Book 5: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

Typically, whenever I finish a novel, the sense of satisfaction is never what I think it should be. Sometimes it happens, but that's rare.

Whenever I read science fiction, there is almost never a complete resolution, and that's fine with me.  That's kind of the point of SF.

It is kind of rare for me to  read something, put it down, and just have to lean back and think about what I just experienced.  There is getting your mind blown, and there's reading the work of a blown mind. I feel like Phillip K. Dick's mind was, for one reason or another, perpetually blown.  His bio supports this hunch.
 
I find myself utterly turned off by fiction which pretends to be more than it is, and even more so when I can tell that the author was trying to wow me with some kind of plot device or new philosophy.
 
If you want to make a statement, make your statement and move on.  Don't cloak it in fiction and sell it as Steinbeck.
 


Ill not be giving away much of the plot of "Flow My Tears," but I do feel like pointing out a few things.

I don't believe in destiny or fate. There is no reason to think that there is any kind of pre-determination in our lives. If we want to look hard, we might be able to find strong coincidence, but destiny suggests an author or agent responsible for our lives besides us.  


I don't know about you, but I've seen nothing which suggests that this is the case.

"We play roles, Buckman thought.  We occupy positions, some small, some large. Some ordinary, some strange. Some outlandish and bizarre. Some visible, some dim or not visible at all."

I don't believe in destiny, but I do think that Dick is right here when he says that we all play roles.  When I think about people like Phillip K. Dick who enjoy celebrity more after they're dead than when they're alive (perhaps "enjoy" is the wrong word), I wonder if they recognized their potential for greatness. 

I wonder if, when they were living a dim, barely visible, ordinary and relatively small life, if they thought they could ever have a large, strange, outlandish and highly visible one. 

People can be born into obscurity, infamy, or anywhere in between. All value judgments aside, it is really not hard for a bright, outlandish person to fade into nothingness.   And, given the way our media feeds on scandal and fear, it won't be hard for an attention-seeking nobody to find a brighter, less-ordinary role to play.
Case in point.


"Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said" was published in  1974 by Doubleday.

What happened in 1973?
Paris Peace Accords --end of the Vietnam War.
Roe V. Wade overturns state ban on abortion.
"The Dark Side of the Moon" is released.
Skylab is launched
The DEA is founded.
Yom Kippur War.
Watergate.
Oil Embargo.

In 1970 we had Kent State.

Years or popular protest, fucked-up government, global instability, resource competition and religious and ideological conflict…. I guess we didn't start the fire after all.

Dick Places the characters of "Flow My Tears" in a dystopian late 80s (as if the 80s weren't dystopian enough… but he couldn't have predicted stonewashed jeans).

Not surprisingly, given the events in the world at the time the novel was written, the police in "Flow My Tears" aren't  your friends.

"I'll kill you with my own gun. Resisting arrest, you degenerate. Or whatever we want to call it. We'll call it what we feel like. Anything."

Some things never change.

One of the reasons people gravitate towards SF is because of its prophetic nature. It is almost always in the future, (except when it is in the past).  Even in novels like PD James "The Children of Men," we see a very near future which is almost, but not quite, indistinguishable from our own.

We're hardwired to want to know what's next. Our lives are a narrative, and that's reflected in our stories (unless you are a certain post-feminist English professor I know, who thinks that only men write in linear narratives, and that is only because Freytag's Triangle resembles the male response to sexual stimulation…... grrr...…)

A few things in "Flow My Tears" I saw, but didn't surprise me:
Mach 1.5 personal transportation.
A police state.
Flying cars.
Personal Autopilot.
Tiny implantable H-bombs about the size of a grain of rice, just in case someone needs to blow you up from remote…



A few things in "Flow My Tears" I didn't expect:
Payphones.
Coins and paper money.
Gasoline.
Incest.
A network of telephone-based orgies.
Stamp Collecting
Paper documents.
LPs

A Few things I expected to see, but didn't:
Caller ID.
Tablet Computers.
Something resembling the internet for public use.
Cellphones.




Now, for your listening pleasure... lute music: