Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

Philip K. Dick notoriously charted SF’s most dangerous, booby-trapped realities. Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is a relatively straightforward tale of paranoid unease at finding the world isn’t what it should be.
Jason Taverner is world-famous for his songs & regular TV show. “Thirty million people saw you zip up your fly tonight.” “… It’s my trademark.” Altho this future USA is a grim police state with labor camps in Alaska & Canada, jetsetting Taverner enjoys being one of the winners.
Then he wakes up in a sleazy hotel room, still well-dressed & flush with money, but no longer the famous Jason Taverner. No ID–that’s a forced-labor offence. His agent doesn’t know him. Nor do his closest friends. He’s even vanished from police databanks.
Forged documents are needed, hand-drawn by teenaged expert Kathy–one of Dick’s most alarming women, a neurotic petty criminal who’s also a police informer, who entraps & manipulates Taverner until he’s terrified of her. He may deserve it. This self-obsessed megastar inflicts small, unthinking cruelties on virtually every woman he meets.
The title’s policeman is another interesting character: Police General Felix Buckman, a mostly good man (fan of Elizabethan songs: “Flow, my teares…”) trapped in a horrible system. Is Taverner, the man with no past, a threat? Less so, maybe, than Buckman’s amoral sister Alys, who takes special interest in Taverner & seems to have the world’s only copies of his music albums…
Paranoid wrongness is expertly conveyed & resolved with a typically offbeat SF notion. A sunny finale concludes one of Dick’s most approachable novels.–David Langford