Now where were we? Oh, shit, the book. Books: so much better than movies. Almost always (unless its a book based off of a movie, of course, like those shitty Star Wars novels).
A Scanner Darkly: The Book was my first introduction to Philip K. Dick. Typically, when confronted with anything that has the remotest tinge of "sci-fi" to it I say "PASS!" and try to find the alcoholic memoir/dysfunctional family section of the book store; I like my books based in reality, for some reason, while I tend to like my movies based in escapism: don't ask.
I picked up A Scanner Darkly with some hesitation. Are there going to be a bunch of weird alien race names I'll never be able to remember and a holodeck? I asked myself. Fortunately, the book comes out of the gate with some straight 70's be-bop shit and makes it clear that while this is set in the "future" (1992, yet there's no mention of Saved By The Bell or Super Mario), the book is way more grounded in a slightly alternate, drugged out reality based on the post-Nixon era.
I'll just sum it up for ya: there's a reason a lot of respectable people (sans Reeves) put the time and effort into making this a movie and its because it's fucking awesome. I can't really describe it much more than the first half makes you feel like you're on drugs like a cybernetic version of "Electric Koolaid Acid Test" and the second half makes you feel like you're mind is exploding into the future. Verdict: read this shit now, before you forget how to read books. Or just see the movie if you're lazy; it's not half-bad (based on the first half I saw).
Okay. This is a two-parter. I also read William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, which, like Darkly, I thought was gonna be some bugged-out, future sci-fi mumbo-jumbo, but turned out to be based in a pretty normal, present-day reality. The trick that Gibson turns is he runs the prose like his usual cyberpunk haiku's, which makes you feel like you're in some flipped-out version of Akira but pretty much everything in the book-universe he's created has already happened and exists in the real world.
I'm not sure if that makes sense, but this will: I liked the book until about half-way through, when you start to realize this book is very well written, but still a pretty boring mess with half-assed characters and some twists that seem straight out of a bunch of bad young adult fiction. I finished it out, like a trooper, because my roommate recommended it, but after this and Spook Country, I've decided he really isn't my cup of tea. Go Dick or go home is what I say (and that's what she said, too).
Next Up: Brief Interviews With Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace and American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis.
