Review: Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said

Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick

Published: Doubleday (1974), Gollancz (2001)

Awards Won: Campbell Memorial Award

Awards Nominated: Nebula, Hugo, and Locus SF Awards

The Book:

“Jason Tavener woke up one morning to find himself completely unknown. The night before he had been the top-rated television star with millions of devoted watchers. The next day he was just an unidentified walking object, whose face nobody recognised, of whom no one had heard, and without the I.D. papers required in that near future. When he finally found a man who would agree to counterfeiting such cards for him, that man turned out to be a police informer. And then Taverner found out not only what it was like to be a nobody but also to be hunted by the whole apparatus of society.” ~goodreads.com

I’ve read a handful of novels and short fiction by Philip K. Dick, and have enjoyed most of them.  Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said didn’t really work for me.  On a happier note, Amazon Prime’s television adaptation of The Man in the High Castle, one of Dick’s novels that I did really enjoy, is now online!

My Thoughts:

It might be the case that I was really just in the wrong mood for Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said, because I have generally enjoyed Philip K. Dick’s work in the past.  I know a lot of people really enjoyed this novel (look at all the awards!).  In fact, I’m really surprised I bounced off of this one as hard as I did.  For me, the first issue was the writing style.  Philip K. Dick’s prose is often pretty plain and workman-like, but it seemed particularly clunky in this novel.  For instance, he actually used the word ‘friendlily’ multiple times.  I wondered if he was deliberately playing up the artlessness of the prose to get the right tone for Tavener’s life of shallowness and celebrity.  Even if that’s the case, though, I find modern-day celebrity culture tedious, and thus was not really drawn in by this fictional version.

This lack of interest ties into my issues with the characters, who all seem pretty vapid and aimless, and with the plot, which is more or less nonexistent.  Random things happen, but they often don’t seem to have an impact on either past or future.  For instance, shortly after the opening of the story, someone nearly succeeds in murdering the main character.  Afterward, neither the event nor the perpetrator have any further role in the story.  Tavener’s vanished identity is a mystery, but it’s not one he’s going to solve.  Instead, he wanders around, encountering the a variety of women, and the reasoning for his situation is tacked on to the end of the story like an afterthought.  I gather that this is one of those books where the wandering around is really the point, and I know PKD often abruptly ends his novels with wild ideas that are interesting but might not make much sense.  In this case, though, I think I was just not engaged enough with the story or the characters to really appreciate the ideas behind them.

It seems like the world might have been a kind of 1970s nightmare, and in that sense I think it has not aged well.  Some of the things which might have been extrapolations of trends in the 1970s no longer have any resonance with this Millennial reader.  I think this would be a surmountable obstacle, except that the world-building seems to exist only for these atmospheric purposes that it does not achieve for me.  Tavener’s country is a police state, where rebelling university students have been trapped underground and people are regularly sent to labor camps for little or no reason. Everyone is always ready to turn on everyone else, so there’s not much genuine connection between people.  There’s also this weird thing about the main character being a ‘Six’, a person genetically engineered to be better and smarter than baseline humans.  Except he isn’t, at least in any way I can tell.  I’m not sure if this is a jab at the idea of genetic engineering or a failure of voice. Given how many novels Philip K. Dick has published, I suppose it’s not surprising that some of them are just not my thing.

My Rating: 2/5

I normally like Philip K. Dick’s work, but I bounced very hard off of this one. This is the story of a shallow pop star briefly losing his fame and identity, and of his wandering around until it is restored.  All of the characters seemed vapid, shallow and incapable of meaningful human connection, and I was frustrated by the apparent pointlessness of the plot.  I think the reveal at the end could have been an interesting twist if I’d been in the mood for it, but instead it just felt tacked on.  I’ll probably still read more Philip K. Dick in the future, because I am honestly surprised I did not enjoy this one.  

Review: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

Published: G.P. Putnam’s Sons (1962), Gollancz (2009)

Awards Won: Hugo Award

The Book:

“It's America in 1962, but not the America you know.  The United States lost World War II, and the country has been divided and jointly occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan.  In this world, genocide is commonplace and slavery is legal.  In San Francisco, both the Japanese and the downtrodden locals consult the I Ching for guidance.

