The Policeman Said, Flow My Tears

Philip K. Dick's strength isn't in his prose or his dialogue or his characters. He didn't have the time to write beautifully polished sentences or to explore his protagonists deeply. What he did, and did magnificently, was tap into the wellspring of existential angst which we all possess.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said does this by having Jason Taverner, world-famous variety show host and singer, wake up in a world where he doesn't exist. No one recognizes him, and there is no record of his birth. But the world is the same--a police state where every citizen is a suspect, and the worst thing you can do is attract attention to yourself. The policeman of the title is one of Dick's best creations, an officer of the fascist state and a reprehensible man, yet one with whom it is difficult not to empathize.
There are some wonderfully mind-wrenching moments here--from the oddly useful advice offered by a talking stuffed toy to the out-of-the-blue moment when Jason starts to slip back into his former existence--but it stumbles to a sloppy and unsatisfying ending. Still, it's a great ride, and if you're a fan of Dick this one is worth reading.

A truly astonishing work that, in my opinion, should easily stand among PKD's best work save for one flaw - an unnecessary epilogue that saps a bit of power from the otherwise gut-wrenching finish, putting a happy polish on what should have been a more bleak finale.

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is, like the works that best represent Philip K. Dick's career, a "What is reality?" book. The scenario he lets unfold - one day a guy is the Johnny Carson of his time, known and loved by all, the next day he is an unknown without an identity and doesn't know why - keeps you turning pages, wanting to know the truth as badly as the protagonist. The world he creates is, as always, intricate in its not-quite-the-world-we-know details. And the ending? Wow. Remove that epilogue (which in a very unDickian manner wraps everything up in a neat little bow at the end) and it's very powerful. If you've read PKD before, this will be familiar to you - twisted reality, hazy drugs, a world turned on its head - and if you haven't, Flow My Tears offers a good look at everything that makes up what a Philip k. Dick book is.

If only it didn't have that darn Hollywood ending ...

The first review, having been removed, has given me more time to think.

Pros:

Science Fiction Elements: Police State, Victim-Less crime is removed, Drug experiments, brash humor. Can inspire discussion on the Police's role in society - or speculation on the future in general. Students live underground. You have the recurring hover ship, with a multitude of names, that flies globally in no time. The first half of the book picks follows talk show host Jason Taverner, who is well drawn.

Cons:

Our opening plot is never resolved. Things just happen. I was frustrated that one of the ways PKD attempts to wrap the plot up involves an obtuse cliche. The characters, while well drawn, do not follow any set plot. They move from scene to scene, quite often disappearing entirely. The protagonist is questionable. Likely the lead comes two thirds of the way through the book -- with his own problems that seem very removed, and odd, within the story of the whole - especially that of the beginning.

General:

At the point of writing PKD is something of a vogue in Science Fiction, and it seems that has given him some special authority. The man was a writer trying to make a living. But Philip K. Dick has moments, certain novels, where he really shines. His later works have maturity. This does not. He thought differently. He was weird and smart and a drug addict. So he conjectured into the future, and put the work in on the typewriter. However, that doesn't give him a free-pass for broken writing, and an incomplete story. I don't feel like I'm missing some grand theme right under my feet by not connecting the dots. Is the story readable? Yes. Does it have shining moments? Yes. Is is the best novel I ever read? No.

The concerns here include erosion of civil liberties, drugs, Kafka-esque loss of identity, incestuous twins, and of course the nature of reality itself. As a work of fiction it's not especially coherent or relevatory. What it does have going for it, as in so many of his books, is a well-drawn and engulfing sense of a future landscape.

As a work of autobiography and personal fantasy this is probably more interesting. The brief and uncharacteristic hostility for black people that is projected for a page or two, followed at story's end by the climactic hugging of a black man, must have something to do with his neighbor who Phil knew and who his wife had slept with before leaving him. The lesbian twin sister is a known projection of his - he told many people that his twin sister, who died in infancy, was with him and "a lesbian". The Tavernier character's transition between fame and anonymity mirrors Dick's own life as he slid from writing towards drug abuse and squalor, and back towards writing again. And the myriad of female characters here are presumably drawn from his wives and girlfriends. Maybe if Dick had been in a better state at this point, he could have turned his personal obsessions and projections into better art. But he wasn't in such a great state here, and I think it shows.

My first PKD. Some really cool concepts with some super wooden dialogue. The story took some serious detours that engaged the reader. The end's very weak. Would have been a better novella. A note-on the audiobook the narration by Scott Brick is comically horrible and utterly clueless. Too over-the-top for even a tv soap opera, he should be doing strictly cartoons. Amazingly innappropriate. Almost as horrible as my least favorite ab voice Edward Herriman, who's never met a book he couldn't make better by constantly dramatizing in the most woefully insincere manner.

So far, this had to be my favorite of Philip K. Dick's novels. It's about a genetically engineered celebrity that, through extenuating circumstances, becomes an unknown overnight. One day everyone knows who he is, the next day he is a nobody. He investigates the cause of this enigma and is chased by police and led into a dark underground of reality-bending drug trips.

The story is short, about 200 pages, but remarkably complex. Dick is a master of playing with our perceptions of what is real and what is our imagination. The descriptions were wrought with phantasmagorical language that transcended many layers of the text.

In 2009 The Halcyon Company, known for owning the rights to the terminator franchise and making Terminator Salvation, acquired the rights to produce a film for Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. Here's to hoping it comes out soon!

I'd recommend this book to fans of Philip K. Dick and anyone who likes books dealing with reality and drugs.

Bookophile Rating: 97%

I've not read much of Philip K. Dick, just Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and mostly know of his style from articles and various film adaptations. Flow My Tears comes across as what must be an exemplar of PKD stories and is certainly worth your time to read more than most of the adaptations of his works over the years. As written elsewhere, the protagonist Jason Taverner awakens to find that he has seemingly been erased from existence. The novel is well paced paranoia and self doubt with a variety of deeply flawed characters in a broken alternative 1980s setting. These sad individuals are both products of the distopic police state as they are contributors. Yes, the dialog feels a bit hackneyed and stuck in the past and some of the made up terms get in the way, but the overall world building is well done. My only real complaint is the Epilogue which feels tacked on and ties up all the loose ends too neatly. Start here for an accessible PKD adventure.

