Stephen Burt writes:

‘God knew how many pills he himself had swallowed during the last decade,’ Dick says of his hero in Martian Time-Slip. It seems hard to believe that someone who took so many pills at the start of the 1960s could be taking even more by the decade’s end, but Dick was: ‘a thousand tablets of Methedrine a week’, Emmanuel Carrère says in his biography, ‘and 40 mg of Stelazine a day – not to mention the various little fixes . . . that he could never turn down.’ By 1970 Dick lived in the house whose highs and lows (mostly lows) he depicted in A Scanner Darkly, his grim attempt at a farewell to drug culture. The novel moves slowly, and feels too much like a memoir, until it reaches the rehab centre (X-Kalay in real life, New-Path in the novel) where the second half of A Scanner takes place. Rehab, a self-obsessed refuge with its own odd rules, turns out to be far too much like a long drug trip, and both, for Dick, are too much like SF itself: ‘Once you go in . . . you’re dead to the world.’

(LRB 3 July 2008)

Library of America | hardback 1128 pp. |ISBN: 9781598530254