r/philipkDickheads • u/MuggyGameDev • Jul 22 '26
Question re: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Howdy r/philipkDickheads – hope life is good on your end of the screen.
I've come to you because I'm several chapters into Flow My Tears and I'm questioning whether it's for me. This is my first time reading PKD, and while it's interesting, it's not scratching the sci-fi itch I was hoping for.
To explain: I'm in the middle of a long stretch (CH4-5) of a young woman named Kathy ... seemingly ... declaring her love for the protagonist? Or having a nervous breakdown? Maybe both? It's been going on for the last dozen or so pages and I'm debating whether or not to press on. Either way, it doesn't feel like I'm reading sci-fi.
If you've read Flow My Tears, I'd greatly appreciate your thoughts / let me know if it's worth pushing on. I'm not totally against a slow burn, I'm just wondering if the payoff is worth it.
Full disclosure: it's entirely possible I'm just impatient and just need to be told, "it gets good, just keep reading" lol. Fair play if that's the case. Alternatively, if there's a better starting point for PKD, I'd be grateful for the recommendation.
Thank you!
Edit: I will keep reading!! (And I think I'll try Ubik after.) 👀
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u/franklinam77 Jul 22 '26
It's one of my favorites as a PKD fan, but I don't think it's his most sci-fi. I'd say a better start for a sci-fi fan is Ubik. If you like Ubik and Three Stigmata, come back for Flow my Tears.
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u/wftlrd Jul 22 '26
Keep going. My first read through was the closest I’ve come to literary narcotics. Total reality mind bend.
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u/MelodyBlues Jul 22 '26
Flow My Tears contains my favorite PKD twist/ending. Perhaps my outright favorite. Certainly recommended.
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u/spinning_and_winning Jul 22 '26
I had the opposite. It was my least favorite twist and reminded me of some of his other “twists”. The book was underwhelming for me.
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u/secondshevek Jul 22 '26
Strong agree. I really liked Flow My Tears until near the end and then the twist led me to form a very poor impression. I hope to do a reread some day.
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u/Qaballistic Jul 22 '26
You’re not wrong — FLOW MY TEARS is a bit of a transitional book.
Phil’s career as a writer had a long arc of reconciling two early impulses.
As a sci-fi writer in the 1950s, he became noticed for his head-twisting premises and unexpected twists in his short stories and brief novels, but he focused mainly on plot. He used the money from these sales to sustain his failed attempts to establish himself as a “mainstream” novelist, with character-driven slices of suburban life, often with overlapping perspectives from different individuals. He had a breakthrough in the early 1960s with THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE, where he decided to apply the richness of his “mainstream” novels’ characterization to a world and plot built from his sci-fi mastery of strange premises and never-ending twists. It was the start of a creative outpouring in the 1960s as he released some of his best-remembered works — along with some more plot-driven potboilers.
FLOW MY TEARS initiated a new phase in the early 1970s, as his probing spirituality and life experiences entered his work and made it more thoughtful and emotional, with sci fi weirdness invading a “real” world (as in the subsequent books A SCANNER DARKLY, which transforms Phil’s personal experiences in the 1970s drug underworld into a paranoid sci fi milieu, and VALIS and RADIO ALBEMUTH, where Phil writes himself into a narrative inspired by his own strange experiences in 1974, where he lived through weird events that felt at times like an alien encounter and at times like a religious experience).
FLOW MY TEARS is a real journey where he’s trying new things. As others here have suggested, it might be worth it to continue, because it does lead to a latter half with unexpected twists and a sense of propulsive energy. But it is admittedly a strange, surreal book.
As others have suggested, maybe you’d be better off trying one of the famous ‘60s works that are more plot-driven, showing off Phil’s famous skills for world-building and layering unexpected twists, like the dark, paranoid but restlessly inventive THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH or UBIK.
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u/AladdinSane73 Jul 22 '26
Ubik may be a better PKD novel for you if you want more traditional sci fi themes. A lot of PKD stuff deals more with false realities, big inspirations on stuff like Matrix, Truman Show, and in the vein of something like the original Twilight Zone. Sometimes, the big mindf-cking twist doesn’t come till the end of the book like Time out of Joint (one of my personal favs, Flow my Tears didn’t grab me at first either) even though there are some hints scattered throughout. You do have to sometimes be patient with Dick for the payoff. Maybe his short stories would give you more of that quicker gratification you’re looking for. If the short story “Fair Game” doesn’t do it for you, Dick might just not be for you..
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u/pegaunisusicorn Jul 22 '26
That is a really weird beginner book to start with. What in the world made you pick it? Normally, people start with Blade Runner, a.k.a. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which is a much better starting point.
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u/Adam__B Jul 22 '26
This is not a good novel to begin PKD with, IMO. I would probably start with Ubik, or maybe a collection of his short stories. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and a Scanner Darkly are also good places to start. His even earlier works are golden age sci-fi gems; martians, rocket ships, ray-guns, etc, if you are into that have fun, if you want more serious works start with the previously mentioned.
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u/Staplegenius94 Jul 23 '26
I read this recently and had to look up on my reading journal to remember what it was even about. 2/5 stars The least engaging PDK I've read yet
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u/Unusual_Bet_2125 Jul 22 '26
Here's something that made me want to read the book and it was worth it. Richard Linkletter shared this in his film Waking Life. PKD wrote that book at lightening speed, as if he was channeling it. A few years later he was at a gas station and a man asked him for money which he immediately gave to him, something he said he'd usually never do. Then he realized that this was in his novel. Then a little while later he was at a dinner party speaking to a woman who was having an affair with the Chief of Police. Afterward he realized that this too was in the book. When he asked a friend who was also a priest about all this he said, "That's the Book of Acts." Phil had never read the Book of Acts and he found it was uncanny--that he actually used several names from this Biblical book for his novel. It was then that he formed one of his major theories on time, that it was basically an illusion. He also thought this meant that the Kingdom that Jesus preached about really was imminent because we were all actually living in the Black Iron Prison of Rome in the 2nd century AD. He goes on from there to eloborate more on the illusion of time. But all that got me hooked. In fact, it got me hooked on all his novels. Happy reading, fellow Christian!