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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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.

Picking Apart Reality - Rated
In a time and place where the pols (US Police) and nats (national guard) carry out random ID checks to catch escaped students and send them to forced labour camps, what would happen if you woke up one day with no identity? Jason Taverner, host of a hit TV show with thirty thousand weekly viewers, find's himself in exactly this position. Not only have his ID cards disappeared, but his whole identity. One day a worldwide celebrity, the next a nobody, someone who no one has ever heard of before.

What makes Flow, My Tears, The Policeman Said such an excellent novel is that Dick spends more time concentrating on building solid plots and involved believable characters instead of bombarding the reader with far-fetched imaginations as many sci-fi authors can do. Through the novel you get to know interesting and unique characters, learn new fears and desires, and become totally immersed in a post-totalitarian future.

All in all a brilliant novel in Dick's own inimitable style, bleak, dystopian, and involved, a great read whether you are a fan of sci-fi or not

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!