Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

What if you woke up tomorrow and everyone around you had gone mad? How would you know you were the one who was sane? To an extent it's a bit of a “first year university philosophy class” kind of question, but that's kind of the situation that celebrity Jason Taverner finds himself in this novel. It goes beyond that, though - what if everyone was sharing in the same mass delusion that you didn't exist? Could you really still say that you exist? Is reality more than a set of agreed-upon hallucinations?

PKD's work has been riffed on so often in the past 25 years (both in print and film) that those questions have started to seem a little cliche, but the way that he's asking them and the answers that he comes up with tend to be more satisfactory than the usual version of them.

As much as I enjoyed the latter portion of this book, it has some fairly serious pacing problems - I found the first 2/3 of it to be somewhat plodding, but once it reached that “aha!” moment that most PKD books have, it got REALLY good.