OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM (17)
By:
June 2, 2026
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… Seventies (1974–83) sci-fi novels and comics! Series edited by Josh Glenn.
A SCANNER DARKLY | PHILIP K. DICK | 1977
I turned down the invitation to write something for this series at first, because I hadn’t read any science fiction novels from the seventies. Then I remembered that I’d always meant to read something by Philip K. Dick, and so — like George Plimpton lacing his boxing gloves — I picked up A Scanner Darkly for a bit of stunt journalism. Here’s what I found:
- A premonition of artificial intelligence and the police-state reality presently unfurling.
- A war-on-drugs parable.
- A series of virtuoso stoner raps. One reason I haven’t read much science fiction is that I get discouraged by the idea of slogging through world-building exposition, but happily, this was a world of carburetors and pay phones, Solarcaine and Seconal.
- A proliferation of identity puzzles, both internal and external, in which Arctor, a nark, self-surveils as his mind splits into unrelated parts. I struggled to follow the details.
- A detective story with a collapsing gumshoe at its center. Arctor collects his pay in cash from a Dr. Pepper machine, hoovers substance D(eath), knows the government “trains and sends out a mass of agents to loosen bolts here, strip threads there,” and is aware that substance D is such an agent.
And then, about two thirds of the way through, I had a vicious attack of vertigo. One minute I was doing the dishes, and the next I was on the kitchen floor, holding on for dear life while the cabinets whirled around me. I slept for much of the next two days, and when I returned to the book, something had shifted. If the detective’s question is “What am I looking at?” the possible answers had become very different. “Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth,” Arctor watches himself saying to no one. It’s as though shafts of light are beaming through the prion holes in his brain, and evanescing just as quickly. When the lights go out, dark-eyed Donna (Arctor’s muse) thinks maybe he’s seen a vision, “a word not fully understood, some small thing seen but not understood, some fragment of a star mixed with the trash of this world.”
Because, finally, the book turns out to be (6) an elegy. All along, the stoner raps were the point. The people who the characters were based on, the ones listed in the author’s note, are the final answer to “What am I looking at?” They were children, he says, punished too harshly for playing in the street.
“In wretched little lives like that, someone must intervene. Or at least mark their sad comings and goings. Mark and if possible permanently record, so they’ll be remembered. For a better day, later on, when people will understand.”
I hadn’t expected to cry.
OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on RIDDLEY WALKER | Carlo Rotella on THE FACE | Sara Ryan on DREAMSNAKE | Matthew Battles on THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST | Ramona Lyons on HIGH-RISE | Adam McGovern on SHADRACH IN THE FURNACE | Deb Chachra on THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY | Tom Nealon on DHALGREN | Michael Grasso on FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID | Stephanie Burt on BRIGHTNESS FALLS FROM THE AIR | Nikhil Singh on SABRE | Gordon Dahlquist on VALIS | Miranda Mellis on THE DISPOSSESSED | Marc Weidenbaum on SOFTWARE | Peggy Nelson on THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER | Josh Glenn on ENGINE SUMMER | Mimi Lipson on A SCANNER DARKLY | Douglas Wolk on THRILLER | David Hirmes on ARZACH | Anthony Miller on THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER | Annie Nocenti on JIMBO | Seth on MR. MACHINE | Alex Brook Lynn on JUDGE DREDD | Joe Alterio on THE INCAL | Jason Grote on JOSIE AND THE ELEVATOR.
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