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What differentiates humans from androids, if there is any difference at a certain point of technological progress, is the main question of this botchy novel.

Very personal opinions fans of Dicks´work might find offending and nasty.

Prodigy or overrated
There are two options, to see Dick as an ingenious literary prodigy, writing novels so densely packed that they can´t be understood without rereading and diving deeper into the complexity of the stories. Others think that he is completely overrated and I am standing somewhere between the lines, but instead of talking about positive things such as the immense influence Dicks´interest in philosophy in young years and his drug consumption had on writing quite a kind of Lovecraftian Sci-Fi, similar egocentric and weird, but packed with deep thoughts and very difficult to understand innuendos, a kind of writer philosopher in the footsteps of all those bearded thinkers of the past, I want to focus on the aspects I didn´t like so much and didn´t have to think of when reading other Sci-Fi classics.

I read „A scanner darkly� by Dick years ago and had similar thoughts, so here they are again in full redundancy. I promise (lie!), I don´t recycle genre specific realizations as if it was nothing. No, but seriously, I´m somewhat trying to get a more objective view on a writing style I just can´t get warm with. So let´s pimp the old thoughts.

An idea what people with different tastes might like about him
One can see everything in this writing, it´s so vague that one can do any kind of subjective interpretation, it´s an intellectual riddle to find the hidden meaning and everyone can see something else in it. That´s a bit like with special music tastes, subjectively heaven or hell, although there are the universally acclaimed megahits close to everybody loves and other genres that make the ears of most listeners bleed. Asimov, Clarke, Lem, Capek, etc. are multi selling platin global evergreen hits, Heinlein (some works, not all) and Dick are more like strange Scandinavian death metal or industrial instrumental progressive construction noise. Or take food, everybody loves a pizza or (veggie) burger, but who eats Haggis or English food in general? See?

Maybe try out more, longer, and better plots?
The writing style is typical, one red line, no real subplots, the ending is quite kind of unsatisfying (looking at you, Man in the high castle.), it often gets confusing and it´s difficult to differentiate if it´s ingenuity or the authors' illumination or paranoia. All of that are reasons why Dick is more controversial and not so universally acclaimed as a grandmaster of Sci-Fi and I am more on the side of his critics. If one looks at the worldbuilding and complexity of all the other behemoths, Dick seems average, with the only hobbyhorse of dealing with consciousness, reality, and the mentioned topics and some novels feel as if he just wrote them for the money (he needed) without real intrinsic motivation. Not for the art, just for the cash, not even having enough financial space to at least make them good.

Close to fantastic realism, high brow, and Nobel Prize trash.
I would call him, and I hardly ever do that because it is not nice, overrated. In this regard, he is more like the Nobel prize, pseudo-intellectual, overhyped, higher literature stuff and less like pure, true, entertaining fiction. To write not understandable and confusing to seem deep and arcane is much easier than to write entertaining, suspenseful, and yes, true, stereotypical following the rules of the genre. But that´s one of the key elements of why we love certain genres and tinkering around with conventions while writing 60 pages a day under the influence of LSD and amphetamines brings him into the corner of Kerouac and consorts and „first thought best thought� madness. Who needs stinking editing, rewriting, or even planning and plotting before writing? Completely overrated.

No big picture or satisfying conclusion that glues everything together
Dicks´ novels don´t feel coherent, there are no satisfying resolutions, just more and more mysteries and open questions, and nothing gets answered, and much feels unfinished. It's no bad writing, I just wouldn´t highly recommend it, because it are no fun reads, and if Dick would have been a bit soberer and invested more time in developing satisfying, believable plots, that could have been great. What annoys me the most are the great moments and ideas that are followed by unanswered questions, unreliable protagonist behavior, or completely losing the overview of what´s happening. Not to forget the running get of making the reader angry by ridiculous ends and no conclusions.

Look at the real behemoths
A direct comparison with other grandmasters of Sci-Fi and what they have revolutionized shows the flaws even clearer. Heinlein (his good works) with amazing military science fiction, Asimovs´robots and some of the first space operas, Clarkes unbelievable language and subtility, Pohl with his worldbuilding, Gibson with Cyberpunk, not to name all the newer authors, and especially Stanislaw Lem and Karel Capek who are close to unknown. Especially they would have deserved the same and more attention and appreciation as Dick and should be named in a row with Asimov, Clarke, and, somewhat, Heinlein because they wrote revolutionary brilliant at Clarkes´ level and were really funny in other novels and short stories, it´s highly recommended literature, totally unique. All those authors were able to write entertaining, unique, tropeforming, philosophical, and with metaplots that come all together to a satisfying and logical ending, something Dick was incapable of, because he didn´t construct a universe, just fragments not fitting together and of extremely varying quality.

A final, failing attempt to be more objective
Of course, it may be a question of personal taste and preference, but I have read so much great Sci-Fi, hundreds of novels, that it feels inappropriate to name him in a line with those works and I felt really unsatisfied after having read any of his novels that are all closer to psychological mindf***ing, pardon my language, mind penetrating mystery whodunnit whatever crossover hybrid progressive alternative indie crap than to real Sci-Fi and with less real genre-typical elements in them. All the giants were true intellectuals and able to endlessly talk about any tiny detail of their work and its meaning and sense and it would interest me if Dick would have been able to give answers to complex questions about his novels. If he remembered writing them at all.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique: