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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Valis

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Ellis

06:15 / 13.09.01

I am reading this at the moment and am blown away by just how brilliant it is. It really is exceptional.

[Even though the more I read of it, the less I seem to be thinking of the originality of The Invisbles.]

06:46 / 13.09.01

Ellis wrote:

[Even though the more I read of it, the less I seem to be thinking of the originality of The Invisbles.]

If you combine Valis with Illuminatis! that accounts for about 85% of The Invisibles right there. The series isn't nearly as inventive as it pretends to be; however, it brilliantly pulls diverse elements together into a coherent whole to become something new(ish). A post-modern masterpiece.

Ganesh

07:05 / 13.09.01

I read 'Valis' recently too, on holiday. It was interesting (although, as with 'Diceman', the 'groovy 70s'ness of it all was mildly distracting) but I'm not sure I'd have persisted with it if I hadn't read 'The Invisibles' first.

.

07:07 / 13.09.01

VALIS totally rocks... i'm afraid to say i'm a bit of a PKD fanboy (or "dickhead" as unfortunately known), so i look foward to discussing this book with you after you've finished it. i won't say anything yet though, in case i give anything away. have fun!

Ellis

07:26 / 13.09.01

Is it part of a trilogy, with The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Ted Archer, or are they just books with a similar theme?

07:37 / 13.09.01

The valis cycle is not really a trilogy. Its the last three books PKD published in his life and each attempts to tell the story of PKD's experiences with the pink light in different ways. With the divine invasion the story is a sort of fusing biblcal and scifi epics where as Valis is a lot closer to an autobiographical novel.

In addition to this there is Radio Free Albemuth a book that was published posthumously and is another, perhaps more skillful reworking of Valis.

Ellis

07:41 / 13.09.01

The Transmigration... book isn't even available. Gah.

.

07:59 / 13.09.01

i have a copy of The Transmigration, a relatively new edition, so i reckon its still available. that said, the Divine Invasion and The Transmigration (of Timothy Archer) are not really in the same league as Valis at all. worth reading, but be ready for disappointment. Radio Free Albemuth is featured in Valis, combined with elements of the David Bowie "Man who fell to earth" as the film in the book. Mother Goose is loosely based on Bowie (although there was a real Mother Goose around at the time too). A fantastic source on Dick is his biography, called Divine Invasions (plural), which covers all the pink light incidents as well as plenty of other wierd things. PS> The diary extracts featured in Valis are real PKD diary extracts.

10:15 / 13.09.01

If you enjoyed Valis, you MUST read Radio Free Albemuth. It's a slightly fictionalized account of PKD's Valis experiences and political paranioa and it makes for a brilliant, brilliant modern gnostic fable about the black iron prison and our attempts to escape it.

While Valis provides a lengthy examination of the WHAT?, RFA gives you the WHY? and the WHEREFORE?.

12:11 / 13.09.01

Speaking of PKD, I just got a new harback with the last interviews with him. Speaking a lot about Valis/Zebra, and also about his never published last book "Owl in the daylight". I also have another interview book called "the dream connection" which is very interesting.

And about Valis, love that book, just reread it. I am so blown away of how much his writings influenced everything from movies to comics. Just as I am writing this I realised how much a plot part in Valis echoes with one of my favorite films. Uhm, just realised that puting something further down in the scroll doesnt work on this kind of board. Anyway think good looking quite confused guy in ugly dirty pink bathrobe.

12:47 / 13.09.01

I really dug Valis. I think that the Divine Invasion was really disappointing.

I'm not sure I want to read 'Transmigration' based on Invasion.

I will read RFA.

I recommended, "The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick" which gives a lot of excerpts from his Exegesis; "Divine Invasions" (his biography, not the novel); and "Flow my Tears, The policeman Said" which is one of my favorite Dick books.

Ellis

18:49 / 13.09.01

Just finished it.

I thought the end fizzled out a little, quite anticlimatic, but really I can't think of how he could have ended it better.

23:24 / 13.09.01

I wrapped my head around Valis at the tender age of sixteen. It's a wicked book, and one can see how this board would be named after it, were the web functional in the 70's. Radio Free Albemuth was like the "Reader Digest" version of Valis, excising PKD "Exegesis"... just how crazy did PKD get, anyway?

othe PKD reccomendations:
"a scanner darkly" - the war on drugs, circa 2006, and a schizoid society in the microcosm of a DEA agent.

whoops, off to the pub. more when i return.

