{"id":677,"date":"2010-04-23T21:25:19","date_gmt":"2010-04-24T05:25:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=677"},"modified":"2010-04-23T21:25:19","modified_gmt":"2010-04-24T05:25:19","slug":"review-a-scanner-darkly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=677","title":{"rendered":"Review: A Scanner Darkly"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>A Scanner Darkly<\/em> is another tour de force from Philip K. Dick.\u00a0 I enjoyed <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=664\">The Man in the High Castle<\/a> <\/em>so much that I picked up <em>Scanner<\/em> when I saw it a couple weeks later.<\/p>\n<p><em>Scanner<\/em> seems to capture a lot of what people love and hate about Dick.\u00a0 It&#8217;s nominally a science fiction story about a powerful drug in a near future setting, but it&#8217;s also a novel about people and how they behave on drugs in contemporary society.\u00a0 (Actually in 1970&#8217;s society &#8211; some of the slang is pretty humorously dated.)\u00a0 There&#8217;s a focus on how people interact, but no character is an individual standout.\u00a0 The plot, as a plot, is very by-the-numbers, but lots of interesting ideas and prose styling is hung off it.<\/p>\n<p>Now, for me that all adds up to a closely observed novel about a marginal subculture that becomes more powerful when universal ideas about identity and paranoia are juxtaposed through unique writing.\u00a0 For some people it adds up to a couple hundred pages of dialogue that goes nowhere as a set of forgettable characters discuss getting stoned and forget who they are, obscured by confusing text and random interruptions.<\/p>\n<p>I stand by my position.\u00a0 I think the novel is both enjoyable to read and interesting to think about and analyze.\u00a0 So much of what I find worthwhile about it is how well the chances Dick takes in his writing and subjects pays off that I can see how a reasonable person could dislike it.\u00a0 More than many things I like, I think assessments will vary widely.<\/p>\n<p>I think it&#8217;s a great novel.\u00a0 Variance may be high.<\/p>\n<p>Strongly Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Scanner Darkly is another tour de force from Philip K. Dick.\u00a0 I enjoyed The Man in the High Castle so much that I picked up Scanner when I saw it a couple weeks later. Scanner seems to capture a lot of what people love and hate about Dick.\u00a0 It&#8217;s nominally a science fiction story [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=677"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":683,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/677\/revisions\/683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}