A Scanner Darkly - A Graphic Novel
Graphic adaptation film tie-in, 2006
A Scanner Darkly (1977) is Philip K. Dick's semi-autobiographical novel set in a near-future Orange County, California, where narcotics agent Bob Arctor, deep in Substance D addiction, finds himself assigned to surveil his own household. Winner of the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel in 1978. This graphic adaptation, published by Pantheon in 2006 as a tie-in with Richard Linklater's film, translates the novel's visual concept into comics form. The film's central technique, interpolated rotoscoping, in which animators drew over live-action footage to create a shifting, unstable image, was already an inherently graphic idea, making the transition to the page a natural one. The adaptation is credited to Dick, with the graphic treatment derived from the film's aesthetic.
Hardcover. First Edition thus, First Printing. Oblong octavo bound in pictorial boards. Issued without a dust jacket. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006. British Science Fiction Award winner (1978). ISBN: 0375424024. #11096.
Fine.
Hardcover. First Edition thus, First Printing. Oblong octavo bound in pictorial boards. Issued without a dust jacket. New York: Pantheon Books, 2006. British Science Fiction Award winner (1978). ISBN: 0375424024. #11096.
Fine.
Additional Details
A Scanner Darkly occupies a singular position in Philip K. Dick's bibliography and in the broader history of dystopian fiction: it is the novel in which his recurring preoccupations with false identity, surveillance, and eroded reality converge with something rawer and more personal than almost anything else he wrote. Dick was explicit about this. The Author's Note, placed at the novel's end, dedicates the book to friends and acquaintances consumed by drug use during the 1970s, each name followed by a clinical notation of what happened to them. Several are marked "deceased." Others: "permanent psychosis," "permanent brain damage," "permanent vascular damage." Dick includes himself on the list, noting that he, too, was one of "those people," one of the "children playing in the street."
The novel is set in June 1994, in a near-future Southern California that Dick renders as a landscape of strip malls, fast-food chains, and a relentless commercial sprawl he calls "neon ooze." The society is bifurcated: affluent shopping complexes protected by walls and security personnel who turn away anyone without a credit card, and the surrounding margins where the addicted, the burned-out, and the discarded circulate through cheap tract housing vacated long ago by the "straights." It is in one of these houses that Bob Arctor lives with a rotating cast of Substance D users, including the paranoid Jerry Fabin, who spends his days trying to wash invisible aphids off himself and his dog.
Arctor is simultaneously a user and a narcotics officer. In his law enforcement role he operates as "Fred," wearing a scramble suit, an invention Dick describes in considerable technical detail: a membrane stretched over a miniaturized computer projecting up to a million and a half randomized physiognomic characteristics per hour, making the wearer a kind of composite of every possible face, unidentifiable by any means. The scramble suit is Dick's most economical symbol for the novel's central problem: the dissolution of a stable self. When Arctor/Fred is assigned to surveil his own household, the chain of command requires that Fred watch Bob Arctor, neither identity aware of the other's full situation. The left hand, quite literally, does not know what the right is doing, and Dick roots this in more than metaphor: Substance D's specific mechanism of damage, he explains, is a severance of communication between the brain's two hemispheres, drawn from actual neurological research he cites in the novel's epigraphs.
The Southern California of the novel is not an overtly totalitarian state, but surveillance is everywhere: holo-scanners record the movements of users, undercover operatives infiltrate households, and the drug rehabilitation organization New-Path operates as something more ambiguous than a simple recovery program. Dick modeled New-Path on real institutions he encountered, including Synanon and X-Kalay, a Canadian Synanon-type program he actually participated in. By the novel's end it is suggested that New-Path is not merely treating addiction but cultivating it, that the organization may itself be a source of Substance D, using its rehabilitation network as infrastructure. Arctor, by then so neurologically damaged as to be incapable of understanding his own situation, ends the novel on a New-Path farm in the Napa Valley, reduced to echolalia, tending fields where the plant from which Substance D is derived is secretly grown.
