Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (Mandarin Edition)

By Philip K. Dick

《流吧！我的眼泪》

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said grapples with many of the themes Philip K. Dick is best known for— identity, altered reality, drug use, and dystopia—in a rollicking chase story that earned the novel the John W. Campbell Award and nominations for the Hugo and Nebula.
 
10月11日，杰森•塔夫纳还是一个拥有三千万粉丝的大明星；10月12日，他却躺在一家破旅馆的房间里，还被抹去了所有个人资料。在一个缺乏身份证明就是犯罪的国度里，他不得不在混沌中摸索，全力追踪事实真相。小说描述了一个处于国民警卫队和警察专制统治下的社会，内中交织着名人效应、基因改造、时空扭曲和泛滥毒品，探索了爱和人性的本质。于1975年获得坎贝尔奖，并获雨果奖和星云奖提名。

• Language: 中文
• Publisher: Yilin
• Release date: Feb 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9787894000750

Philip K. Dick

Over a writing career that spanned three decades, PHILIP K. DICK (1928–1982) published 36 science fiction novels and 121 short stories in which he explored the essence of what makes man human and the dangers of centralized power. Toward the end of his life, his work turned to deeply personal, metaphysical questions concerning the nature of God. Eleven novels and short stories have been adapted to film, notably Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly, as well as television's The Man in the High Castle. The recipient of critical acclaim and numerous awards throughout his career, including the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards, Dick was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2005, and between 2007 and 2009, the Library of America published a selection of his novels in three volumes. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

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Reviews for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (Mandarin Edition)

[electrascaife · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This one feels like it's in the same world at A Scanner Darkly (Is it meant to be? I should look that up...), and that's a good thing, as I enjoyed both of them quite a bit. Certainly not a happy read, either one, but well written and cleverly done.

[big_bang_gorilla · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book has the greatest title of all time, and its premise is promising enough, but on the whole I didn't find it compelling reading. The book posits that America's most popular television personality finds that all recognition of him has disappeared overnight. He encounters many armchair ontologists who attribute this variously to him either being delusional or under the influence of narcotics either before or after this transformation. And then he finds that the police have become interested in him, for reasons which were never clear to me, though perhaps that's the point. The author's reveal, fueled by a load of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo, was lost on me, but the basic misfire here is that the antagonist is more interesting and likable than the protagonist, and the stream of minor characters, mostly female, who drop in along the way for a chapter or two, are more interesting by far than either. Add in that the book is set in the far future of 1988 and that Dick's attempt at futuristic dialogue struck me as sounding a lot like Saturday Night Live's "Wild and Crazy Guys" of the seventies, and for me, the problems swamped the book's undoubted merits.

[ufkls · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Bücher von Phil zu lesen bedeutet jedesmal fast den Verstand zu verlieren.

[parthurbook · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Anything by Dick carries the enormous weight of his reputation with it - visionary, philosopher, maverick, shaman. Added to which, this novel about identity, policing and perception has the most suggestive of titles. Unfortunately whille there's much to admire in the simplicity of Dick's writing, it's a rather empty affair that left me somewhat undernourished after a week's reading. For completists only.

[delta351 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Flow My Tears is one of the favorite PDK books. It is set in an alternate future police state in America. he introduces some interesting concepts like a Second Civil War, harsh handling of the black population, and his usual blend of mentally ill characters w drug problems. He also adds a feature of the book that all colleges are underground, surrounded by police containment eams, and students are treated like criminals.I think it is similar but better put together than Scanner Darkly. I caught a hint of Demolished Man also, without the high drama ending. Definitely well written.

[pondlife_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is quite a good novel, but not one of PKD's best.The main problem for me was that the ending just seemed too far fetched. Drugs often feature in PKD novels, and parallel dimentions or alternative realities are common SF concepts, but the was these two things were combined just didn't seem at all convincing to me. In fact, it felt like a deus ex machina.Perhaps I missed something, but the epilogue seemed totally unnecessary: it didn't really add anything to the story.Currently, I rate Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, A Scanner Darkly, and Ubik higher than Flow My Tears.