This book has what so much of science fiction lacks - wonderful characters. Not wonderful in the sense that they are good people. Rather, Dick's characters are wonderfully real, with both good and bad aspects, and everything in between. The world they inhabit is a somewhat surreal alternate/future reality that allows us to see how they deal when the definition of what is real becomes blurred.
The only negative comment I might make is that Dick's vision is colored by the mid-70's in which he wrote it, which dates his fictional "future" a bit. But this is really a trivial flaw - just think of it as an alternate reality.
This book is so wonderfully written that I quickly found myself unable to put it down. Read it!

Philip K. Dick, as many people know, had a series of visions / hallucinations throughout his life and these are explained in detail on the Philip K. Dick page on the Wikipedia. The famous illustrator and cultural documentarian/commentator R. Crumb illustrated "The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick" -- an 8 page comic story / graphic novella [philipkdickfans daught-kham (four wards lash) weirdo (forewards lash) weirdo1 (daught aychee,tee,em ] (sorry, phonetics... otherwise ah-mah-zhan sense "or's" it! )

On "page 8", the last page of the story there is a reference to this book (Flow my tears) stating: "One of his books in which there is a "cipher" a secret prophetic message aimed at "particular people"; and which Dick was not even aware of when he wrote the book in 1974."

I just thought that was interesting. Cheers!

This book is indicative of the paradox of Philip Dick. It shows that, for all his lapses, he was one of the great writers of the Twentieth Century.
Populist pulp sci-fi that meditates on Kant, Jung, Proust, Joyce and renaissance music. A classic 'thriller' plot-line that metamorphoses into something entirely other. A hero who isn't the main character of the book, and who isn't even a hero. Minor characters who appear as the fully rounded protagonists of their own worlds. Outragously dated futurism alongside spot-on perceptive prediction. Frankly poor, slapdash writing that has a uniquely moving and lasting effect on the reader.
Like most of Dick's writing, this is a work of flawed genius. Dick simultaneously embraces and subverts the science fiction genre to create his own unique, fractured vision of existence. In doing so he shows us that the 'final frontier' of Sci-fi is not space but the human heart.

After the first couple of chapters of this, I had an overwhelming sense of familiarity with the story line. There were shades of Iain Banks "The Bridge", probably being the foremost. However, as usual with PKD, things were just not quite what they appeared to be.
Once more I found myself drawn into PKD's dark wit and cynicism. A police-state where celebrities are seemingly exempt, and the results of genetically manipulating humans are walking around.
The reason this did not rate the full 5 stars was really to do with the explanation of why Jason Taverner's life was turned upside-down for two days. This was not explored fully enough for my tastes, but that's the only criticism I can level at this.

The premise of this novel is that by taking a toxic drug called KR-3 one can become "unbound in space" and start to inhabit alternate spatial corridors branching off from the "real" one. When Alys Buckman, a malevolent, sadomasochistic power-tripper, thoroughly decadent in all matters of sex and drugs, takes KR-3, she is able to pull Jason Taverner, popular TV entertainer, into an alternate reality where no one except her knows who he is. Taverner's "star" status is the reference point for his reality, until he wakes up in a world where people think he's insane, suffering from delusions of grandeur. He's solipsistic because he incorrectly believes the world still revolves around him. But Alys is a solipsist who happens to be right, for she makes Jason a performer on the stage of her mind, and her mind only. Terrifyingly for Taverner, he must survive as a nonperson in a police state where to be caught without identification can mean spending the rest of one's life in a forced-labor camp. Interestingly, the policeman Felix Buckman, Alys's brother, is portrayed sympathetically, even though he represents the State that crushes individuals like butterflies under its heel. He is the character who finally discovers love as a redemptive force. Dick holds out empathy as the only salvation from the unforgiving human and existential forces that try to expunge one's identity and cast one into the outer darkness of insanity.

Philip K Dick was an unusual science fiction writer in that, while he tended to write in (usually dystopian) alternative universes, the "space opera" aspect - the act of universe creation (which so obsessed JRR Tolkien, for example) isn't what interested him. If Star Wars was the ultimate piece of fantasy escapism, with a ludicrous morality play veneer thrown in for an emotional punch at the end, then Dick's works existed at the other end of the spectrum: the world was described incidentally, the ingenious devices and drugs a means of locomoting and teasing out the existential questions they posed for his characters. There was always a little bit of scientific hocus pocus thrown in, but never for the sake of it: always as a means to crystallising Dick's character theme.

So Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? isn't, really, a futuristic gumshoe PI noir about killing replicants (though it functions pretty well on that level) but an examination of what really makes us human; what *is* empathy; and what consequences would there be for the way we relate to each other if we could achieve it artificially? And here, in Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, Dick ruminates on identity - what am *I*, if not a collection of relationships, impulses and memories in other people's minds? - and reality - what, when it comes to it, is the world itself, if not a collection of relations, impulses and memories in *my* brain?

What if we really could alter brains to change these things - how would that alter the way we see ourselves and the world? How, given the limitations of the above view, do we know we cannot? These are big themes, not the sort of thing that science fiction, in the main, handles awfully well. But because Philip Dick is so concerned with his characters, all of whom feel real, human, fallible and contrary - that is, they react in ways we can relate to - it is easy to forget this is a science fiction book at all (it is a matter of record that Dick despaired of his pigeonholing as a writer of pulp fiction).

Flow My Tears is characteristic of Philip Dick in other respects (not the least its idiosyncratic title!). As in Ubik, the The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and A Scanner Darkly, narcotics - Dick's equivalent of the red and blue pills from Alice In Wonderland - play a significant role, and his paranoia, by 1974 well documented and approaching the psychotic, is well on display. Dick tended to portray his futures as governed by dystopian states not out of political disposition or dramatic impetus but, I suspect, because he genuinely believed that's where the world was inevitably headed. (And he was right!!)