The Sinister Haiku Bureau

23:59 / 13.09.01

I've just finished divine invasion, and it wasn't as good as albemuth or valis, but still worth reading. I'd agree with solid_state about albemuth being the 'reader's digest version of valis', it's good, and it's the book I'd recommend to someone who I thought ought to get into that sorta weirdness without the heaviness of valis. I'm sure I've seen copies of transmigration around recently, but I could be wrong... is it worth reading?

00:08 / 14.09.01

ok, your're done, spoilers away, anyway what I meant in my last post was the thing about horselover fat realising who he was in the end. Which somehow reminded me of the Tyler Durden thing in fight club, whiuch I hadnt really thought about until I started to to write the post.

Agree on shifting realities being a great read, very interesting, and in it you will find PKD's synopsis for a mission impossible episode, which isnt half as bizzre as one would hope.

I also found UBIK to be very good, its one of his books I sort of stayed away since they made all of this computer games and things about it, but I found it highly enjoyable

04:46 / 14.09.01

what? a game based on UBIK? tell me more, please. it was a fun book, but i didn't find it quite so "heavy" as it seemed to want to be. fun, paradigm-shifting sci-fi, though.

other recomendations:
"Clans of the Alphane Moon"- one of his earlier works, i think, and IMHO, a real act of comedic insanity that's only realized in the very last sentence. a love story, so to speak.

Any one of PKD's short story collections, which is where he really shines (off and on). "The Short, Happy Life of the Brown Oxford, and other Stories" in particular, which was noteworthy for "The Variable Man" and all the "Doctor Labyrinth" stories. old-skool sci-fi was never any more fun than Dr. Lab.

07:11 / 14.09.01

for the record mytop 3 fav. PKD shorts (all from the little black box) the electric ant, the exit door leads in and strange memories of death

07:11 / 14.09.01

I think I've worked my way through almost all of PKD's 'major' works in the past two years, and I hereby present;

My PK Dick top 5:

1.Radio Free Albemuth
2.A Scanner Darkly
3.VALIS
4.The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
5.Now Wait For Last Year

I think the first four books on the list are full-scale masterpieces, the rest are simply very good indeed.

.

17:28 / 14.09.01

Flow My Tears The Policeman Said,
A Scanner Darkly,
The Three Stigmata,
UBIK,
Valis,

all the middle to late sci-fi period, stop reading this and go out and read these great books.

Rex City-zen

19:17 / 14.09.01

Barbelith Forum.
I owe a big one to this place as it was here I first heard of VALIS, near the end of the invisibles series.True, after reading it I felt Invisibles wasn't that original (and more so after I read 'The Cosmic Trigger')but...MY GOD!!What a book!!
I found myself taking the whole story in an autobiographical sense on PKD's part and it just blew the whole story out of the realm of fiction and into the plausible.Horselover Fat- the archetype for the fiction suit.
I don't know where you are in the book, but, when they get to the VALIS film, compare it to the MATRIX.
And the exegesis changed my entire thought process.
Was he really nuts??

20:41 / 14.09.01

oh, and "Do Androids Dream of Electric..." something or other.

Everytime I read it, there's something new, which leads me to put Blade Runner under the microscope again (which is a masterful translation, given the content of the original book and the audience of the movie)

Ganesh

23:31 / 14.09.01

Perhaps he was nuts; if so, in a uniquely creative way. I can't discount the fact that I'm employed to seek out psychosis; perhaps this coloured my enjoyment of 'Valis'...

.

08:50 / 15.09.01

oh hang on, i forgot to mention earlier, his short stories (of which there are probably around 100) are well worth reading, especially for the earlier more pulpy sci-fi fun, where i find the novels tend to trail off a bit. having read the short stories, i don't think any sci-fi sounds original anymore... prototype versions of everything from Total Recall, to The Terminator, Bladerunner (obviously), The Matrix, etc etc. apart from the more computer/net based stuff which kicked off just as PKD died

Was he mad? probably a drugs casualty. and he had a twin sister who died a birth, this is the key i think to almost all of his work, plenty of twin symbolism, and so forth. i don't really want to say too much, since half the fun is in discovering these things for oneself.

i am currently compiling the A-Z of PKDisms (from "Autofac", "Blobel", "Can-D", "Chew-Z", via "Gubbish" to "UBIK", "VALIS" and "ZEBRA") for publication on my webpages as a kind of PKD primer, so feel free to email me any nice words along with a brief description and the novel or story they're from, and i'll put them in. cheers, iivix, xxx.

iivix@twentysomething.co.uk

The Sinister Haiku Bureau

01:24 / 16.09.01

quote:Originally posted by Rex City-zen:

...Was he really nuts??

