into a nice little novel full of twists and surprises.

It tells the story of famous TV show host Jason Taverner who wakes up to find he doesn’t exist. Set against a backdrop of an oppressive government the story revolves around Taverner’s attempts to discover what happened to him and how he came to this. The other major character in the book is police inspector McNulty who is also trying to discover who Taverner is and determine why he doesn’t appear in their computer databases.

At its heart is a mystery thriller where the science part of this SF book is sidelined yet serves to build an impressive backdrop through which Taverner wanders. The back of this edition states that Taverner is a ‘six’ – a genetically engineered human being born bright and beautiful. That isn’t really part of the story but like I said it flavours it nicely.

It won the 1975 John W. Campbell Award, was nominated for the 1975 Hugo Award and nominated for the 1974 Nebula award.

Well worth a look!

Ok, but not his best - Rated
This, on the face of it, is a fairly standard story in the SF / pulp fiction vein. But it is given the usual P. Dick treatment of identity crisis, paranoia and existensialism. This lifts this above the usual of the genre, as does his well written characters (particularly the well drawn women characters). It still was a good read, and kept me entertained on my holiday (the pace of the novel is quite fast).
This is good, but not his best.

Philip K. Dick in good form and impeccable style - Rated
"Flow my tears..." is a book that exhibits Dick's (heretofore PKD) usual thematic obsessions in an expert literary way, having been written during the last decade of his life, in between theological treatises and attempts to explain his personal epiphany. It actually reads like he is showing off that he can write good old SF to his publisher who's asked him to clean up his act before an audience that's not interested in religious revelations. The fourth part of the book, telling what happened to the heroes and institutions involved in the far future, is reminiscent of a B movie ending, and probably reflects the author's overindulgence in the commercial nature of this work.

The book is very reminiscent of Ubik, centered on a man's struggle to make sense of his reality that has suddenly changed (to a very unpleasant one), and it could have been written in one - extended - sitting, PKD driving his points home from page 1. It can certainly be read in one sitting, and its frantic pace will compel most people to do so.

As per usual, the environment only serves as a context for PKD to bring his social commentary home. This shouldn't detract, however, from the fact that the particular world, a heavily policed fascist state where universities and their students (presumably standing for free thought) are offenders by default, is one of his most successful predictions, as we can already see it happening. PKD seems to be aware of it as well, for he describes its functions and mechanisms in unusual detail.

That said, the novel is an exploration of human behaviours and emotions, how they interact and which bring which about. Grief and love being prime examples, and indulged in by a series of unlikely characters, the novel also touches on selfishness and selflesness, sexual promiscuity, cruelty and kindness and the deeper meaning of personal success, without neglecting, of course, the usage of copious amounts of hallucinogenic substances.

The novel features a wide and varied range of perplexing characters and accompanying behaviours, deeply explored and perfectly aligned with their environment. It is one of PKD's most sympathetic works towards his heroes, and clearly paves the way for his later book, "A scanner darkly", his peak of empathic prose, and possilby his best.

"Flow, my tears..." is a powerful treatise on how human behaviour shapes to fit its environment. So strong, in fact, that the author doesn't even bother, for the most part, with the 'details' of the world, hence the rating of 4 stars. This novel is for the serious bookreader (not limited to 'SF fan') who will see past the premises and into the substance of the meanderings of a truly brilliant mind.