[drardavis · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Having also read Dick’s Exegesis this story made a bit more sense than it might have otherwise. As the main character, Jason Taverner, admits near the end, he was “living in a world made of rubber. Everything bounced. Changed shape as soon as it was touched or even looked at.” But just when you agree that it was all a paranoid dream, Dick comes at you with an explanation. Of course, the explanation starts off sounding reasonable, blending drugs, neuroscience, the physics of alternate realities, and more until the explanation gives you and the “policeman” a headache. But if you really can’t make sense of it all, just enjoy the passing of the scenes. I especially liked the wall-to-wall carpet depicting “Richard M. Nixon’s final ascent into heaven amid joyous singing above and wails of misery below.”

[antao-3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Flow, my tears, fall from your springs! Exiled forever, let me mourn; Where night's black bird her sad infamy sings, There let me live forlorn. Down vain lights, shine you no more!No nights are dark enough for thoseThat in despair their lost fortunes deplore.Light doth but shame disclose.Never may my woes be relieved,Since pity is fled;And tears and sighs and groans my weary daysOf all joys have deprived.From the highest spire of contentmentMy fortune is thrown;And fear and grief and pain for my desertsAre my hopes, since hope is gone.Hark! you shadows that in darkness dwell,Learn to contemn lightHappy, happy they that in hellFeel not the world's despite. In “Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said”, taken from “Flow My Tears” by John DowlandThis is one of the books that changed me in ways I’m still trying to come to terms with, and I’ve read it more than 30 years ago. At the time I lacked the tools to properly tackle this. That’s why I’ve been wanting to re-read it and analyse it in the light what I currently know. I still remember the feeling I had the first time I read it back in the day. Mind-boggling to say the least. 30 years later, can I define what reality is? Doesn’t reality belong to the subjective objectivity realm, i.e., isn’t it the highest degree of objectivity possible for a human being? Reality can only be a subjective objectivity as it falls back on whether I chose to accept it as the truth or deny it completely. This means objective reality does exist, but I can only perceive it with my own perception filters. I have to decide what is reality as best I can, and may choose to assert some prepositions even though everyone else denies it (Copernicus comes to mind). It’s to my advantage to seek to make my perception filters as little distorting as possible, but I doubt I could ever achieve that completely, because I’m the product of my own culture to start with, to say the least. This leads me to the question whether uncertainty in reality is a psychological phenomenon. Does it exist only in the mind, and not in the world? We’re dangerously delving into the quantum universe continuum…Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, dudes who I think knew what they talking about. At the time I knew zilch about these matters. Now I only know little bit more. Now I know reality does not exist until it’s measured. Regardless of that, I firmly believe in the fact that asymptotic convergence theorems are meaningful. Even in the realm of quantum physics, I believe that through asymptotic convergence I can get very meaningful on some states of information, but that state of information is sometimes not maximal, i.e., deterministic for observables. When the best I can do is some probabilistic function over observables, it's because I've left out essential details, not because the observables are random. That’s the nature of the quantum world for you. Quantum mechanics tells me I only perceive at most a tiny sliver of reality. The rest is just fuzzy stuff…The direct consequence of this is that the world of our perception is just a projection of a fantastical high dimensional space continuum. The space of all those space continuums has its existence and properties quite independent from our observations, i.e., from the “objective” reality as perceived by us. But once again, this n-dimensional space is unavailable to us — we can only see the ripple effects it has within our much smaller 3-dimensional space.One of my plans for 2017 is to re-read some of my old-time favourites, being Phil Dick one of them. As I was reading “Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said” I kept thinking and trying to pinpoint what makes Phil Dick the writer he was. A hasty analysis tells me he had a peculiar way of delivering information (what some of us call “the act of writing” …). Dick usually set up an ecosystem that seems pretty much ordinary, except for a few tiny, bitsy details that on first reading go unnoticed (e.g., remember the electric animals in “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”); everything else about the universe created and depicted is relatively unchanged. This way of keeping things down-to-earth except for a few changes creates a bounded sense of realism in his writing; this is a very smart way to tell me not dismiss anything unusual. He uses this approach of make-believe realism to uproot his own philosophies on a subject into my head. What he does is he gives the main character a common frame-of-reference on something, and utilizes the other characters to change the main character’s frame-of-reference to what the minor characters are thinking. He does this with Taverner in “Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said” regarding love. Pretty smart for a SF writer, don’t you think? Many Mundane Fiction writers are incapable of doing this successfully.Coming to the theme of what reality is. Reality is being able to find beauty in Andreas Scholl singing several John Dowload ayres, particularly “Flow my Tears” while reading this novel.