Although I'm in no position to make proclamations about his sanity or lack thereof, if I was a supremely intelligent alien divinity, he's one the people I'D most want to speak to....

15:27 / 16.09.01

Sanity and crazy are concepts that may or may not apply, but after reading his biography it seemed pretty clear that he paid some heavy prices during his life for his visions.

While some of his stories were genius, there's no way in hell I would want to live the life he lived and have the pain that he had.

I do think that if he didn't have his writing, he would have been completely unable to function in society. It's probably what gave him any semblance of sanity at all.

16:22 / 16.09.01

Aha!

This ties in with a thread 'Nesh started a fair while ago. Schizophrenia seems to be a prevalent topic within Dick's novels - most, if not all, feature at least one character with symptoms of the problem - and he considered himself a sufferer. There's a lot of biographical and autobiographical information in 'The Shifting Realities of Philip K Dick'.

18:17 / 16.09.01

Once you start talking about people being 'nuts' the argument loses coherence. PKD used is own mental states as a source for his fiction and I would guess he used his fiction to try and resolve his mental states;- Sometimes he felt he was 'nuts' is for sure.

This gives us something deeply personal and deeply strange. I wouldn't want to be him but he's about the only SF author I can still reread.

Does anyone know how biographical 'Timothy Archer' was? I'm really intrigued by this book which purports to be about an Anglican bishop from a Californian diocese. Its probably the only thing that PKD wrote that might be validated.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

19:01 / 16.09.01

I can't remember from where I read this, but remote diagnoses of Dick suggested he 'suffered' from speed psychosis, which I assume is a mental state brought on by excessive use of the drug which he used so as to stay up all night so he could write, always being borderline poor most of his life (though having to buy that much speed couldn't have helped). But as Ganesh has always told us, never trust a diagnosis made at a distance...
(Currently reading 'A Scanner Darkly')

19:13 / 16.09.01

That's mentioned in 'The Shifting Realities..'

"What distinguishes schizophrenic existence from that which the rest of us like to imagine we enjoy is the element of time. The schizophrenic is having it all now, whether he wants it or not; the whole can of film has descended on him, whereas we watch it progress frame by frame. So for him, causality does not exist. Instead, the acausal connective principle that Wolfgang Pauli called synchronicity is operating in all situations - not merely as only one factor at work, as with us. Like a person under LSD, the schizophrenic is engulfed in an endless now. It's not too much fun."

He uses the term 'schizoid effective' to describe himself. This idea of squashed time also forms the basis of his novel 'Martian Time-Slip'.

[ 16-09-2001: Message edited by: E. Randy Dupre ]

20:57 / 16.09.01

just two links for the ubik game, someone was wondering, its from 98:
http://www.gamesdomain.com/gdreview/zones/reviews/pc/apr98/ubik.html
http://www.joystick.fr/joybases/fiche_jeu.php3?ID=1884

15:23 / 21.09.01

The only PKD book I've read is The Man in the High Castle. I liked it a lot. Do you think it's a good jumping point for Valis or any other of the later PKD works?

15:45 / 21.09.01

I'd also recommend one of PKD's longer short stories, "Faith of Our Fathers". Anyone who liked VALIS and especially UBIK will probably enjoy that, too.

22:00 / 21.09.01

I wouldn't suggest starting on VALIS, I would try some earlier works to get into Phils strange mindset. The first book I read was Scanner Darkly and I was hooked for life.
"In pursuit of VALIS" is very informative with lots of exegesis excerpts.
Maze of death
Penultimate truth
three stigmata
And don't forget the very weird "Counterclock world"

16:15 / 23.09.01

So, um, this goes out to all of you who claim to have liked A Scanner Darkly. Can any of you explain why either in short sentences or long explanations. It was weak: it ended (poorly) three times, personalities change wholesale (and the argument that he was attempting to show blahblah - no spoilers doesn't hold), and the moralizing bit about how it wasn't moralizing tacked on at the end stinks up the room. And, of course, it would have made for better scifi if the badguys had been, well, someone else.

07:47 / 24.09.01

I thought it was a very moving book - made me cry in fact. The way the central characters identity collapses completely - the way all his drug 'friends' get fucked up and hate each other - the complete depersonalisation of being involved in the police bureaucracy, which hurts him as much as the drugs do - his girlfriend living in her shitty apartment and driving along the highway shooting coke bottles off the back of a truck - them sitting on the side of the road, him half dead wondering who the hell he is and what he's doing and why he feels so terrible - the ending..

Analysed like straightforward novels, all of PKD's books are 'flawed', but that's kinda .. not the point.

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