Flow My Tears isn't a perfect novel: the motivations of secondary characters aren't always easy to divine and it's difficult to know which of Jason Taverner and Felix Buckman is meant to be the "emotional axis" of the book - it feels as though it should be Taverner, but Buckman is drawn as a far more complex and carefully worked out character. Ultimately I would not put it in the same category as The Man in the High Castle or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but it's certainly readable and entertaining and linear in a way that later novels weren't.

Olly Buxton

I have read very few Philip K. Dick books that I did not love. Unlike many my age, I prefer my Sci-Fi to be from the old school of writers. Many of todays sci-fi, has little to think about. Prefering to get you with action and quick one liners. Don't get me wrong, Heinlein, Bester, and even Dick each threw one-liners, and the like into their stories, but they also knew how to make you think about the story and brought out today's problems in their fiction. This book, though not Dick's best, or one of the religious trilogy that he wrote is still a great read. I try not to give the story away, you can read the back of the book cover. It is the reader's job to decide to read a book without knowing the story. Just get the book of you like Dick's work, you won't be disappointed.

Imagine you're a very successful TV celebrity, the number one show, 20 million viewers, the girls and riches, the lavish lifestyle. Mmmmm, yes that sounds all good, but then imagine waking up the next morning to find your own self never existed, ever. Your TV career is gone, your money and on top of it all, no one seems to even remember who you are.
This is what happens to superstar TV icon Jason Taverner, and he has no clue what to do next.
The story takes place in the year 1988 in a future dystopian society, where America has become a police state after a second civil war.
Mr. Taverner notices that things are out of the ordinary when he wakes up in a slum hotel the next morning. The same reality, yet slightly off. He awakened after a altercation with a women friend who attacked him with a Callisto Parasite, which latches on to its victim and uses its tubes to enter you and infect the victim. He has been stripped of all his ID badges. This is when he meets Kathy Nelson, a forger. He reclaims a new set of ID badges and tries to get in touch with people he is close with. One of these persons is Jason's female co-star/fling Heather Hart, who is also a 'six'. (Introduced in this book are certain people know as 'sixes', sort of an upgrade in genetic engineering.) Heather does not remember Mr. Taverner, in fact has never seen him and that's the same with everybody else he knew. Obviously he must find out what the hell is going on.

This book is one of my many favorites from PKD, it contains everything he's known for and does so well, which is why I recommend this for a reader new to PKD.
The book has an eerie like feeling, paranoid, closed in. As the reader your just as confused as the main character is, which is fine cause your always wondering if that's real or not or did that happen or did it? What is real?
There's also talk of hallucenagenic drugs(a fictional drug here called KR-3)and what it can do to the brain in terms of empty/split perceptions.
Throughout the book Jason meets very unique people and put through such horrible and embarrassing situations. You start to really feel for this guys mental downward spiral, yet at the same time the guys a complete jerk.
'Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said' is unlike anything I've read in the genre and is why PKD is my favorite of sci-fi authors.

Released in 1974, 'FMTTPS' won the John W.Campbell awards for best science fiction book of the year.

CHECK OUT ALL MY OTHER PKD REVIEWS!

Enjoyable dip into another world...This was the first P.K.D. novel that I have read; and I am sure to go back for more.
This places us in a present future time that is immediately thought as probable given the worse case trajectory of our culture: and the knowledge that in some countries something close to this exists already.
Well drawn characters keep a reader engaged and perhaps a bit more cynical of powers that are being exercised already.

Once again, Philip K. Dick blends startling realism with surreal sci-fi. This time, the focus of his book is one Jason Taverner, TV star, singer and Six. One morning, Taverner wakes up to find himself in a low-grade motel he doesn't recognize. He quickly realizes that he has "vanished"-- all memory of him has been expunged, and he simply doesn't exist anymore, in a police state where not having an identity is a crime in itself.
The book begins by focusing fairly steadily on Taverner, a classic Dicksian protagonist. He is confused, disoriented, but profoundly in control of his desperate situation. After meeting up with a deranged identity forger, he finds himself at odds with the ubiquitous "police" that run people's everyday lives. However, at about this point Dick introduces Police General Felix Buckham and his fetishist sister Alys. The two are constantly at odds, the general's firm belief in rules clashing with Alys's firm belief in breaking them. Alys later becomes a more important character, as she "saves" Taverner after his second run-in with the general. After taking him to her house, she feeds him a hallucinogen, then goes to get him the counterdrug. Along the way, she dies, leaving Taverner the main suspect. He flees, and begins to realize that people know about him again. He hypothesizes that the drug she gave him was what had maintained his illusion of stardom, and that he was really just a nobody, a bum. I will not reveal the ending in this review, except to say that it far stranger than even Taverner believes.
PKD starts out strong with this one, but his focus begins to shift to Buckham later in the book. With his usual attention to detail, Dick hints vaguely at ways this world differs from our own: the lockdowns of campuses, the legality of certain drugs, and most of all the experiments that created superhumans called "Sixes." What the Sixes do exactly is unclear, but Taverner is one, and he has powers of persuasion far beyond the human norm. This and other vagueties are resolved in an epilogue that seems unusually contrived; perhaps it is mocking the omnipotent epilogues that wrap things up so neatly, a common feature in contemporary sci-fi. Whatever its message, Flow My Tears raises thought-provoking questions on life, love, and loss.

Classic Philip K. Dick through and through...and then you get to the ending. I suppose I've probably read a dozen or so PKD novels, and I must say none had a weaker, more anti-climactical ending than this. I must say, it really did feel like a cop-out. The majority of the novel is wonderful, but if Dick had just spent a little more time crafting a proper conclusion, the book as a whole would have been much, much better. I suppose my favourite PKD to date is probably The Game-Players of Titan...or maybe Now Wait for Last Year...or UBIK...oh, forget it. I can't decide. Just read 'em all, but you'd probably be best-advised not to start with Flow My Tears.

