A Scanner Darkly was published in 1977 and is set in 1994. It is thus a novel of the near future, and lacks the crazy reality-distortions of Dick's earlier novels of the far future, and the hectically driven, breakneck plots those distortions fuel. The chief item of technology by which the world of the novel differs from our world is the ‘scramble suit’ (discussed below). In Dick's oeuvre, A Scanner Darkly is the novel that offers the most thorough conspectus of the nature of postmodern society, with emphasis on the social. It is not the dissolution of the boundaries between subject and object, nor the groundlessness of knowledge that is highlighted here, but the kind of social group and social experience that is significant of the conditions of postmodernity. What shapes events, characters, behaviours and things at the deepest level in this case is not dissolution, or stagnation, but something like deprivation: a narrowing down and stripping away.

Dick is here, as he sees it, writing an anti-drug novel; he is writing about what happened to himself and his friends. The different purpose and setting of the novel have prompted a different take on characteristic features of Dick's imagined universe. It's as if we have a recoil into reason: let's slow down and take a steadier look at the circumstances of life in postmodern society. Let's detail, item by item. A slowing, and thence a nightmarish stopping of time is, however, what overtakes the novel's characters. The steady pace of the narration has to be seen in relation to what happens to the people whose story is being told. In the end, this is Dick's most powerful narrative of the loss of differentiation: Substance D, the drug that all are seeking, is with them all along, and Substance D is, obviously, Death—the catch being that they don't find death in the sense of an ending, but reach a stalled cessation of time and experience, exactly what was feared but averted for Manfred in Martian Time-Slip.

Between the 1950s and the 1990s, cultural critics had to revise their ideas of the social totality, and even to question whether the concept of the social totality is good to think with.