Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

"Buckman walked toward the black man. The black man did not retreat; he stood where he was. Buckman reached him, held out his arms and seized the black man, enfolded him in them, and hugged him. The black man grunted in surprise. And dismay. Neither man said anything. They stood for an instant and then Buckman let the black man go, turned, walked shakingly back to his quibble."

Philip K. Dick's Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is set in 1984, four years after the totalitarian world of 1984. A dystopic future in which the world is dominated by a police-state, revolutionary students living underground are under attack, most blacks are sterilized and dying off, and rest of society consists of a small elite, a select number of "evolved" people (sixes), and "ordinaries." In some ways, Dick's dystopic future 1988 was not that different from the 1960s and 1970s of his time, with a "racial" problem, divisions of class, totalitarian governments, student movements of 1968, and a counterculture, including LGBT activism (Dick has a penchant for lesbians, perhaps). Like Dick's other fiction, metaphysics and the two obsessions of his, what is being and what makes an authentic human, are the themes waxed upon here. Unfortunately, none of the central characters are likable or redeemable and the writing is, well, not technically the best. I think Dick's prose and dialogue is better written here than in, say, Maze of Death, and the idea of a celebrity waking up one day in a world in which his existence is wiped out is unique, and again we see drugs and mind-altering substances as central to Dick's work, matching the idea presented in Dick's 1978 lecture on reality as limited to the individual, yet intersecting as our perceptive realities converge. 

Of course, Dick's interest in race and hints at his growing religiosity abounds here. Most significantly is the beautifully written scene in which Buckman, the Police General willing to let an innocent man die in order to protect his own position, in a moment of utter vulnerability, connects emotionally with a black man at a gas station. Moments like this, evoking the the tale of the Ethiopian eunuch who converts to Christianity, where differences as extreme as race in a profoundly unequal society, are overcome, albeit briefly, point to an ethic of universal salvation, of being willing to love, like Ruth, a former girlfriend of Jason Taverner, at the point of great risk and grief. As someone who reads the tale of the Ethiopian eunuch along the lines of Byron's suggestive text on early Christianity and color symbolism, Dick is challenging the racist assumptions of our own "reality," which makes up for his questionable or condescending descriptions of women in the work. Sure, Dick may have been part of a disrespected and largely white male circle of science fiction writers, but on the "Negro problem," more progressive than one would assume.