Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
by Philip K. Dick; ISBN: 0-679-74066-X

       I found Philip K. Dick through the movies – Blade Runner, based on his novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? happens to be my second favorite science fiction movie of all time. (My most favorite sci-fi flick, for what it’s worth, is Stanley Kubrick’s 2001.) Because of Blade Runner, I always thought I’d give Dick a try sometime, but managed to put it off – alas, there are many books to read, and so little time. Then I saw Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, a mediocre movie for my taste, not in the same category as Blade Runner and 2001, but the story itself is intriguing, a future society where crimes are discovered before they happen. I was wondering where Spielberg got his clever idea when the titles rolled at the end and I saw the screenplay was based on a Philip K. Dick short story. Two times could be no accident; I decided to go to the source and see what this author was all about.

      Philip K. Dick, who lived from 1928 to 1982, mostly in California, wrote 36 novels, many with odd titles, and 5 short story collections, winning the Hugo Award in 1962 for The Man in the High Castle. I decided to start with Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of 1974. Set in the futuristic year of 1988, fourteen years beyond the book’s publishing date, Dick imagined a world of incredible technology: 3-D television, cars that fly, and other gee-whiz gadgets that have not come to pass. Like other science fiction writers of his era, Dick got the future at least partially wrong; technology has progressed more slowly than the optimism of the mid-20th century believed. Yet this does not interfere with the enjoyment of reading such a tale, and there are other human truths to consider more interesting than flying cars... Continue