I went back to Philip K. Dick’s Flow My
Tears, the Policeman Said. An engaging sci fantasy yarn about a future
American police state. The protagonist, TV celebrity and alpha “Six”, Jason
Taverner, is hurled out of his privileged life by a familiar plot ruse that
works: he has a close brush with death and finds himself in a different
reality.
The device is used beautifully in The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You and
in the BBC Wales series Life on Mars. In
Kin, the protagonist wakes up in
another world where he regains his humanity and sense of life’s purpose before
being sent back to the reality he came from, where he has bills to pay.
In Life on Mars, a cop is thrown back to 1973 while his body lies in a coma after a
near-fatal accident. He has an identity here, close to the one he has in the
present. He is again a police inspector, with transfer papers that say he was
reassigned from “Hyde”. In 1973 he was (and is) four years old, and catches a
glimpse of his child self. He gets engaged in cleaning up a corrupt police
department and introducing methods for collecting and handling evidence that no
one has heard about. From time to time – through a voice on TV or a phone call
no one else can hear - he learns about his situation in the present. Will he
die in 1973 as well as the present if they turn off the respirator?
In Flow My Tears the close call is delivered by an otherwise unexplained monster from a B horror, a “cluster sponge” with fifty feeding tubes flung at him by a psychotic girlfriend. He kills the thing with whisky, but some of the feeding tubes stay in. When he comes round, he’s not in hospital but in a cheap hotel in a bad part of L.A., minus all the I.D. that makes life possible in this reality. The people he knows – agent, lawyer, official mistress – are all in this reality but they don’t know him and when he manages tocheck, there is no record of his birth…
The scifi elements are charmingly creaky, like old space cowboy flicks without special effects. No cell phones or internet here. When Taverner wants to phone, he drops gold dollar coins in a public phone booth. (Where do you find public phone booths these days?)
Great relief reading this after Dick’s Valis. Reading that requires a sojourn in a mind that is imploding. You can watch the tenements fall over and into each other.
1 comment:
This is a fantastic one by the one and only PKD! Yes, a bit less reality bending than his gnostic and metempsychotic Valis trilogy (essential reading IMO). My wife and I loved The Life on Mars series. And while we don't have many phone booths, let alone those that take gold dollar coins, his other predictions through out his work have proved scarily prescient as the global panopticon continues to surveil. The best practice for the transition to a different life remains dreaming.
Robert, you might like the Charles Stross series The Merchant Princes, which has a lot of reality hopping and is a fun mutiversal adventure romp. The last three books feature a lot of stuff about how the East Germans evaded the ever present watchful eye of the Stasi. For that matter, the punk rock history book Burning Down the Haus by Tim Mohr gives a very good history of the subculture on the far side of the wall before it came down. Latter day punks would do well to read it and remember.
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