The inaugural entry of my third annual Bizarro Oprah's Book Club -- which reviews books Oprah would never have on her show -- is quite timely.

A Scanner Darkly by the late prolific science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, has been made into a movie that will come out July 7. Whether you know it or not, you've seen Dick novels and short stories as films before. Total Recall? Minority Report? Blade Runner? Paycheck? These are all based on Dick short stories or novels. But not all of them are good, and most deviate tremendously from their source material. Scanner, written for the screen and directed by Richard Linklater (who will use the same rotoscoping techniques he employed in Waking Life) looks to be bringing us, for the first time, a faithful adaptation of a Dick work.

But we're talking about the novel. Like most Dick novels, it's set in the future, in Los Angeles. This future isn't as unknown to us as the one from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as there are no androids, robots, or the like. But there is surveillance. Bob Arctor lives in an L.A. suburb and hangs around with a bunch of druggie friends. Unbeknownst to them, he actually works for the LAPD's drug unit, doing anonymous, undercover surveillance inside a "scramble suit," a device that camoflauges his voice and appearance so that no one will know he's a cop.

The drug of choice in this future time is something called "Substance D," a drug whose primary effect seems to be making its addicts go crazy. I can't say a lot about the rest of the story, because that would be giving away too much. But I can talk about Dick's epilogue.

At the end of his "drug novel," he says that the book is something of a euology to the various friends he lost to drugs. Dick grew up in Berkeley in the 1960s (and even went to high school with Ursula K. LeGuin), and as a result, did a lot of drugs. In his later years, he decides that drugs were probably not a good idea and offers a list of friends who died or were mentally crippled by drug use.

But Dick is not a moralizer, and he says as much. His epilogue, he says, is a moral statement in the tradition of the statements of Greek tragedies: it is a warning, not a plea. Dick doesn't plead with his readers not to do drugs; rather, he tells them that if they choose to do drugs, they should know that there will be consequences. This, he says, is something that no one told him and his friends back in the 1960s, and as a result, they got a lot of pleasure, but then they got a lot of pain.

Dick also says that he doesn't buy the notion that people can't help being addicted to drugs; all of his friends, he says, chose to do drugs, and in true Existentialist form, he says that they had to live with the consquences of their actions.

Dick died in 1982 from heart failure and lived with drug complications all his life. He was brilliant, but crazy. Allegedly, he said that the stories for his books were beamed into his head by aliens. But he has great ideas, especially the central idea from this book. The "scanner" in the title is a holographic scanner, like a futuristic surveillance camera. Arctor, watching himself on the playback of the scanner's recordings and losing his mind at the same time, wonders whether or not he can truly know himself, since he has no objective frame of reference. He hopes that the scanner can tell him about himself, but that's only if the scanner sees "clearly" -- if the scanner is able to penetrate him and his mind. Or, does the scanner see "darkly" -- does it only show his physical self, unable to penetrate into his mind? Is there no objective way to know who you are? How do you know when you've gone crazy?