Homest4r, did you SEE Spider-man 3??

As to the idea of the ASD characters having their relationships of virtue be inevitably corrupted into relationships of need and utility (Donna/Bob being the primary example), I'm fully onboard with the notion that that devolution of humanity that comes with drug addiction is one of the chief sources of horror to be…

I love how so many SF projections into the future not only anticipate amazing advances in space travel, laser-based weaponry and hair gel, but also expect those advances to happen in the space of…oh, say 20 years. So much post-world War II sci-fi was suckered in by the far off sounding "Year 2000", that I think so…

Can't an author be "of" a specific milieu without having his/her relevance and power chained within it? I mean, Fitzgerald is very clearly of a specific time and place, as is Dickens, and Kerouac, and the vast majority of authors, good, bad and in between. Does this at all dampen their relevancy for contemporary…

I, the miserable Atlas! A world,
An entire world of pain, I must carry.
I bear the Unbearable, and my Heart
Wants only to break within my body!
[Found on Pg. 261. From Heinrich Heine's poem "Der Atlas"]

Do I still live within this cell?
This cursed, damp hole
Where even the light of heaven
Can only break through the walls' cracks!
Encircled by this tower of books
Gnawed by worms, bedecked with dust
From top to bottom.
[Found on pg. 185. From Goethe's "Faust, Part I"]

I resemble that worm which crawls through dust,
Lives in the dust, eats dust
Until a passerby's foot crushes it.
[Orig. german found on Pg. 181. Trans. by PKD.

German Poetry Translations
I've been meaning to post this, but I never had the time to sit down and work this out. Please note that these are the half-assed, vaguely metric translations that I understood myself. I reserve the right for them to be lame. While not at all essential to appreciating the breakdown of…

The conflict between the State and the Users is one of the primary drivers of the book, a conflict I'm willing to extrapolate to being State vs. Individual, even if the "Individuals" in this case are expressing their individuality through the act of slowly dismantling it. But I can't see how the State's methods, tools…

I may be remembering incorrectly, but I don't believe Barris is addicted to Substance D, hence shielding him from suffering the personality-fracture that befalls Arctor.

What is identity, though? We're all asking this question, and obviously, we'll all not come to a conclusive answer. Is it a connected linear thread of experiences and events married to an established system of values, goals, ethics and instincts? What happens when you can no longer maintain that thread? What if your…

It's a little high up on this thread, but MikeStrange, please do not feel in any way "bad" about honestly disliking this book. If it didn't work for you, it didn't work for you, bro. I've been participating in WUiB since the beginning, and there has not been a single book that did not have at least one person reacting…

Wow. I didn't think this book could make me any LESS inclined towards using recreational drugs, but Wayne, your insight just pushed me that much further into the "Just Say No" camp.

Wow! This goes a tremendously long way in helping me better appreciate the book.

Wait a minute, shit, it wasn't Freck. What's the name of the character who has the grand insectoid freakout at the start of the book? My memory's not what it used to be…

"The banal, the grimy and the sordidly suburban" focus of this book was one of its most powerful aspects for me, MS. Its low-bore, stolidly unsexy focus on life as an addict was powerfully effective for me; I don't think PKD ever attempted to depict what it was like to USE drugs in this books, rather he was depicting…

Miller, fittingly enough, I recently saw Stranger than Paradise, which explicitly makes this same observation.

Is it possible that Bob's somnambulic infiltration of New Path at the end of the book was one of those elements rewritten into the book to make it more of a sci-fi novel as Dick's editor requested? It ends the book on a mildly hopeful note after so much disintegration and despair, but I found the tacked-on…

Wasn't the afterword in part aimed at refuting the War on Drugs mentality that even in the late '70s had hardened the Straight World's hearts against the suffering, however self-induced, of drug addicts? One thing A Scanner Darkly is not at all morally ambiguous about is how it condemns the exploitative and eternally…

A fine point, JJ, and an interpretive angle that I find really worthwhile. It would indeed support PKD's depiction of Substance D as an ill-defined, mega-awful drug; it would allow him to incorporate all sorts of facets of the Addict Experience without being strait-jacketed by the chemical properties of any particular…