Flow My Tears, The man Said (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

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Review ------ Philip K Dick notoriously charted SF's most dangerous, booby-trapped realities. Flow My Tears, The man Said (1974) is a relatively straightforward tale of paranoid unease at finding the world isn't what it should be. Jason Taverner is world-famous for his songs and regular TV show. "Thirty million people saw you zip up your fly tonight." "... It's my trademark." Although this future US is a grim state with labour camps in Alaska and Canada, jetsetting Taverner enjoys being one of the winners. Then he wakes up in a sleazy hotel room, still well-dressed and flush with money, but no longer the famous Jason Taverner. No ID--that's a forced-labour offence. His agent doesn't know him. Nor do his closest friends. He's even vanished from databanks. Forged documents are needed, hand-drawn by teenaged expert Kathy--one of Dick's most alarming women, a neurotic petty criminal who's also a informer, who entraps and manipulates Taverner until he's terrified of her. He may deserve it: this self-obsessed metar inflicts small, unthinking cruelties on virtually every woman he meets. The title's man is another interesting character: General Felix Buckman, a mostly good man (and fan of Elizabethan songs: "Flow, my teares...") trapped in a horrible system. Is Taverner, the man with no past, a threat? Less so, maybe, than Buckman's amoral sister Alys, who takes special interest in Taverner and seems to have the world's only copies of his music albums... Paranoid wrongness is expertly conveyed, and resolved with a typically offbeat SF notion. A sunny finale concludes one of Dick's most approachable novels.--David Langford Review ------ One of the most original practitioners writing any kind of fiction, Dick made most of the European avant-garde seem like navel-gazers in a cul-de-sac (Sunday Times) Dick quietly produced serious fiction in a popular form and there can be no greater praise (Michael Moorcock) One of the genuine visionaries that North American fiction has produced (LA Weekly) For everyone lost in the endlessly multiplicating realities of the modern world, remember: Philip K. Dick got there first (Terry Gilliam) The most consistently brilliant SF writer in the world (John Brunner)