num_pages: 256
description:  Philip K. Dick notoriously charted SF's most dangerous, booby-trapped realities. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is a relatively straightforward tale of paranoid unease at finding the world isn't what it should be.  Jason Taverner is world-famous for his songs &amp; regular TV show. "Thirty million people saw you zip up your fly tonight." "... It's my trademark." Altho this future USA is a grim police state with labor camps in Alaska &amp; Canada, jetsetting Taverner enjoys being one of the winners.  Then he wakes up in a sleazy hotel room, still well-dressed &amp; flush with money, but no longer the famous Jason Taverner. No ID--that's a forced-labor offence. His agent doesn't know him. Nor do his closest friends. He's even vanished from police databanks. Forged documents are needed, hand-drawn by teenaged expert Kathy--one of Dick's most alarming women, a neurotic petty criminal who's also a police informer, who entraps &amp; manipulates Taverner until he's terrified of her. He may deserve it. This self-obsessed megastar inflicts small, unthinking cruelties on virtually every woman he meets.  The title's policeman is another interesting character: Police General Felix Buckman, a mostly good man (fan of Elizabethan songs: "Flow, my teares...") trapped in a horrible system. Is Taverner, the man with no past, a threat? Less so, maybe, than Buckman's amoral sister Alys, who takes special interest in Taverner &amp; seems to have the world's only copies of his music albums... Paranoid wrongness is expertly conveyed &amp; resolved with a typically offbeat SF notion. A sunny finale concludes one of Dick's most approachable novels.--David Langford
language: English
title: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
titlecomplete: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
characters: Alys Buckman, Jason Taverner, Felix Buckman
genres: American, Classics, Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Dystopia, Novels, Science Fiction Fantasy, Literature, Fiction, Science Fiction
ratings_count: 40029
places: The United States of America
awards: awardedAt: 157795200000
name: Hugo Award, awardedAt: 126259200000
name: Nebula Award, awardedAt: 157795200000
name: Locus Award
category: Best Novel, awardedAt: 157795200000
name: John W. Campbell Memorial Award
category: Best Science Fiction Novel
publisher: Gollancz