Dick is careful throughout not to romanticize any of this. The Author's Note addresses this directly: "There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were." He invokes Greek tragedy and its concept of Nemesis, a consequence without a moral verdict, arising from causal law rather than divine punishment. He also acknowledges, self-implicatingly, that he was part of the world he is describing. Unlike most dystopian fiction, in which the author observes from a safe distance, Dick here is inside it, compromised by it, mourning it.
The novel won the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel in 1978 and has grown in critical reputation considerably since, now considered among Dick's finest and most fully realized works alongside The Man in the High Castle and Ubik. Richard Linklater's 2006 film adaptation, with Keanu Reeves as Arctor and Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, and Winona Ryder in supporting roles, used interpolated rotoscoping, drawing over live-action footage to create an animated effect that many critics found apt for the novel's themes of blurred identity and perceived reality. The film is among the more faithful adaptations of Dick's work.
The novel is set in June 1994, in a near-future Southern California that Dick renders as a landscape of strip malls, fast-food chains, and a relentless commercial sprawl he calls "neon ooze." The society is bifurcated: affluent shopping complexes protected by walls and security personnel who turn away anyone without a credit card, and the surrounding margins where the addicted, the burned-out, and the discarded circulate through cheap tract housing vacated long ago by the "straights." It is in one of these houses that Bob Arctor lives with a rotating cast of Substance D users, including the paranoid Jerry Fabin, who spends his days trying to wash invisible aphids off himself and his dog.
Arctor is simultaneously a user and a narcotics officer. In his law enforcement role he operates as "Fred," wearing a scramble suit, an invention Dick describes in considerable technical detail: a membrane stretched over a miniaturized computer projecting up to a million and a half randomized physiognomic characteristics per hour, making the wearer a kind of composite of every possible face, unidentifiable by any means. The scramble suit is Dick's most economical symbol for the novel's central problem: the dissolution of a stable self. When Arctor/Fred is assigned to surveil his own household, the chain of command requires that Fred watch Bob Arctor, neither identity aware of the other's full situation. The left hand, quite literally, does not know what the right is doing, and Dick roots this in more than metaphor: Substance D's specific mechanism of damage, he explains, is a severance of communication between the brain's two hemispheres, drawn from actual neurological research he cites in the novel's epigraphs.
The Southern California of the novel is not an overtly totalitarian state, but surveillance is everywhere: holo-scanners record the movements of users, undercover operatives infiltrate households, and the drug rehabilitation organization New-Path operates as something more ambiguous than a simple recovery program. Dick modeled New-Path on real institutions he encountered, including Synanon and X-Kalay, a Canadian Synanon-type program he actually participated in. By the novel's end it is suggested that New-Path is not merely treating addiction but cultivating it, that the organization may itself be a source of Substance D, using its rehabilitation network as infrastructure. Arctor, by then so neurologically damaged as to be incapable of understanding his own situation, ends the novel on a New-Path farm in the Napa Valley, reduced to echolalia, tending fields where the plant from which Substance D is derived is secretly grown.
Dick is careful throughout not to romanticize any of this. The Author's Note addresses this directly: "There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled; it just tells what the consequences were." He invokes Greek tragedy and its concept of Nemesis, a consequence without a moral verdict, arising from causal law rather than divine punishment. He also acknowledges, self-implicatingly, that he was part of the world he is describing. Unlike most dystopian fiction, in which the author observes from a safe distance, Dick here is inside it, compromised by it, mourning it.
The novel won the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel in 1978 and has grown in critical reputation considerably since, now considered among Dick's finest and most fully realized works alongside The Man in the High Castle and Ubik. Richard Linklater's 2006 film adaptation, with Keanu Reeves as Arctor and Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, and Winona Ryder in supporting roles, used interpolated rotoscoping, drawing over live-action footage to create an animated effect that many critics found apt for the novel's themes of blurred identity and perceived reality. The film is among the more faithful adaptations of Dick's work.
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