But in Dick's own reflections on those years, it's clear he experienced a protracted mental breakdown or a series of psychological disorders brought on by drug abuse.

It's this phase of Dick's life that, more than any other, cemented his reputation as a modern-day mystic. The cult science fiction author spent the last decade of his life trying to understand a series of visions he experienced under the effects of sodium pentothal after a dental operation, a struggle charted in his biblical Exegesis and in the novels Radio Free Albemuth, Valis and The Divine Invasion. It stems from the period following his revelatory religious experiences in 1974. When an administrative error results in Agent Fred being assigned to monitor Bob Arctor, Arctor/Fred has the strange experience of monitoring his own activities through the holographic scanning equipment that gives the novel its title.Ī Scanner Darkly is late-phase Dick. But Arctor is also Agent Fred, an undercover narcotics officer whose identity is hidden even from his police handlers by a 'scramble suit' that makes him appear as an unmemorable blur. A man who realises one day that he hates his suburban existence, and so trades it in for a life among the hippie drop-outs, drug addicts and street people of Orange County, California. Arctor is a man on the fringes of society.

The darkness of insanity.ĭick dissects modern insanity through the cypher of Bob Arctor. A Scanner Darkly is about a descent into the deep fears of our 24-hour consumer society: the twilight of intellectual and emotional collapse. And in a society that never switches off the lights, the dark has become internal. Even the book's nighttime is saturated with the electric glare of strip mall lighting and the glow of the television screen. Philip K Dick's partially autobiographical chronicle of 70s hippie drug culture takes place under the eternal sunshine of southern California.

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick