{"id":2061,"date":"2008-10-07T19:20:11","date_gmt":"2008-10-08T00:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.net\/?p=2061"},"modified":"2008-10-07T19:20:11","modified_gmt":"2008-10-08T00:20:11","slug":"on-re-reading-valis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=2061","title":{"rendered":"On Re-Reading VALIS"},"content":{"rendered":"

A discussion on TrekBBS<\/a> a few days ago prompted me to pull out some of my Philip K. Dick books and take a look at them.<\/p>\n

Dick was one of the authors I discovered in college and went on a “binge” in reading everything by Dick that I could possibly get my hands on. In the span of about a year I’d read most of his short stories, two-thirds of his science-fiction novels, and a couple of his mainstream contemporary novels.<\/p>\n

Then, I never went back, with one or two exceptions. I reread The Three Stigmata of Palmer Edritch<\/i> about five years ago. That was probably the most recent Dick novel I’d read, though I’ve enjoyed reading PKD Otaku<\/i><\/a>, an online Dickian fanzine, in the years since. And I really liked Emmanuel Carrere’s biography of PKD, I Am Alive and You Are Dead<\/i><\/a>, which I read not long after it came out.<\/p>\n

This TrekBBS thread, though. The original poster wanted to know what the good PKD novels were, and some good choices were thrown out. VALIS<\/i> was one, and that was one of the earliest Dick novels that I read, having come out at the time in a nice edition from Vintage Books along with The Divine Invasion<\/i> and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer<\/i>. Since I wrote a post about VALIS<\/i>, and then another post about The Man in the High Castle<\/i> (Dick’s novel set in a world where Germany won the Second World War and occupied the United States), I realized that I should probably refresh my memory with Dick’s canon.<\/p>\n

I decided I would start with VALIS<\/i>.<\/p>\n

I’d forgotten what a normal<\/i> novel this was. Difficult to get into — the first chapter is a bit off-putting — but fairly conventional in literary terms.<\/p>\n

I remember, vaguely, that the novel goes into some really weird<\/i> territory later. But, where I’m sitting in the novel, it’s a rather conventional first-person account of a burned-out drug addict with psychological delusions about Gnostic philosophy and the nature of the universe.<\/p>\n

I haven’t progressed very far with it — six or seven chapters, I think. Many of the revelations of the story, at least as I remember them, and it’s been a good fourteen years since I read VALIS<\/i>, are still ahead of me. It’s been my commute reading, though this afternoon I read an issue of Titan’s Star Trek<\/i> magazine instead, and I expect I’ll have burned through it in the next day or two.<\/p>\n

I’m trying hard not to peek ahead. I remember vaguely where the book is going, but I don’t want to ruin the surprise.<\/p>\n

I don’t know, once I’m done with VALIS<\/i>, if I’ll read much more Dick beyond The Man in the High Castle<\/i>. Yet, as I think about it, the more and more I think about books like Martian Time-Slip<\/i> or A Maze of Death<\/i> or Galactic Pot Healer<\/i> (which is about a guy who repairs clay pots, not a guy who brings universal happiness by dealing dope on multiple worlds, in case the title confused you), and I wonder if maybe I’ll go ahead and read those, too.<\/p>\n

Maybe I will.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A discussion on TrekBBS a few days ago prompted me to pull out some of my Philip K. Dick books and take a look at them. Dick was one of the authors I discovered in college and went on a “binge” in reading everything by Dick that I could possibly get my hands on. InContinue reading “On Re-Reading VALIS”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[32,54],"class_list":["post-2061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading","tag-philip-k-dick","tag-science-fiction","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2061\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}