FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID

American Editions

From the back cover of the 1975 Daw edition

FIRST TIME IN PAPERBACKTHE NEW PHILIP K. DICK NOVEL Jason Taverner woke up one morning to find himself completely unknown. The night before he had been the top-rated television star with millions of devoted watchers. The next day he was just an unidentified walking object, whose face nobody recognized, of whom no one had heard, and without the J.D. papers required in that near future. When he finally found a man who would agree to counterfeiting such cards for him, that man turned outto be a police informer. And then Taverner found out not only what it was like to be a nobody but also to be hunted by the whole apparatus of society. It was obvious that in some way Taverner had become the pea in some sort of cosmic shell gamebut how? And why? Philip K. Dick takes the reader on a walking tour of solipsism's scariest margin in his latest novel about the age we are already half into.

From the back cover of the 1976 Daw edition

PHILIP K. DICK The John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best science fiction of the year is given by a select academic and literary committee which reviews the publishers' own choices. Although Philip K. Dick's novel had been a strong candidate for both the Nebula and Hugo awards,losing out only to Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, it was the winner of this unique award. Brian Aldiss, a member of the committee, writes that at the awards announcements he said that "Dick is one of the greatest living sf novelists. . . that the book is full of beautiful coups de fheatre and marvelous cold moments. . . that the chief cop is perhaps the best of all Dick's portraits of men who maintain the status quo. . . that the book is full of life, juice, color. . . that it's protound and also fun to read." Other reviewers wrote: "A blockbuster of a novel, worthy of an award," -Tucson Daily Wildcat "Another fascinating trip through one of the truly original minds now turning out serious sf." -Don Hutchinson The book is brilliant. . . definitely postgraduate reading." -Berkeley Barb
"Buy this one and brace yourself. . ," -Theodore Sturgeon

From the back cover of the 1977 Daw edition

PHILIP K. DICK
Brian Aldiss wrote of this prize-winning novel: "Dick is one of the greatest living sf novelists. .. the book is full of beautiful coups de theatre and marvelous cold moments. .. the chief cop is perhaps the best of all Dick's portraits of men who maintain the status quo. .. the book is full of life, juice, color. .. it's profound and also fun to read.

From the back cover of the Vintage Edition

On October 11 the television star Jason Taverner is so famous that 30 million viewers eagerly watch his prime-time show. On October 12 Jason Taverner is not a has-been but a never-was -- a man who has lost not only his audience but all proof of his existence. And in the claustrophobic betrayal state of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, loss of proof is synonyms with loss of life.

Taverner races to solve the riddle of his disappearance", immerses us in a horribly plausible Philip K. Dick United States in which everyone -- from a waiflike forger of identity cards to a surgically altered pleasure -- informs on everyone else, a world in which omniscient police have something to hide. His bleakly beautiful novel bores into the deepest bedrock self and plants a stick of dynamite at its center.

Back cover of the Doubleday edition