A SCANNER DARKLY

Among Dick’s 45 or so novels, A Scanner Darkly is his dark night of the soul, and is based on one of the lowest points in his life—his involvement with drugs and hard-drug users in 1970-72. Although Dick’s characters had rarely been two-dimensional before, in this novel they clearly take on flesh, and for him it was a breakthrough. The dialogue is street talk of the late 1970s, gritty and realistic; the setting is Southern California, and though nominally science fiction, the sf elements are minimal. The conversations of the characters reflect, often humorously, their derangement and deterioration from the use of drugs. The main character is both a narcotics agent and an addict of the hallucinogenic Substance D, nicknamed “Death.” The split in his personality finally brings him to a crisis and entry into a drug rehabilitation center. The whole story is told with great compassion, which makes the pessimism somewhat bearable. On the whole this is not a happy book. But it is compelling, real, and incredibly deeply felt. Most readers of PKD, I believe, tend to rank this near the top of the list of all his books.

DEUS IRAE              

Dick wrote this in collaboration with another sf great, Roger Zelazny, though the end result is not really one of either author’s best efforts. In a post-World-War-III wasteland a religion has grown up around the God of Wrath, whose human embodiment is one Carleton Lufteufel, the government official who detonated the doomsday device that contaminated the Earth’s atmosphere with radioactivity. Limbless painter Tibor McMaster sets off in his cart on a quest to find Lufteufel to capture the god’s true visage in a painting. There’s some interesting speculation around the encounter between a vitiated Christianity with this life-negating religion (Deus Irae means “God of wrath”) and a somewhat Zen-like spiritual renewal may be found in the novel’s conclusion. The religious preoccupation gives the novel interest as a kind of reflection of Dick’s other greater novels of the late 60s and 70s, despite the somewhat casual and fragmented history of its composition.

RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH

This was an early version of Dick’s masterpiece VALIS. It is a very different novel and a very good one in its own right, full of the same metaphysical issues but not as directly autobiographical as VALIS. It is set in an alternate universe in which a certain Ferris F. Fremont (a thinly disguised Richard Nixon) is president. Nixon’s paranoia about domestic “enemies” becomes Fremont’s all-out campaign against a supposed conspiracy called Aramchek. To crack down on this enemy, an insidious secret police organization called FAP (Friends of the American People) is set up. Nicholas Brady, an alter ego for Dick himself, is the target for FAP harassment, and learns that the conspiracy is real. Aramchek is the satellite that is beaming information to several thousand highly aware individuals around the world, forming a “collective brain.” Radio Free Albemuth is cast in a more straightforward science-fictional mode than the unconventional VALIS. But on its own merits, it is an absorbing novel that is the best possible introduction to the material and preoccupations of Dick’s later years.

VALIS

Best read after Dick's other phenomenological novels 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 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 like 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.

THE DIVINE INVASION

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.

THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER

Dick’s last novel was completed in 1981 and published posthumously the following year. It is one of his finest achievements, and a triumphant return to realistic, mainstream writing, albeit with fantastic elements. Many fascinating conversations on philosophy, theology, and literature become the central focus of the book, as opposed to diversions from the plot. The play of ideas is compelling because it emanates from the life-and-death concerns of the characters, whose believability and humanity are perhaps greater than anywhere in Dick’s writing. The book is loosely based on the life of Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike, whom Dick knew. Like Pike, Bishop Timothy Archer is a seeker for truth who questions the Church’s doctrine, favoring instead a direct revelation. Archer becomes embroiled in the occult when all manner of table-tappings and stopped clocks are taken as signals from his son Jeff, who committed suicide (like Pike’s son in real life). The real redeeming center of the novel is its narrator, the bishop’s daughter-in-law Angel Archer. Hers is a story of spiritual transformation and freedom from bitterness and self-absorption. The resolution is not one of certainty about the mysteries of the afterlife or of the higher realities around us, but of hope and trust in the possibilities of redemption no matter where we find ourselves in the lower realms of experience.