The City & the City
Hugo (tied), World Fantasy, Clarke and BSFA winner — a near-sweep — and the book that carried Miéville furthest into the literary mainstream; its 'unseeing' entered critical vocabulary as shorthand for trained urban blindness.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is A Scanner Darkly about?
Undercover narcotics agent Fred wears a scramble suit that hides his identity even from his handlers — which is awkward, because his assignment is to surveil Bob Arctor, who is himself. As Substance D severs the hemispheres of his brain, agent and addict stop being able to recognise each other in the surveillance footage. Dick built the novel from his own years in the Californian drug culture, and the famous afterword — a list of dead and damaged friends, himself included — makes plain this is barely science fiction at all. His funniest dialogue and his saddest book.
Why it matters
BSFA Award winner, Dick's most personal novel, and the basis of Linklater's rotoscoped 2006 film. The scramble suit is the great pre-digital image of dissolved identity.
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One of the most-taught novels in the English-speaking world and a perennially renewable warning.