Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Third DAW paperback, 1981
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) is a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick set in a totalitarian near-future America, in which a famous television celebrity wakes to find his identity has been completely erased from all records. This is the fifth printing of the third DAW Books paperback edition.
Softcover. Third DAW Books Edition, Fifth Printing. DAW Books No. 438 ($2.25). "First Printing" is stated on the copyright but number line indicates this is a 5th printing. Cover art by Oliviero Berni. New York: DAW Books, 1981. John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner (1975). Nebula Award nominee (1974). Hugo Award nominee (1975). Levack 16m. Wintz & Hyde SF10.4. ISBN: 0879976241. #10934.
Sharp, nearly fine copy.
Softcover. Third DAW Books Edition, Fifth Printing. DAW Books No. 438 ($2.25). "First Printing" is stated on the copyright but number line indicates this is a 5th printing. Cover art by Oliviero Berni. New York: DAW Books, 1981. John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner (1975). Nebula Award nominee (1974). Hugo Award nominee (1975). Levack 16m. Wintz & Hyde SF10.4. ISBN: 0879976241. #10934.
Sharp, nearly fine copy.
Additional Details
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) is set in a near-future United States that has passed through a Second Civil War and emerged as a totalitarian police state. The police and national guard, known as polheads and nats, maintain order, and everyone else is expected to carry identity documents at all times. Universities have been walled off and their students kept permanently on campus, underground, sealed away from society to protect them. Labor camps absorb those who fall outside the identification system. The bureaucratic infrastructure of surveillance is total and mundane, and presented as the ordinary flow of daily life.
Jason Taverner is a television celebrity of the first order, a singer and variety host watched by thirty million people each week. He is also a "six," one of a cohort of genetically engineered humans produced by a secret wartime program forty-five years earlier, designed for superior intelligence, beauty, and charisma. Sixes do not age as ordinaries do, and Taverner carries his celebrity with the easy confidence of someone who has never had to think about what he would be without it.
Taverner wakes up one morning in a cheap motel room with no identification and no memory of how he got there. More disturbing, no one recognizes him. The records of his existence, the identity documents, the television contracts, the millions who watched him last Tuesday, have all vanished. In a police state where identity documents are the difference between freedom and a labor camp, Jason Taverner does not exist.
The investigation into what happened to him runs parallel to the story of Police General Felix Buckman, who is drawn into Taverner's case through his sister Alys, a deeply unstable woman with access to experimental drugs and a complete disregard for consequences. The connection between Taverner's erased identity and whatever Alys has been doing is the novel's central mystery, and its resolution will ultimately reframe everything that comes before.
The title comes from John Dowland's lute song "Flow My Tears," published in his Second Lute Book in 1600 and described in the novel as the first piece of abstract music ever written. The song appears near the end of the novel, played by Buckman as he drives home through the night after the story's most devastating plot twist. It is one of the more quietly dark moments in Dick's work.
Flow My Tears won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1975 and was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. First published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1974.
Jason Taverner is a television celebrity of the first order, a singer and variety host watched by thirty million people each week. He is also a "six," one of a cohort of genetically engineered humans produced by a secret wartime program forty-five years earlier, designed for superior intelligence, beauty, and charisma. Sixes do not age as ordinaries do, and Taverner carries his celebrity with the easy confidence of someone who has never had to think about what he would be without it.
Taverner wakes up one morning in a cheap motel room with no identification and no memory of how he got there. More disturbing, no one recognizes him. The records of his existence, the identity documents, the television contracts, the millions who watched him last Tuesday, have all vanished. In a police state where identity documents are the difference between freedom and a labor camp, Jason Taverner does not exist.
The investigation into what happened to him runs parallel to the story of Police General Felix Buckman, who is drawn into Taverner's case through his sister Alys, a deeply unstable woman with access to experimental drugs and a complete disregard for consequences. The connection between Taverner's erased identity and whatever Alys has been doing is the novel's central mystery, and its resolution will ultimately reframe everything that comes before.
The title comes from John Dowland's lute song "Flow My Tears," published in his Second Lute Book in 1600 and described in the novel as the first piece of abstract music ever written. The song appears near the end of the novel, played by Buckman as he drives home through the night after the story's most devastating plot twist. It is one of the more quietly dark moments in Dick's work.
Flow My Tears won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1975 and was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. First published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1974.
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