Aside from numerous technological inventions, Philip K. Dick has accurately predicted a multitude of trends in society, the natural environment and the government. Some of these trends have already come to pass and some may still yet be. His vision in 1974, when Flow My Tears was written, of the police-state that would emerge in 1988 America was essentially only a decade off. What many regarded as PKD's paranoia at the time is actually only inaccurate by the degree to which the U.S. has sacrificed personal freedoms. Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, like many of Dick's greatest works, rings eerily true today under W.'s "Reign of Error," with government wiretapping, citizen databases, legalized torture, labor camps etc. being the reality.

1988 society, like today, are obsessed with famous people's cult of personality. Main protagonist Jason Taverner is an internationally famous television star beloved by millions who wakes up one day to find that he has lost more than his fame. He technically no longer exists, with friends and lovers no longer knowing him, being bereft of all forms of personal identification necessary to function in 1988's police state. But being a "six," from a government program where a group of genetically modified, intelligent and beautiful human beings were created, Taverner is able to find ways of surviving in the dark underbelly of society. Here he encounters a wide variety of unsavory yet memorable characters. All the while hampering Jason's progress in regaining his identity is Police General Felix Buckman, one of PKD's most compelling and complex villains.

An entirely plausible vision of what life in the United States might be like if we continue to go down the current path and excellently written, multifaceted characters are just a few reasons to pick-up this book. Other terrifying ideas PKD raises are genocide or forced sterilization of African Americans, continued social stratification, with the gap gaping ever wider between the haves and have nots, and the ability of future illegal drugs to actually alter reality. Without ruining the conclusion of Flow My Tears, I will say that I feel that Philip K. Dick does not adequately tie-up all lose ends. However, the vast majority of the book is PKD at his best, among my top 3 favorite of his works, and very much deserving of having won several awards. It also clearly influenced darker scenes of other PKD adapted movies such as Minority Report and Bladerunner; Roy from Bladerunner references Buckman, while underworld scenes in Minority Report such as the black market doctor who swops out Tom Cruise's eyes are reminiscent of Flow My Tears the Policeman Said.

I just finished thise one, and it's absolutely Philip K. Dick. This means it's absolutely excellent. The plot has been explained by others, so I'll get right to the good stuff.
PKD clearly loved to play with ideas of perception and reality. He does it really well here.
Previous reviewers have mentioned that they felt this novel fell apart at the end, but was consistently good before this. I have to disagree. The first majority of this book is great pulp SF. The last ten or so pages (don't count the epilogue as the end, PKD just uses it to tie things up) are a whole lot more contemplative and less action filled than the rest of the book. Most people don't expect much stylistically from a speculative fiction author, but the end of this book flows like poetry.
There is no masterful unfolding of some vast plot, and there is no enormous confrontation to close up the story. PKD is beyond clever; he's insane. I love it.

The plot will have you guessing throughout, but always guessing wrong. The reader always guesses consistent with his own prejudiced conception of reality; he's over-matched by the mind-blowing stuff Dick throws at him. Seasoned readers of Dick are perhaps an exception. If you're new to Dick, I suggest re-reading the book a second time, especially if you have to fully "get it" it to be satisfied.

Dick probes the profound mystery of personal identity and its particularly effective because it's set against the backdrop of a neo-Stasi, dystopian America. In this world, existence means a dossier, an ID card, a micro-transmitters, etc. It's inconceivable that existence remains undocumented. Nevertheless, as Jason Taverner proves, it is possible -- somehow! We ought to take note of the implications of this type of society considering the Real ID Act of 2005 will soon require us all to carry National ID cards.

The finale of the story is very provocative and satisfying. I adored all the female characters in the book -- they were all so colorful.

Altogether, and satisfying and trippy read!

Jason uses his eugenically enhanced intellect for tawdry manipulation of millions of TV viewers. His introspection seesm to have limited over decades to honing these skills rather than contemplating their purpose or value. There is a sense of comeuppance to his awakening to a world unchanged except for the absence of his fame. Cast into the police state over he shows no concern or sympathy for its victims. His journey introduces a variety of characters culminating in a fatal meeting and a rather unconvincing explanation of the cause of his trouble. The book then ends with a whimper, not a bang....
The book seems to inhabit a similar world to "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" but has less coherence and characters that eleicit far less sympathy.

This is a great book in the same way many of Dick's books are: the reader is placed in the neverending crossfire of ideas and plot twists, and when the end finally comes, all you can do is ask yourself: "What happened?" Not everyone likes that feeling, but I do, and Flow My Tears is a fine representation of all the things I mentioned. The basic idea is fascinating, and as always, Dick handles it well, giving the reader a feeling of satisfaction: my time was not wasted reading this.

Ive read many of Philip K. Dick's novels and I dont think I was ever more puzzled by an ending as I was in this novel. It is a superb novel right from the beginning but there is an encounter between Felix and a black man at a gas station near the end of the book that came quite out of nowhere. Maybe I missed some connection along the way (very easy to do in a Dick novel) but if anyone reads this I would love to hear any interpretation.

From Isotropic Fiction:

When a writer cross-references his work as much as Philip K. Dick does, the absence details becomes as powerful as the details that actually appear on the page. The reader struggles to force the truths he or she's come to learn into a world where they don't fit. After repeated attempts to erase the divide between the known past and the unfolding, unknown present, the reader is faced with a stark choice: fail and walk away from the novel as a lessened member of literary society or engage the author for the first time again. For those that stay, what they'll find is a recasting of many of Dick's big ideas in a new way.

Originally published in 1974 and most recently reissued by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt as an e-book in July 2012, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said won a John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and was nominated for a Hugo and a Nebula. In 2009 The Halcyon Company, known for their work with Terminator Salvation and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, announced the title was in development. As of 2011, it was still in the early stages of development, according to Isa Dick Hackett in an interview with Meredith Woerner--read that interview on io9 or check out a related article on scifiscoop.com--and suggestions to play the lead role of Jason Taverner have ranged on IMDB from Conan O'Brien to George Clooney nine years ago.

