A Scanner Darkly is a BSFA Award winning 1977 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. The semi-autobiographical story is set in a dystopian Orange County, California in the then-future of June 1994. It includes an extensive portrayal of drug culture and drug use.
The protagonist is Bob Arctor, member of a household of drug-users, who is also living a parallel life as Agent Fred, an undercover police agent assigned to spy on Arctor's household. A...
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A Scanner Darkly is a BSFA Award winning 1977 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. The semi-autobiographical story is set in a dystopian Orange County, California in the then-future of June 1994. It includes an extensive portrayal of drug culture and drug use.
The protagonist is Bob Arctor, member of a household of drug-users, who is also living a parallel life as Agent Fred, an undercover police agent assigned to spy on Arctor's household. Arctor/Fred shields his true identity from those in the drug subculture, and from the police themselves. (The requirement that narcotics agents remain anonymous, to avoid collusion and other forms of corruption, becomes a critical plot point late in the book.) While supposedly only posing as a drug user, Arctor becomes addicted to "Substance D" (also referred to as "Slow Death," "Death," or "D"), a powerful psychoactive drug derived from a small blue flowering plant, Mors ontologica. An ongoing conflict is Arctor's love for Donna, a drug dealer...
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