A Scanner Darkly

Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly begins as a standard American nightmare. It is California, 1994, and society is divided between the straights in their fortified apartment complexes, and the acid-heads who are hooked on a new drug of unknown origin, substance D (for Death). Most of the detritus of the 1970s survives unchanged but surveillance technology has been advanced by the invention of the "scramble suit", which reduces the appearance of the wearer to a nebulous blur, and is compu...