[crazymamie · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I picked up Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, which was calling to me from the bedroom bookcase. And I am so glad I did - very good. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep still remains my favorite, but this was a very enjoyable ride. I like how just when you think you might know where Dick is going, he takes you in a completely different direction. His stuff his clever and innovative and edgy. And it holds up - this was written in 1970. A futuristic dystopian that could be written today. I like the kind of nebulous reality that Dick brings to all of his stories - there is clear definition in some parts while others remain just out of our grasp. Recommended if you like his writing. If you have not read anything by him, I would not start here - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep would make an excellent entry, or try some of his short stories to get a feel for whether or not he is for you.

[sylak_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Good science fiction sends your mind racing off in many directions all at once and at differing speeds. You'll be focused on an immediate situation involving you questioning your own morality, or accepting a hitherto alien concept, whilst your mind quietly unravels a theme that was presented to you in a previous chapter. Flow My Tears, the Policeman said is just such a story.I had absolutely no idea what to expect before reading it except that I was following a good recommendation; and as it turned out it worked out for the best. I found myself totally immersed in the plot. At times it felt to me like reading parts of William F. Nolan's 'Logan's Run' and Dick's 'We Can Remember It for You Wholesale' in others.Some of the chapters gave me a lot to think about such as chapter eleven when Ruth Rae discusses her feelings of grief and loss with Jason Taverner. Little things like that sit in the back of your mind as other things overlap to form a rich cocktail of flavours that make this for me a deeply satisfying novel.As you can see, I've chosen not to give anything away concerning the actual story; so, please do enjoy.

[booksfordinner · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very good. Love PKD, yet haven't read all that much (Palmer Eldritch is the only other one I can think of). Will have to read more. Philosophy and character studies disguised as science fiction. No one like him.

[dmsteyn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, Philip K. Dick has a written a strange book. Although a science-fiction novel, Flow My Tears can scarcely be called a “hard” sci-fi book, to use the genre jargon. It is set in the future, but not particularly far in the future, and although it does contain certain technological innovations (e.g. “quibbles”, or flying cars) Dick does not lavish too much attention on these. They are just there, givens without justification or explanation. Dick is, however, pre-eminently a science-fiction writer of ideas, and those are certainly present in Flow My Tears. It is a very thoughtful, even sad, book, in which the plot is somewhat subordinate to the meaning.The book starts off by introducing us to the main character, Jason Taverner. He is a famous celebrity, and has a syndicated TV-show, watched by 30 million viewers a week. Jason is also a “six”, the product of a genetic-modification program that has made him smarter and more beautiful than the average human being. Jason’s life seems idyllic, but one senses that he is lonely for all that. Then, something strange happens. Jason is attacked by one of his former flames, and rushed to hospital. But when he wakes up, he isn’t in the hospital. Rather, he finds himself in a trashy hotel room, unable to explain how he got there. All of his identity cards are gone, which is a big problem in the security state in which he lives. Not only are they gone, but his identity itself seems to be gone; no-one recognises him, a world-famous entertainer. Jason needs to find out what has happened to him, and the rest of the novel is concerned with how he accomplishes this.But not really, or at least, not mostly. Although there is a plot, in which Jason gets caught up in the police-web tightening around him, this doesn’t really matter as much as one would think. The more important aspects of the novel are Dick’s ruminations on identity and loneliness. Dick asks us to place ourselves in Jason’s position: who are we really, and what really matters in our lives? Existence for its own sake? Making a mark in history? Or the connections we make with others? Jason meets various characters, all of whom are struggling with these problems. My favourites were Kathy, the police informant who makes contraband identity documents, and the policeman of the title, Felix Buckman, who is actually a Police General in charge of the Los Angeles department. Both of them are sad, melancholic characters, with Kathy working for the police to free her (probably deceased) husband from a labour camp, and Felix worrying about his drug-addicted sister.Dick paints a bleak picture of humanity. In his future, black people have become a protected minority, and homosexuals, although tolerated, are viewed with contempt. That gives a flavour of what Dick describes, but not a very accurate one, as Dick handles these issues quite sensitively. One has to admit that Dick isn’t the greatest prose-stylist, with his writing being workmanlike at best. But his ideas are luminous and serious, and he uses science-fiction tropes to address them in interesting and imaginative ways. The book could have done without its epilogue, in which Dick reductively enumerates what happens to each of the characters after the story, weakening the impact of the novel. But it’s a minor fault, and some might enjoy reading about the further exploits of the characters. I also realise that Dick was trying to accomplish something other than merely telling what happens afterwards, but it isn’t quite successful.So, on the whole, a fascinating book of ideas. I read this years ago (well, more than a decade ago, at least), yet I still enjoyed it now. A great read for those interested in seeing how science-fiction can be emotionally mature and affecting.

