"Happiness, he thought, is knowing you got some pills,” according to the narrator of the masterful and much more cohesive A Scanner Darkly. Indeed, we're far from warm puppy-land, despite the fact that we're in Disneyland’s backyard, and a Happy Meal is on every corner:

They had by now, according to the sign, sold the same original burger fifty billion times. He wondered if it was to the same person. Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; It just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze. What there was always more of had been congealed into more of long ago, as if the automatic factory that cranked out these objects had jammed in the on position. Someday, he thought, it’ll be mandatory that we all sell the McDonald’s hamburger as well as buy it; we’ll sell it back and forth to each other forever from our living rooms. That way we won’t have to go outside.

The main futuristic twists are a highly addictive drug that cancels out the link between the hemispheres of the mind, leading to irreversible brain damage; a special suit which allows undercover cops to be completely anonymous; and hologrammatic scanners used by police for surveillance. The main character is a schizophrenic police agent who goes deep under cover as a dealer of the hallucinogen, developing an addiction along the way. So successful is he at forging a secret identity, he eventually lands the assignment to investigate himself. The ensuing development is a surreal journey through a world of splintered identities and paranoia, junkies, and scam artists.

The Martians are always coming...