Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly begins as a standard American nightmare. It is California, 1994, and society is divided between the straights in their fortified apartment complexes, and the acid-heads who are hooked on a new drug of unknown origin, substance D (for Death). Most of the detritus of the 1970s survives unchanged but surveillance technology has been advanced by the invention of the "scramble suit", which reduces the appearance of the wearer to a nebulous blur, and is compu...

[A Scanner Darkly] treats one of the major problems of our society today, namely drug abuse, but is written as science fiction set in the near future. I wish the author had treated his main theme with realism, describing the situations and events more accurately, but instead everything tends to be vague and uncertain…. Unfortunately the things are described so vaguely that the situation gets quite illogical. I suppose the license of the science fiction writer allows him to present the ideas ambiguous...