[sebastianhagelstein · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Jason Taverner is a popular television personality and singer who loses his identity and suddenly experiences the underbelly of the oppressive society he lives in. The ending has a real science fiction twist and takes you by surprise.

[dwfree · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've never been a huge sci-fi or fantasy reader, but I do dig PKD. This is one of his best.

[m_mozeleski · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An interesting story about the mutability, or immutability, of human nature. Worth a read.

[blankreg_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This is the book I read that finally solidified my feeling that I don't like PKD. For one thing, I don't really enjoy the pathologically dystopian view in his stories where every human society seems not just corrupt but irredeemable to the core. However, I also realize this was the fashion in the mid '70s so, while it's not to my liking, I can take that part of it as n historical artifact. The thing that pushed me over the edge to disliking PKD entirely-- once I realized it was his style and not just in a few stories and novels-- can be summed up in one phrase: "Wall-to-wall exposition." Hardly a paragraph goes by when the reader is not preached at, spoken down to, or forced to listen to a boring character monologue which explains concepts, and forces the story points home with a tone that manages to be stilted, condescending, pretentious, and contrived all at once.But I made it through, so that's something.

[wirkman_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An amazing short novel by Philip K. Dick. It's been twenty years or more since I've read it -- could it be thirty? -- but it still resonates. This is one of his best Altered Reality novels, and it would make a great movie.

[grunin_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The basic story is familiar -- man wakes up into a world where his existence has been erased -- but I don't know if Dick was the first to write it. In any case, it's a good elaboration on the premise, but with a weak resolution.If anyone else had written it, I'd give it an extra star, but this just isn't as good as, say, A Scanner Darkly.

[lyndatrue · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As usual, PKD knocked my socks off. It's amazing to realize how very long ago this was written, and yet it seems timely, and timeless, all at once. The only startling note in the whole book was the mention of "Darvon" as a painkiller. It's a great read, from beginning to end, and I had almost forgotten what a rich vocabulary PKD had, and how quickly he could draw you in.

[pool_boy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Enjoyable read, but I honestly think the ending (prior to the epilogue) was kind of unnecessary. It's a quick read and you have to love the author's brevity.

[dbsovereign · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fought with myself over whether to include this or include _Man In the High Castle_ as my favorite of Dick's sci-fi novels. Ultimately I chose this one because I can relate to it more easily. Both are essential Dick. If you have ever felt really paranoid, you'll be able to relate too.

