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5.0 out of 5 stars
Gnostic wisdom in an sf wrapper, Jun 5 2004
The Divine Invasion clearly fits the category of science fiction, unlike its predecessors A Scanner Darkly and VALIS, which are just marginally science fiction. But Dick departs from conventional SF by assuming the utter reality of what religion describes, while staying within the scientific spirit of the quest for objectively verifiable knowledge. He continually alludes to religious and philosophical ideas of great profundity and historical resonance, while through the very structure of the narrative he emphasizes the relativity of time. The "divine invasion" refers to the invasion of the world by Yah (God), directly opposing Belial (Satan) who rules it. This sounds simplistically dualistic, but the overt Gnosticism of the religious premise contains many subtleties. Yah inflicts Job-like suffering on Rybys Romney, the mother of Emmanuel, a brain-damaged child who is the Christlike incarnation of God. But by "falling" into incarnation, the god is humanized. The music of English Renaissance composer John Dowland forms a backdrop to the novel, giving it a tender and classic flavor amidst the science-fictional trappings. This book will strike many as an odd mixture. I find it a wise book, permeated by knowledge and compassion, that opens new vistas in speculative fiction.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A Visit from the Stars, Mar 17 2004
Divine Invasion opens with Herb Asher (do I detect a botanical reference?) "dead and in cryonic suspension" overseeing information traffic from within his dome around the binary star system CY30-CY30B. His sickly female neighbor, dying of multiple sclerosis, becomes pregnant with a virgin birth (her hymen is intact and Herb is repulsed by her sickness) that turns out to be the result of Yahweh--God of the old testament. Although only perhaps (like us all?) vividly dreaming, Asher accompanies his legal wife (Yah has insisted he sympathize with her by vengefully threatening to destroy his most treasured belongings, especially his tapes of Linda Fox, a galactically renowned vocalist) through quasi-fascistic interrogations and security back to Earth. There his life is reminiscent but different than on the world of methane crystals housing the dome where he "really is." As the "legal father" of God (as he explains to a police man who stops him in his fly-car) he meets his step-son, the Christ-like child who combines infinity from God (the alien who comes in half-human form to Earth) and the earthly from his human wife. Emmanuel, the God-child, is engaged in both a battle of recalling his true nature and playing with his elusive female playmate, Zina. Zina knows things about him that he doesn't. She is Shekhina, "the immanent Presence who never left the world...the female side of God" who remained with the immanent world when the Godhead split. Elias Tate, Herb Asher's best friend, is the prophet Elijah on the two-star system, but a black man who works at an audio components shop on Earth. Thus the inimitable and brilliant Dick establishes an overlapping confluence between the celestial (the extraterrestrial) and the mundane--he literalizes the Gnostic worldview, spiced idiosyncratically with bits of his personal life, esoteric Judaism and mystical Christianity. (The well-regarded literary critic, Harold Bloom, tried to write--wrote--a fiction book based on Gnosticism that fell far short of this brilliant effort.) Quoting Church father Tertullian on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Asher's friend Elias, who counsels him to dump his wife and pursue his dream--Linda Fox, who in space is only a projection of artificial intelligence--explains: Et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est." He was resurrected from the grave; this is therefore credible, just because it is absurd. I think you have to give the benefit of the doubt not to those who cannot penetrate Dick's densely nuanced tangle of relevant references upon a single reading--but to Dick, who has instantiated Gnosticism in fiction with entertainment and story-telling acumen, imparting lodes of theological information along the way where others have failed. In Islamic culture being a writer may be considered suspect because one is competing with God. But Dick is alway competing with God--and making "Him" such as he is (here an alien with a penchant for intrauterine symbiosis) palpable and relevant for modern times. That is what great authors (e.g., Pushkin in Russia) do: they revive and re-weave culture, preserving it in their creative efforts. The devil appears as an especially stinky goat, who is killed on a rooftop (as is another goat in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?!) But Belial (the sheep who lusts after non-existence) was created by God. As my son raps, "Good and evil are not equal; light created the darkness." A theological mini-masterpiece--pearls before swine are still pearls.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Philosophically Scattered and Religously Absurd Sci-Fi, Jan 7 2004
"Above them the city machine worked, gathering up the remains of Belial. Gathering up the broken fragments of what had once been light"By this point in his life Dick was either completely drenched in insanity or saner and more focused than he had ever been in his life. What do you get when you put together a galactically-famous super Diva, Satan in the form of a petting zoo Goat, a God that has amnesia, and of course fly-cars? Well obviously you get Phil Dick. In this, his last official novel before his demise, he tries to cram philosophies of the space time continuim as well as theology to explain reasoning behind the following ideas:
a. - God can be convinced to change
b. - Evil is the antithesis of God not because God is good, but rather because God is creation and evil is death, the absence of creation.
c. - Reality as humans know it may only be an overlapping reality of a primary reality.
d. - If God cannot remember creation, creation cannot exist.
However above all these points he stresses that all is predestined and that evil exist only because God created it. His story surrounds several key characters, mainly Herb Asher, a Kafka-esque character who has little to live for; it also follows his 'legal' son Eman, who is actually, God, or the male half of God. Yes, in Phildickian fasion this is a fairly convuluted novel, but this reviewer found it to come full circle rather well.
One dissapointment is the lack of developement in the storylines of the Cardinal of Earth and the Leader of the Communist party. Dick's point on how in the future good and evil will completely shift sides is put in place, but other than that he lets the characters he used to introduce the idea kind of fall out of the novel. He brings them back momentarily towards the end, but drops them again. Also, I found the longer passages to go into borderline incoherent rambling, but that was to be expected from latter-period Dick.
In synopsis, this is a fine read. It sometimes reads as though it were a large essay in which Phil Dick tries to cram all his theories into much too short of a medium. But the story and theories are entertaining nonetheless. A fine book, but defineitely not a starting place for beggingers in Dick's writings.
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by Philip K. Dick
by Philip K. Dick
by Philip K. Dick
by Philip K. Dick
by Philip K. Dick
