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From Amazon
The first of Dick's three final novels (the others are Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer). Known as science fiction only for lack of a better category, "Valis" takes place in our world and may even be semi-autobiographical. It is a fool's search for God, who turns out to be a virus, a joke, and a mental hologram transmitted from an orbiting satellite.
The proponent of the novel, Horselover Fat, is thrust into a theological quest when he receives communion in a burst of pink laser light. From the cancer ward of a bay area hospital to the ranch of a fraudulent charismatic religious figure who turns out to have a direct com link with God, Dick leads us down the twisted paths of Gnostic belief, mixed with his own bizarre and compelling philosophy. Truly an eye opening look at the nature of consciousness and divinity.
From Publishers Weekly
The quest for God is the binding theme of this trilogy. The "funny and painful and sometimes brilliant" VALIS(anagram) finds protagonist and Dick alter-ego Horselover Fat unable to reconcile human suffering with his belief in God. Invasion is a "fascinating and highly readable" vision of Armageddon, blending New Testament, Kabbalah and Dick's own worldview. In Transmigration , Angel Archer reminisces about her father-in-law, Timothy, an Episcopal bishop obsessed with a set of ancient scrolls that shed faith-threatening new light on Jesus: "This finely crafted, odd but compelling book demonstrates Dick's great erudition, keen human insight and subtle ironic sense of humor," said PW.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
A Tragic Epitaph,
This review is from: Valis (Paperback)
Having read most of Dick's published body of work(and there are new things cropping up every year) I have to say that this book is nothing more than a sad statement of the self-destructive nature of Mister Dick. Philip K. Dick was a great, prolific talent in his day who had a knack for exploring the various aspects of human madness in both funny and provacative ways while also including the most fundamental of fiction writing's ingredients -- plot. Yes, I know to you post-modern relativistic types that plot, like anything else that may dicate form to an art, is a vile and disqusting word. But simply put, the best of novels and short fiction has a discernable plot, with a long term goal that is either acheived or failed. And Dick, in books like Clans of the Alphane Moon, Eye in the Sky and, of course, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (oh my, does liking this last book make me a conformist?)manages to viably explore human madness and tell a good story at the same time. And don't be fooled by what you may have learned in college, my friends, but a well written, plot driven story that also holds valid intellectual content is much more difficult to craft than the splattering of thoughts that one finds in this book and others (such as the works of Henry Miller) like it. In fact, writing like this is the prose version of a painter who blindly throws paint from cans into a jet engine which in turn spaltters the paint on a canvas with no possiblility of form and content. Somehow this senseless splattering of colors is compared with well crafted works by the likes of Picasso and Dali. And so is the case with this book. It does not compare in greatness to any of Dick's ealier classics. We have been trained by professors and other intellectuals to be "open-minded" to formless garbage. That is likely because those who preach the merits of garbage can only produce garbage. Never be "open-minded", my friends. One needs a criteria in life to find purpose. Moderation is the only true evil.Dick, unfortunatly, was a great talent who spent his last years writing moderate, evil swill. Put simply, he fried his own mind in the senseless abuse of drugs that destoryed other geniuses of his time. And the post-modern idiocy that is Valis is a mere reflection of lost brain cells, pshycotic flashbacks and a culture that is thankfully long dead.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Nonsense,
This review is from: Valis (Paperback)
This book is utter nonsense. More an autobiographical meandering than an actual story, Valis by Philip K. Dick is loaded with more pseudo-philosophical and pseudo-theological insight than a first year undergraduate student. What's worse, these tedious ideas keep being repeated over and over again. It's a short book, but I feel like the book could do with some major trimming to make the experience less painful. I definitely won't be finishing this book.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A monolith of literature,
By Doug Mackey (Fairfield, IA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Valis (Paperback)
Best read after Dick's other phenomenological novels (such as Eye in the Sky, Three Stigmata, and Ubik) because of its complexity, Valis is destined to remain Dick's most controversial book. Here the author steps outside the conventions of fiction to inform the reader that he, Philip K. Dick, has had visionary experiences, information beamed directly into his brain from a godlike extraterrestrial entity named VALIS. But he does so in such a way as to distance himself from the revelation. His dreaming, visionary alter ego, Horselover Fat, is another side of the character Phil Dick's psychotically split personality. Fat keeps a journal, the "Exegesis" (as Dick did in real life), in which he theorizes that we are all parts of a cosmic brain; everything, including ourselves, is information in this brain. He believes that the universe is an illusion but that God (or VALIS) is giving him glimpses of reality in the form of holograms produced by a beam of pink light aimed at his brain. When, late in the novel, as autobiography changes to science fiction and Fat is healed by the divine child Sophia, he "remembers" his true identity as Phil Dick, and Fat is incorporated and reintegrated in Phil's personality. You can call this a metafiction, but it transcends even that category, for the author neither tries to subvert the novel form nor to convert the reader to his fractured vision. Rather, it stands on the literary landscape a self-existent monolith, like those in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. More than any of Dick's other novels, it stretches fictional conventions to give the reader a virtually inexhaustible text that will simulataneously support and deny any interpretation.
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