Laying aside convenient devices like the Time Scoop and androids, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said brings readers into a different version of Dick's dystopian future. Set in a post Second Civil War America, a fascist police force controls the nation and maintains order through fear. The unthinkable happens to entertainer Jason Taverner when he wakes up one morning to find something valuable has been stolen. Worse than his identity cards, somehow his entire identity appears to have been erased. As Traverner struggles to survive in a world where he apparently never existed, he finds himself getting unwanted attention from authorities.

As the novel switches from Traverner's perspective to that of Police General Buckman, Dick dives into an area of murky moral ambiguity. While clearly a villain, Dick creates a character so complex that it's impossible for readers not to empathize with Buckman. And while Traverner has done nothing wrong aside from being a bit arrogant, there's a perverse exhilaration in seeing his struggles.

Despite the ending, which feels forced and tacked on due to a deus ex machina twist, it's impossible to not to be amazed by Dick's writing. It has a power similar to that of a steady rain: never shocking, but always eroding. And by taking the moral drives that powered many of the heroes in his short stories and placing them in his villain, readers must learn to encounter him in a whole new way.

My favorite parts of PK Dick's books are the characters themselves and the fact that they all come to question their reality, causing you to question yours.
As in real life, good characters do bad things and visa-versa, unlike some authors who manage to pigeon whole their characters into pure good or evil. They only want to be themselves even if they are not sure of whom that is.

If you like to contemplate a book after finishing it, then this is a book for you.

My first Dick book. While not for everyone, it's pretty accessible to anyone who can appreciate alternate reality/paranoid sci-fi. It's classic man-against-the-clock stolen identity stuff in the tradition of D.O.A. and (to a much, much lesser extent) Enemy of the State. Jason Taverner, anti-hero as he may be, is a great character in which to carry the main storyline of arrogant celebrity turned underground fugitive, but the smaller characters are what make this book into something more than "one man out to get back what was stolen from him." When read as a whole, it is a great testament to being human in the face of mechanical adversity. Not clanking robots, mind you (although it does have it's share of cool futuristic gadgetry), but rather the mechanisms imposed by society, and ourselves, that would otherwise strip away or mask what is good and human in everyone. The best character in the book (in my humble opinion) is the policeman who has a ferocious hard-on for nailing the fugitive Taverner, and from whom the wonderful title is taken. To those who start this book and are inclined to put it down partway through, be assured! Good things will come to those who wait. The scene at the end that involves the title is one of the singly most beautiful ever penned, in sci-fi or any other genre. But it is a very subtle beauty and perhaps not suited for every reading palette. If yours is a refined taste that can grasp a sentiment that is not delivered with a sledgehammer, and enjoys it in the setting of a eerie future America that smacks dangerously of our present one, read this book post-haste.

I thought the ending was fantastic. Not satisfying? Hardly. I found it to be entertainingly and purposefully glib, yet replete with serious meaning. Satisfying meaning. Meanings within meanings. Yes, one either gets and appreciates this sort of thing or one does not. Which isn't to say that anyone who 'gets it' has to 'get it' in exactly the same way. Such is the ambiguity of true art. It is, however, a well documented scientific fact that those who do not 'get' PKD are a lot less fun to have around at parties.
Flawed genius? Yes, maybe, but Dick was a creator of beautiful art, even if his art was, out of necessity, posing as pulp SF. But, hey, the absence of flaw in beauty is in ITSELF a flaw, as has been astutely noted.
Okay, yeah yeah yeah, what is real? What makes us human? That jazz has been thoroughly covered, and rightly so. But another one of the many, many (this IS by Dick, after all) admirable threads that tie all the characters of 'Flow My Tears' together is the ever-popular and universal theme of love...wanting to love, wanting to be loved, temporizing over love, gettin' some love (woo-hoo!), crazy-nutty-unrealistic love, incestuous love (whoa, didn't see THAT coming! Go Dick!), meaningless-life-draining-phone-oriented-cyber-love (curiously prophetic), losing one's love, having one's love stomped all over by forces that are beyond one's control. And, yes, we are INDEED living in a 'police state', my naively optimistic, overly pampered and isolated brothers and sisters. That's ALREADY true as blue, and getting worse.
But, in the end, not unlike so many real-life characters I've met, Dick's characters seem to never get enough love. And who can blame them? Not I. But, out of all the characters in 'Flow My Tears', do any of them actually find love? Yes! The beautiful blue vase was "much loved." Good for it! I'm satisfied. What? Yes, the blue vase DOES count as a character. It surely does. Oh, whatever. Please remind me never to invite you to any parties.

Philip K. Dick led American science fiction in innovation and daring. This novel has Jason Taverner world famous one day and a nonperson the next day, ie, someone who never even existed. It's a twisted tale as Taverner tries to put it together. It ends a little too easily pat, almost to a cop out, but man, leading up to it is Dick at his crazy best.

This is the first novel I read of Dick's, and I must say I enjoyed it very much. I was very engrossed in it all the way to the end. I did, however, have mixed feelings about the way the novel ended -it felt like Dick resolved the plot a little too quickly, but the ending was good nonetheless. I would recommend this book to any sci-fi fan.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is one of Philip Dick's more accessible books to read. The plot is intriguing and pulls you along as Dick ponders the question of identity. If there is no record of you and no one knows you, who are you? Jason Taverner's mysterious loss of identity leads the reader on a suspenseful story that asks this question without boring the reader with a metaphysical lecture on identity. While not my favorite ending of Dick's it does tie up all the loose ends so the reader is not left dissatisfied. For people who like other Philip Dick novels as well as people who like Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night this book is highly recommended. For people who have yet to get into Philip Dick this is a good place to start.

Taverner is not supposed to be likeable, he is an arrogant man thrown from his usual reality into one where he is no longer important or privileged, but he carries the story very well.

The other characters are a strange mix, all broken in some way, and Taverner's journey shows us a violent and brutal world that isn't too hard to believe.