A handful of people, with limited power to change the reality of the world in which they live, move through the actions of their daily lives.  As their stories intersect or influence one another, they may come closer to seeing through artifice and understanding the truth of their lives and their world.” ~Allie

I’ve read a few of Philip K. Dick’s novels before, but this is the first one I’ve reviewed on this blog. By complete coincidence, I finished The Man in the High Castle directly before the pilot for a series adaptation on Amazon Prime was announced! I watched the pilot, of course (it is available here), but it remains to be seen if it will be greenlighted for a full season.  I’m going to include my impressions of the pilot after the book review. This is a book I chose to read both for Stainless Steel Dropping's Sci-Fi Experience and Little Red Reviewer's Vintage Sci-Fi Month.

My Thoughts:

The Man in the High Castle shows a world where World War II has ended very differently, with Japan and Germany dividing up and occupying a defeated United States.  It was set in modern day for the time of publication, which puts it around half a century into our past. Thus, it has now become an alternate past extrapolated forward from a more distant alternate past. I’m sure plenty of people have discussed the I Ching and the nested/interconnected authentic and inauthentic realities of the story.  Since I’m not familiar with I Ching, and I just spent a lot of time writing about multiple WWII realities in my review of The Separation, I’m not going to go into that discussion here. Instead, I will focus on the parts of the novel that have stuck with me the most—the characters and how they cope with their world.

The story follows a handful of characters that are each leading their ordinary lives. Frank Frink is an artisan hiding a Jewish heritage, and his vanished wife Juliana just wants to live peacefully in the unoccupied Rocky Mountain States as a judo instructor. Robert Childan is a shopowner who sells antiques of American culture to enthusiastic Japanese patrons, and Tagomi, a San Francisco trade missioner, is one of his top customers.  Tagomi begins the story in preparations to meet with Mr. Baynes, supposedly a rich Swedish industrialist who seems to have an ulterior motive. Some of these characters’ stories intersect, or influence one another in indirect ways, but there is never a point where all the stories converge. I was pretty equally interested by each of the storylines, since they each showed a mental perspective from a different level of society.

However, while it was interesting seeing views from people of various levels of power and privilege in a fascist world, the portrayal of the world and the characters necessarily involves a lot of racism. This racism ran from quietly held beliefs, to racial slurs, to acceptance of genocide, and I think it was clearly intended to be shocking. It seemed that the point was to show how people can get used to a world like their (or, well, like ours), and how they can pass their daily lives without examining their prejudices or really thinking about distant atrocities that seem unchangeable.  At the same time, while the characters may have had little power to affect their world on the large scale, their thoughts and actions still have meaning and impact the lives of the people around them.  I really enjoyed seeing how each character’s actions could intentionally and unintentionally affect the lives of the others. The ending of the novel is pretty weird, but I took it in a metaphorical way.  That may not have been the intention, but I think that interpretation makes for a rather satisfying ending.

My Rating: 4/5

The Man in the High Castle is an alternate history story about the daily life of a defeated American people.  The novel follows many loosely connected characters living in a western US occupied by Japan, whose stories influence one another but never merge into a single narrative. I thought each of the storylines was pretty interesting in its own right, and I enjoyed seeing how they intersected with each other. With the I Ching, the alternate history within an alternate history, the portrayals of people in various strata of society and more, I think that this is a book that merits a lot of discussion. I also enjoyed the Amazon Prime pilot, though it differs from the novel in some very significant ways. I hope the rest of the show is produced!

The Man in the High Castle: The Amazon Pilot 

(Some Mild Episode 1 TV Spoilers Ahead)

Overall, I thought the pilot episode of The Man in the High Castle was pretty entertaining.  There were some changes made to the story from the novel that I agree were necessary, and also others that seemed unnecessary.  On the unnecessary side, for instance, I believe Juliana is into aikido instead of judo.  Perhaps Aikido is more stylish these days?  On changes that were necessary for the adaptation, they have managed to connect all of the disparate storylines into two main plot threads, cutting out only one viewpoint character at this point. I think this was probably needed for a one-hour television pilot, or the story might have seemed too disjointed.  Also, I think there is a rule written somewhere that science fiction pilots must have action—something that only shows up later in the novel’s story.  To this end, they have introduced an American Resistance, which provides violence and tension for the early story. I am really interested in seeing what direction they go with this adaptation, so I hope Amazon greenlights its season!