Reviewed edition: DAW Books, 451-UW1166-150, 208 pages, $1.50, 1975/1974.

If someone hasn’t told you by now, the most recent Philip K. Dick book, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, is amazing fiction. For several years now, I have looked forward to the release of each Dick book and have had the goods delivered every time. That’s the straight forward truth too.

While being nothing truly out of the ordinary, Flow My Tears is fresh and skillfully animated by Dick’s practiced hand. The characters are distinctly Dick; their pacing, thoughts, speech is much like many of his people have exhibited in novels past, yet the type he works most comfortably with. His people seem to defy the norms that might restrain their fictionalized lives; meaning, the characterz are consistently plausible and their actions reinforce their strange human traits. Christ! After all that, I mean the characters are real! Jason Taverner is a popularity gorging, self-centered man, and thus, Jason Taverner. Police General Felix Buchman is a sly, dedicated enforcement official, and thus, Felix Buch-

man. Alys is an authority-defying sexual pervert, and thus . . . It goes on down the line, but those few words describe the characters in Flow My Tears about as well as you describe any joe-schmoe off the street. Take any of the book characters and twist the personality 45 degrees, you still have that same person but with a different outlook; an unfathomed facet that you didn’t have before. Twist two more maybe three more times and you have a Dick character. That is human and out of the ordinary.

Within the book, the author seems to plug himself into the characters’ minds at times, though. There are sections where characters lay themselves bare emotionally, intellectually, spilling out tremendously structured opinions about the very difficult subject of love. It appears, during these sections, that suddenly the character’s mind is over-rode by the author, spews forth this stream of structured emotion, then returns to normal. Not to be nit-picking, but I am. I can’t think of very many people that can be eloquent and analogously luscious while bleeding their hearts.

Solipsism is a word used in the book. It’s there as a possible key to the explanation for the events occuring during the course of the book. Solipsism: the belief that the mind is the only reality. Stop and deal with that a while. If that were a commonly accepted belief, we would have to give the mind about fifteen times the mental power we already accredit to it. To create such a complete environment inside the mind and only for one entity; for yourself. Imagine your mind creating me to write these words you’re reading now, only to disappear into limbo until your mind needed me again. Now take that thought of single minds and add another mind or two. Then those minds would use each other, changing each world slightly between them. Your mind creates another mind in your same position to work on your life, changing your environment slightly.

That’s the kind of thing this book throws around in your ahead. Then any thought or interpretation becomes fair-play within the context of the novel. It’s very entertaining, very fun, and very thought provoking.

Books like Flow My Tears are curiously arousing, in a dangerous sort of way, like being curious about how hot a flame feels, or shooting up Drano, but in a common-sense way also. This fast-paced, fast-reading novel is top-flight entertainment for the reader who likes doing pleasant things to his/her mind.