The pace is good but the ending and the explanation it provides aren't, it is too simplistic and easy and the epilogue is a annoying.
This more like a bad John Brunner story than something by Dick.

A journey but lacking in the final destination.

This was my first PKD novel and I was truly astounded. I have always had a bad and narrow-minded view on sci-fi because of the impression that Star Trek and Star Wars gave me.
This is different.
I have never read a novel so technical or gripping, descriptive or true. I related with Jason Taverner and felt disappointed for him in his false existence. One of the very few novels I read in a day and a fantastic introduction to a brilliant author. Personally, I think this is PKD's crowning achievement. This is most probably because this is the first of his novels I read. I continue to read PKD novels and have changed my view on sc-fi altogether. If you buy this, enjoy. If you enjoy it, read A Scanner Darkly.

Philip Dick has combined several themes into one very good story that is simultaneously eccentric speculation and extrapolation of cultural analysis. Ranks right up with "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and "Radio Free Albemuth" Excellent.

Owning almost all Dick books and a lot of short stories, i find this volume a standard one. It starts off alright but then lapses a bit, until halfway through the book it again becomes interesting. The plot is underexposed which is too bad because it's an interesting one (different worlds being perceived by our brain under the influence of some drug). I was hoping for some great ending but alas, a short epilogue is what we get. Read Ubik if you want really gripping stuff!

The master of fictional identity crisis demonstrates his form in spades via this rollercoaster of an adventure! As per the usual sci-fi "what-ifs"; What if you woke up only to discover that you no longer existed?

Only 3 stars---leaves some gaping plot holes and questions unresolved in the resolution, or lack of...

Flow, My Tears is an amazing novel. It stars off as a very interesting thriller about a man trying to regain his identity, and evolves into a surreal sexual odysee(though without much sex go figure lol).

But in the end, to me at least, the novel is about one thing. The corruption of government. About the horrible things the Government does. About the iggnorance and justifications behind these acts, and about the governments lack of responsibility.

And when it come down to the actual ending of the book I find myself still thinking about it, wondering if I liked how everything came together or not(I'm ignoring the epiloge). But theres one thing I know for sure, the fact that I'm still thinking about it says alot about it's power.

This is a wonderful novel -- it grips the reader by creating a world so similar to this one yet also distinct enough to be puzzling. It forced me to reexamine how relationships between man and the state are forced, sustained, and later possibly strained. This is one of Dick's best works.

The first book I've ever read by Phillip K Dick, although I've seen a bunch of movies based on his books (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly). The story starts off describing the life of a major celebrity and his lifestyle - casual sex partners from Hollywood hills, romps in Venice, drug indulgences and plenty of crazy, surrealistic living - before his life becomes surrealistic itself. He manages to cope with a descent into anonymity and all sorts of quirky escape-the-cops-with-the-weird-stranger-who-just-befriended-you action in it that we've now gotten used to. Yeah, right.

At the end, there's an odd, cowardly encounter with the policeman of the title, and then some sort of crazy "ten years after, this is where the story's proponents ended up" sort of thing.

i like PKD, and this was an amazing 5-star novel... up until the end, where it plummeted straight down in a shooting stream of crap for the last 40 pages or so and never came back up. i hoped, i wished, i prayed, and it still went straight into the toilet. PKD, like jim thompson, was a great 220-page writer who for money's sake was forced to write 180-page books and could never really get the hang of it. his visions were much more suited towards lengthier books. if you're interested in his work, read "man in the high castle" or UBIK or "scanner darkly." don't start here.

I try to like Philip Dick. I really, really do. I think my lack of appreciating of Dick is just a matter of taste. I recognize the literary quality of his work, and the strength of his ideas, but his books always get me down. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said didn't do much for me. It's not known to be one of his better works, but still, I expected more.

When a world-famous, fabulously wealthy media star wakes up in a seedy motel with no ID, and no one, including his close friends, his agent, and his girlfriend, recognizes him, he knows he's in trouble. He has to figure out how to get around in this near-future dystopia, where being caught without ID can get you sent to a labor camp. What could have been an interesting exploration into the psychology of identity and a look into parallel universes turns into a weak story of drug trials and perceptions of reality. This isn't the first time Dick's stories have seemed too caught up in the drug culture of the 1970s.

He has great ideas for stories, or the kernel of stories, that frequently translate into terrific movies. A movie version of Flow My Tears could be great, in the right hands. I would just ask the filmmaker to make it better than the book.

Flow My Tears, this is how I felt after completing this novel. The book was dry, and boring. It was a complete failure compared to Dicks other works. The characters were barely described and the plot was resolved all too quickly in the end.

This is one of may favorite books and have read it more than twice. It messes with your mind as if you are on some sort of drug and takes you where you've never been before. Thinking outside the box and entering a new atmosphere. A friend of mine recommended one of his books and I fell in love with the flow of words, the imagery and the way he questions our every day routines.

This was an awsome book. In the usual Philip K Dick manner he explores the question of what is real. But i would highly recomend tearing out the fourth part, the Epiloge, and burning it. It may nearly wreck the book for you. It seems as if Dick wanted could not stand the world his book created and had to unmake it. If you can not stand to tear it out at least wait a few days between reading the rest of the book and the last part.

This is another great Dick novel, but I was a bit disappointed at the ending - sentimental rather than shocking. However, still a compelling read with PKD's usual themes of paranoia, reality vs. unreality, and so on.

This is Dick at his best. The hallucinatory worlds ,the reality that may or may not be true, drugs, schizophrenia, what is normal - all these are dealt with in true Dick humor. Again he shows what happens when a person's reality as a construct is "owned" by others who have power, and therefore label that person as sick and in need of fixing. One of his more well writen and accesible works.

Flow my tears... is another great read for me, a self proclaimed Phil Dick fan, however I suggest to those who havent read him yet to start with another book. Maybe A Scanner Darkly, or The Phillip K. Dick Reader which is a collection of short stories, some of which have become major movies i.e. Total Recall, Paycheck, and Minority Report. Total recall is based on a short story called "We Can Remember it For You Wholesale"

This is perhaps the most acesable example of Dick's obsesion with exploring the nature of reality and as such may well be a good place to begin a lifetime of reading obscure Science fiction.
In this novel Dick explores meny of the themes that haunt his fiction (the nature of reality, identity, mental ilness and the death of the counter culture) in a form wich alows the reader in rather than excluding them as with other works such as 'The Three stigmata...'