[jnwelch_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a small gem from one of sci-fi's most accomplished and interesting writers, Philip K. Dick. Movies based on his books keep coming out, with Blade Runner being the most famous. A new Total Recall is being released this year, and others include Minority Report and Adjustment Bureau, the latter a favorite of my wife's and mine.OK, enough about movies, other than I could see Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said being filmed, too, if one squeam-inducing plot thread were changed.Jason Taverner is a genetically enhanced Six, top of the heap, and the host of a hugely popular TV show. He's also full of himself and a womanizer. Our world has become a police state, with tabs kept on every citizen and problematics sent to forced labor camps. When one of his abandoned trystees expresses her anger and injures him with an ugh-toss, he ends up waking up in a world that doesn't know him. His fame has disappeared. His identity is missing from all databanks. In a police state, he's a disaster waiting to happen. What to do?His quest to first acquire some identity so he can survive, and to eventually recover his own identity, connects him with some memorable characters. They include a 19 year old ID forger and police informant who craves his bod and may do him in, an old flame who likes to wax philosophical, and the whacko sister of a police captain who may be behind all that has happened.Dick is a good writer, with a great imagination. The police state is a convincing backdrop, and the storyline is irresistible: why is his reality so changed? Will he be able to regain his identity? Will he be betrayed, chewed up and spit out into a forced labor camp? Along the way we have characters engage in deep discussions about grief, love, life, death, and what exactly is reality. Written in the 70s, drugs play a role in opening eyes and also potentially destroying lives. A bit of disturbing societal racism at the beginning comes full circle at the end.The author does provide an occasional clunker, e.g. a character making a remark in "his doglike panting voice." But mainly the story zips along, packing a remarkable amount of ideas, developments and story into approximately 200 pages.I also learned a good Latin phrase from it: De gustibus non disputandum est. In matters of taste there's no dispute. This may not be your cuppa, but for those who are intrigued by this sort of thing, it's a cinematic trip with a master.

[ahs7wolfy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What happens when you wake up and find out you no longer officially exist when you live in a police state? This is what Jason Taverner, a singer who also has his own TV show, finds the answer to when, after an encounter with a former protégé, he wakes up in a flea-pit hotel room with no identity cards and where no-one, for the first time in 20 years, recognises his face. His agent totally disavows all knowledge of him as does his current lover and fellow singer, Heather Hart. Along with Heather, Jason has another secret that if anyone found out would see them sent to a forced labour camp. They are Sixes, the product of top secret government experiments 40 years earlier but now there's not many of them left.Is the memory of his life up until this point just a sham and he's gone insane? Is it a plot to discredit him? Has someone found out his secret and now it's just a matter of time until his internment at one of those camps? Jason sets out to get some answers and also to get his life back along the way.The feel of this book is very reminiscent of The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester examining the question of who a person really is. Written in 1974 and set in a 1980's dystopian future some of the technology is a little dated but the amount of ideas contained in this short novel more than make up for that. This is a very quick and readable story with interesting characters but does have a slightly weak ending but very enjoyable all the same.

[electricray · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Philip K Dick was an unusual science fiction writer in that, while he tended to write in (usually dystopian) alternative universes, the "space opera" aspect - the act of universe creation (which so obsessed Tolkien, for example) isn't what interests him. If Star Wars was the ultimate piece of fantasy escapism, with a ludicrous morality play veneer thrown in for an emotional punch at the end, then Dick's works tend to exist at the other end of the spectrum: the world is described incidentally, the ingenious devices and drugs means of locomoting and teasing out the existential questions they pose the characters. There is always little bit of scientific hocus pocus thrown in, but never for the sake of it: it is always a means to crystallising Dick's theme. So Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? isn't, really, a futuristic gumshoe PI noir about killing replicants (though it functions pretty well on that level) but an examination of what really makes us human: what *is* empathy, and what consequences would there be for the way we relate to each other if we could achieve it artificially? And here, in Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, Dick ruminates on identity: what am *I*, if not a collection of relationships, impulses and memories in other people's minds? - and reality - what, when it comes to it, is the world itself, if not a collection of relations, impulses and memories in *my* brain? What if we really could alter brains to change these things - how would that alter the way we see ourselves and the world? How, given the limitations of the above view, do we know we cannot? These are big themes, not the sort of thing that science fiction, in the main, handles awfully well. But because Philip Dick is so concerned with his characters, all of whom feel real, human, fallible and contrary - that is, they react in ways we can relate to - it is easy to forget this is a science fiction book at all (it is a matter of record that Philip K Dick despaired of his pigeonholing as a writer of pulp fiction). Flow My Tears is characteristic of Philip Dick in other respects (not the least its idiosyncratic title!). As in Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and A Scanner Darkly, narcotics - Dick's equivalent of the red and blue pills from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - play a significant role, and his paranoia, by 1974 well documented and approaching the psychotic, is well on display. Dick tended to portray his futures as governed by dystopian states not out of political disposition or dramatic impetus but, I suspect, because he believed that's where the world was inevitably headed. Flow my tears isn't a perfect novel - the motivations of secondary characters aren't always easy to divine and it's difficult to know which of Jason Taverner and Felix Buckman is meant to be the "emotional axis" of the book - it feels as though it should be Taverner, but Buckman is drawn as a far more complex and carefully worked out character. Ultimately I would not put it in the same category as The Man in the High Castle or Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, but it's certainly readable and entertaining and linear in a way that later novels weren't.

