Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
by Philip K. Dick; ISBN: 0-679-74066-X
Week 49 (July 14, 2003)

       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.

      As with Minority Report and Blade Runner, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said visualizes a bleak, nightmare world of the future where the police control every aspect of every citizen’s existence. The story begins with Jason Taverner, a famous TV star with 30 million viewers who wakes up one morning to find that his identity is completely erased. He is more than undone. Suddenly he has gone from fame to utter anonymity, a man with no record that he ever existed – not even his closest lovers have any memory of him. Jason is a superior being, a handful of genetically modified humans known as “sixes,” but this does not help him much as he sets out to discover what has happened to him.

      In Philip K. Dick’s United States, Civil War has been raging; there are still pockets of “students” living in underground pockets in various cities. To safely navigate this world, Jason needs to buy himself the proper identity cards, a quest which takes him to a waiflike forger, a pretty young woman who may, or may not, be a police spy. Nothing is at all certain in this world, who is spying on whom, who can be trusted. In fact, Jason is unable to stay in hiding long before his circumstances come to the attention of Police General Felix Buckman, a high Los Angeles official who is living in an incestuous relationship with his sister and who sets about in a cat-and-mouse fashion to bring Jason in.

      Don’t look to Philip K. Dick for any high literary purpose; this is pulp fiction in the original meaning of the phrase, science fiction born from cheap magazines of the 1950s in which writers had to spin a tale as fast as they were able. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is a book you can gobble up in three or four hours, an ultimately quick read – vintage sci-fi that is a great deal of fun if you don’t take it too seriously. And as far as the future is concerned, we all know – don’t we? – that the police in the United States will never have the power of a General Buckman to know every minute detail about each citizen: every credit card transaction we make, what we read, what we watch on TV, our politics, even our sexual inclinations. This, happily, is only the realm of science fiction?