This book is so good that it's almost criminal to sit back and let it languish in a mere 4 star status. This book is a paranoid adventure from start to finish.

Do yourself a favor; get this,"The Man Who Japed" and "Ubik".When you have finished, come back and help this book get the rating it deserves. Take it from a fellow six.

This book contains many of Dick's strengths e.g. Fascinating alternate realities, interesting plot twists.

As other reviewers have mentioned the novel's epilogue should probably just be ignored...
I can't imagine why Dick would have written this epilogue unless he was under some sort of pressure to end the book on an upbeat note.

A serious and exciting detective story which is also a thriller - intelligent, ingenious and suble.Nightmare adventures in an American Police state too likely to become true. With a delightful leaps of imagination Dick outdistances nearly all of the most popular star trekkers.

(Written for Worm's Sci Fi Haven by countezero, more of his reviews can be read here: [...])

To readers of a particular mindset, specifically those who are outwardly contemptuous of authorities like government and law enforcement, Philip K. Dick's Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), will probably go down the gullet like manna. For readers less inclined to view their political and personal freedom as conditions that hinge on the whims of small-minded men in high castles, the novel may not be so sweet.

Dick, for those who are unfamiliar with him, wrote 36 novels and five short story collections-one of which, The Man in the High Castle, won the Hugo award in 1962. He died in 1982 of heart failure just months before the release of Ridley Scott's Bladerunner, which is based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Thanks to his timely death-and Scott's bold theatrical vision of his work-Dick suddenly became a "poor man's Pynchon," who, "may be recognized as the greatest American novelist of the second half of the 20th century." Not bad praise for an author whose novels never made him much money and were mostly out-of-print until Harrison Ford doggedly pursued an outlawed band of replicants through rain-soaked Los Angeles streets on the silver screen.

What I've written above is the accepted biography, the one published on the cover of his novels. It is factual, but it is also too polite. The whole truth and nothing but the truth, something which Dick professed simultaneously to worship, wonder and write about, is slightly stranger.

Would it surprise the readers of this review to learn Dick believed he had been contacted by pink laser beams from something called VALIS, or the Vast Active Living Intelligence System, which he described as one node of an alien artificial satellite network originating from the star Fomalhaut in the Pisces constellation? Further digging reveals:

"Dick claimed that he began to live a double life, one as himself and one as Thomas, a Christian persecuted by Romans in the 1st century C.E. Despite his current and past drug use, Dick accepted these visions as reality, believing that he had been contacted by a god-entity of some kind, which he referred to as Zebra, God, and most often VALIS. He saw Rome as the pinnacle of materialism, which, after forcing the Gnostics underground 1900 years earlier, had kept the population of the Earth as slaves to worldly possessions. Dick believed that VALIS had contacted him and unnamed others to induce the "impeachment" of Richard M. Nixon, whom Dick believed to be the current Emperor incarnate."

Biography can either add illumination to a reader's comprehension of an author's works, or it can muddle it. I've chosen to mention some of Dick's lesser known eccentricities because I believe it is almost impossible to understand Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said without knowing something about the questionable beliefs and obvious passions that drove the man behind the rhetorical curtain to pull the particular plot levers he did.

Beyond the paranoid details Dick sprinkles throughout the opening pages of the novel-America is a police state in which everyone must carry I.D. cards, college campuses have been closed off by the military and blacks have been sterilized to cut down on the crime rate-there isn't too much to gawk and gape at for the reader. A television celebrity named Jason Taverner, who is the idol at the center of "the big worshipping world of viewers," receives an interesting comeuppance from one of the attractive celebrity wannabes he's been spending some nocturnal hours with. Because Taverner has failed to land said Lady a record contract, as he promised, she shoots him in the chest with a Callisto cuddle sponge, some sort of life form which apparently has 50 feeding tubes that like to burrow into a person's chest. When he wakes up, alone in a dilapidated room, he discovers no one has the foggiest idea who he is. Even, his fellow celebrity lover, though Taverner possesses her private phone number and can describe a number of intimate details about her. But what's worse, remember folks he's living in a police state, is that there is no official documentation to prove anyone named Jason Taverner ever existed.

No celebrity, no status, no identity. "I don't exist," Taverner mentally moans. Existence being one of Dick's favorite topics, it's hard to read this line and not smirk. Taverner does exist, of course. He thinks, therefore he is. What's bothering him, beyond playing cat-and-mouse with the police, who know all about the forged papers he is forced to acquire, is that nobody recognizes him as Jason Taverner, celebrity extraordinaire-at one point, Taverner even discovers a selection of his records, but when he plays them they are blank.

Had the novel stayed with the idea of identity it might have worked. After all, what is identity? Are we are all self-contained solipsists, whose identities are totally the result of our own internal thoughts? Or are we shaped by our deeds and what other people think of them? Is a celebrity a celebrity simply because of the attention given to them, or do they possess some unquantifiable glimmer of brilliance? Certainly the people Taverner meets in the novel keep noticing special things about his post-celebrity-self, despite the fact they've never laid eyes on him before. He shines, he sparkles, he's handsome and he has a way with words and carries himself in a manner that defies ordinariness, even though for all intents and purposes he is no different than them. He's special, without having earned such an adjective.

But unfortunately, Dick abandons this promising narrative in favor of another. Enter Police General Felix Buckman, one of the police state's higher-ups who has a drug-addled, insane sister who ends up being the critical cog in the entire ebb and flow of events. As it turns out, Alys has been experimenting with a substance called KR-3, which bends time and space temporarily to create an alternate reality interlaced or superimposed over the actual one.