[systemicplural · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My favourite Dick novel to date (I've read about 6).An obnoxious yet famous celebrity wakes up after surgery to find out that no one knows who he is any more. Set in a dystopian police state the novel follows Jason in his increasing desperation to find out why no one knows who he is.The setting is dated (set in a future world of 1988), with some of the technology long having be superseded, whilst others are still well out of reach. Yet this is just backdrop to the real story so does not really matter.Well worth the read, only Dicks tripped out mind could think up this story.

[theboylatham_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Eight out of ten.

Jason Taverner is a world famous celebrity - his TV show is watched by weekly by 35 million people. One morning he wakes up and no-one knows who he is...

[drinkallsolution · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

My favorite Philip K. Dick novel. It is as beautiful as the title might suggest. As always, his work transcends the sci fi label and is far more than mere genre fiction. If the story appeals to you even in the slightest, you will burn through this in a day.

[gingerbreadman_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

On Wednesday, Jason Taverner says good night to the 30 million viewers of his weekly TV show. On Thursday morning he wakes up in a ratty motel, to find out he doesn’t exist. Not only are all his identification cards gone, but his name isn’t in any files, his hit records were never recorded and nobody recognizes him, not even his close friends. In a future society after a second American civil war, where spies and tracking devices are everywhere, Taverner has to try and find out what the hell has happened to his life, while running from the police who are convinced he’s somehow managed to erase himself from all government files as part of the conspiracy of a genetic elite.One of the cool things about Dick is that he never saves on ideas. Even with a plot that involves questioning the very fabrics of reality in a oppressing state (Matrix, anyone?), he still tosses some killer sponges, psychic hotel clerks, subterranean universities and secret phone sex networks into the mix. And, which I also love about his work, a tender quality. A story about a rabbit which thought it was a cat gets several pages in a slim book, and clumsy, awkward meetings between strangers get much more room than action filled escapes. The tone of this book is melancholy more than anything else.

[darushawehm-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Four to five stars for great ideas and beautiful unironic emotion. Two to three stars for really clunky writing and weaving storytelling.

[weird_o · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

P. K. D.'s Flow My Tears Said the Policeman is a decent page-turner, but not completely satisfying. The book was written in the mid-70's, but set in 1988, so it's "in the future." The central figure is a celeb who wakes up in a flea-bag hotel, a big wad of cash in his pocket, but no ID. And he quickly discovers that NO ONE KNOWS WHO HE IS. And of course, he's living in a police-state kind of society where ID of multiple types is essential. But there are NO files on him anywhere in the whole world, not even in the colonies on the Moon. That of course makes him a subject of interest to the authorities, who want to know how he expunged the international data banks of his personal data. It's not spoiling anything to say that it all works out in the end. Pretty much.I get a kick out of the mix of technological forecasting that's stirred into such stories. In this depiction of 1988, people travel around in vehicles called "quibbles" that fly, taking off and landing vertically. There seem to be traffic lanes in the sky, but no traffic controllers. There seem to be streets, and people park their quibbles at the curb. Taxis are robotic quibbles, and once at your destination, you can't exit ('cause the door won't open) until you pay up. The authorities have endless data bases, digital dossiers on ev...er...y...body, that can be accessed quicktime. The phones have video-screens so you can see who you are talking to. They've got microdot tracking devices that can be hidden in a person's clothing, and even supremely miniaturized nuclear bombs (called "seeds") that can be implanted under your skin and triggered remotely if you...uh...you know...drift out of line.All this BUT, vinyl discs are state-of-the-art for recorded music. All the phones are linked by wires. Wanna call your buddy? Get out some coin and find a pay phone. The computer mavens still depend on punch cards.