Jason Tavener, celebrity singer and television personality beloved by millions, wakes up one morning in a dingy hotel room to find that nobody has any idea who he is. His agent has never heard of him; his superstar girlfriend has never heard of him; people in the street don't recognise him. He has no ID and no papers – which in a futuristic police state is a serious problem. First published in 1974, this is a transitional work between his wild amphetamine fueled production of the sixties and his later theological works. In addition to being such a rich text, “Tears” is also a great read. The mystery of how Taverner ends up in an alternate reality is compelling (compare this to the abandoned mystery in “The Game-Players of Titan”), and the solution is fascinating: Alys’ drug use creates a temporary reality for everyone she was thinking about. In "Autofac," a community of people is trying to wrest control of automated production facilities from the machines that run them in the aftermath of a nuclear war. Tears” is cynical – or realist, depending on a reader’s POV – yet it has a surprisingly (but admittedly refreshing) Pollyanna epilog. Taverner not only is found not guilty, but he regains all of his fan base and then some.

For classical composer John Dowland, teardrops open the soul

Governor Ronald Reagan alleged that the Berkeley campus was "a haven for communist sympathisers, protesters, and sex deviants." When Reagan used the National Guard to quell the protest, he rationalised, "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement." Dead Artists Are Better: While he was a respected science fiction author note at least, as respected as a science fiction author could be at the time, which wasn't very much during his lifetime, he only became recognized as a geek icon after his death in 1982. What do you do – where do you go? How do you prove your identity? And more to the point, is Tavener suffering from some kind of hallucination – or, even worse, could it be his memory of being famous that's the hallucination?

Quizás no es tan buen libro como 'Ubik', pero se nota que es del mismo autor, y eso es una garantía, al menos para leer algo bueno, bien escrito y con una trama compleja (tanto que no se si la he comprendido del todo). Because her general taste appalled him, it annoyed him that he himself constituted one of her favorites. It was an anomaly which he had never been able to take apart.” But that isn't necessarily it. Alys soon reveals, "All my libido, my sexuality, is tied up with Felix...We’ve lived an incestuous relationship for five years. We have a child, three years old…Barney is his name." Eldritch Abomination: Rachmael ben Applebaum, the protagonist of Lies, Inc., teleports from Earth to the supposed off-world paradise of Whale's Mouth. Once there he's shot with an LSD dart and sees a giant, angry "cephalopodan cyclops," a pretty clear Shout-Out to H. P. Lovecraft.

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (S.F. MASTERWORKS Book 28) Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (S.F. MASTERWORKS Book 28)

He did not object to the people: he saw them as trapped here, the ordinaries, who through no fault of their own had to remain. They had not invented it; they did not like it; they endured it, as he had not had to. In fact, he felt guilty, seeing their grim faces, their turned-down mouths. Jagged, unhappy mouths.” Evil Smells Bad: In The Divine Invasion, the protagonist finds a poor, lost, talking baby goat. He slowly becomes aware of a terrible stench surrounding it. It turns out the goat is actually the devil Belial. She sighed. "Oh, God, to be in the flyship cruising through the void. That's what I long for: an infinite void. With no human voices, no human smells, no human jaws masticating plastic chewing gum in nine iridescent colors.” Something is struggling to be born in this damaged and inspiring world, and I believe science fiction and its speculative cousins are helping us figure out what it is. It’s pushing the imaginations of fiction writers to bend and twist familiar forms to try to capture the forces that are hurling us into a barely conceivable future. But he simply doesn't tell his stories well, so I doubt I'd ever give him five stars. And Flow My Tears suffers because the protagonist's existential crisis is philosophically less interesting than I've come to expect. Sure, there's a crisis, but it isn't philosophical or psychological, and only existential in a superficial manner.Masquerade: In "Adjustment Team", the story's protagonist stumbles into a world that is in effect behind the scenes of the observable world where omnipotent beings alter the flow of reality to fit some kind of ineffable design. He opts to subject himself to Laser-Guided Amnesia at the end of the story. For all except the totally successful, being a professional writer is a hell of a life, which I would only wish cheerfully on people who are cruel to animals.