"Anyone affected by it is forced to perceive irreal universes, whether they want to or not...Taverner (who was affected with the drug) passed over into a universe in which he didn't exist. And we (the people he came into contact with) passed over with him because we're objects of his perception," Buckman's aides explain.

Perception? Now there's an interesting theme. Too bad Dick fumbles it when he is trying to wrap up his novel with the above explanation. And if those fine words don't quite wrap things up for you, it's probably because any reader who comes to the end of the novel needs to know something about the beliefs of Dick's which I mentioned earlier.

In an essay entitled "How to Build a Universe that Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later", Dick writes, "The two basic topics which fascinate me are `What is reality' and `What constitutes the authentic human being?'" To this, add and consider the following three statements.

1. "If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities?"

2. "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

3. "I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem."

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said presents a perfect synthesis of these statements. For Taverner and Buckman, the universe as they know it is certainly unglued. There is no one single reality in the novel, there are at least two. But both realities are "real" because both of them continue to exist when the characters who exist within them wish they would go away.

So what then are we to make of the ending, when a singular reality is ultimately restored? I was certainly baffled by it, until I read the essay I quoted from above and came across Dick's bizarre claim that the novel is inspired by the Book of Acts, from the Bible:

"A careful study of (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said) shows that for reasons which I cannot even begin to explain I had managed to retell several of the basic incidents from a particular book of the Bible, and even had the right names. . . My theory is this: In some important sense, time is not real. Despite all the change we see, a specific permanent landscape underlies the world of change: and that this invisible underlying landscape is that of the Bible; it, specifically, is the period immediately following the death and resurrection of Christ; it is, in other words, the time period of the Book of Acts."

We are all, in other words, "fake humans" living in "fake realities"-with, presumably, Richard Nixon at the helm. Occasionally, we are given glimpses of the truth, or revelations, but most of our lives are spent dwelling inside a contemporary dream. Brush it aside as we will find Tiberius ruling over Rome, the apostles spreading the word. Exactly who or what has thrown the proverbial wool over our collective eyes, or to what end, I have not been able to learn in my brief bit of research for this article. Perhaps Dick, who seems better informed than any of us, wasn't privy to that information himself.

What does all this say about the plot of the novel, about Taverner's experience inside an alternate reality, which ultimate wasn't actual reality but an imagined one? To be honest, I'm not sure. The epiphany in the novel-and the scene from which the title is pulled, belongs to Felix Buckman, not Taverner. Exactly what revelation the scene conveys, beyond eliciting sympathy from the reader for a character who up until that point has been entirely despicable, I don't know. Felix cries. His sister, who he also happened to be carrying on an incestuous relationship, has died. This is sad, sort of, but to what end? Looking back at the essay one last time, I see Dick hints at what he wants his audience to understand, but see if you can follow his logic:

"(Buckman) is Christ himself returned, to pass judgment. And this is what he does in my novel: He passes judgment on the man sealed up in the darkness. (On whom? Taverner?) It was judged and condemned. Felix Buckman could weep at the sadness of it, but he knew that the verdict could not be disputed. And so he rode on, without turning or looking back, hearing only the shriek of fear and defeat: the cry of evil destroyed."

Only Taverner didn't kill Alys, Taverner is not convicted of killing Alys-what's more he didn't even know her in the novel's actual reality. He only met her in the novel's other reality. Is Dick saying we're guilty for the crimes we commit in both the realities he believes in? Are we judged in one world for what we do in another? I live those questions for my readers to answer. What I will say is that Dick's method has ultimately failed to convince me. His metaphor is strained and does not work. He misses, or very rarely chooses to focus on what is, or what might have been the core of an excellent novel. Instead, an ultimately empty "dream within a dream" scenario, something the professors who taught me creative writing in college told me to avoid is explored. Never end a story with "...and then I woke up," or its equivalent I was told in a stern voice by several different PhD's. With Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, Dick does just that-and it's his zealotry for and his personal beliefs about the faulty nature of reality that have led him to such a disaster of flawed intent.

Two out of five

I am a big fan of Dick's. His short stories are his strength, his imagination is superb, but this novel is peculiar to say the very least. I am well aware that a major criticism of his body of work is the uneven writing. Sometimes he soars, but at other times it feels as though he wrote a book in a week and stuffed it in an envelope and mailed it off to the publisher without giving it another thought. This is just such a book. How it won the John W. Campbell Memorial award for the best novel of 1974 is beyond me. It would never get published today.

The beginning is classic Dick: a famous man wakes up in a flophouse after a murder attempt on his life and finds that he doesn't exist. No records, no biography, fame all gone, a pocket full of money, that's it. But from that point on the story lumbers from one encounter with a ditzy woman to another. It's all rambling filler that has nothing to do with the story. The policeman in the title doesn't show up until halfway through. Granted, the story picks up a bit at that point, but then it loses its focus again and the ending is a rush job if ever there was one. The whole thing turns out to be a drug induced figment of his imagination. How disappointing is that? That's as bad as those Star Trek time travel episodes where everyone goes through absolute hell, they should all be traumatized for life and suffer from terminal PTSD, but then the loop is completed and it's as though none of it ever happened. Arghhh!

If you think Dick was one of the great Sci-Fi masters of all time, read this book, but keep it in context with his corpus of work (i.e. somewhere in the bottom half). If you are just starting to read Dick, skip this one for a while. But by all means read his short stories. Some of them are keepers for all time.

I have to admit that it appears that the store reviews suffer from the same problem as performance appraisals - everyone is outstanding. Too often I find that a book has lots of five and four-star reviews, only to find that, once read, the book just wasn't very good. And this book is not just not very good, it's no good at all. The writing is just so amateurish, the plot, as one of the other reviews suggested, is way full of holes, the ending, trite and completely disappointing. The book is an interesting idea that died on the vine.

So we have to understand that Dick was a little nutso to appreciate his work? Sorry. This may be a good example of therapy for a sick mind, but that doesn't make it a good book. Sheesh...

To balance all of the five-star reviews that, I think, are way off base, I give it one star. Come to think of it, forget balancing the five-star reviews. This book deserves one star on the merits.