I was on vacation and this was the second book I read. I came to it without a lot of expectations. I knew Philip K. Dick by reputation but I hadn't spent much time with his novels. This one got under my skin in a way I didn't see coming.
The setup is this: Jason Taverner is a television star, famous to tens of millions of people, and one morning he wakes up and nobody knows who he is. No records, no ID, no trace of him anywhere in a police state that tracks everything. He has to figure out how to exist in a world that has no slot for him. Meanwhile a police general named Felix Buckman is trying to track him down, for reasons that get complicated as the book goes on.
Dick keeps the plot moving but the question underneath it is what drives this book. Who are you when the external proof of you disappears? Taverner's fame, his identity, his whole sense of himself is tied up in being recognized, and when that's gone he doesn't have much left to work with. That hit me harder than I expected. I found myself thinking about my own sense of self while I was reading it, which is not something I usually do with a science fiction novel.
The writing is clean and fast. Dick doesn't linger. The world-building is efficient, just enough to establish the stakes without turning into a tour of the future. The emotional stuff hits in the right way. The ending is what got me.
Recommended.
