"Dick is one of the ten best American writers of the twentieth century, which is saying a lot. Dick was a kind of Kafka steeped in LSD and rage."--Roberto Bolaño
What is VALIS? This question is at the heart of Philip K. Dick's ground-breaking novel, and the first book in his defining trilogy. When a beam of pink light begins giving a schizophrenic man named Horselover Fat (who just might also be known as Philip K. Dick) visions of an alternate Earth where the Roman Empire still reigns, he must decide whether he is crazy, or whether a godlike entity is showing him the true nature of the world.VALIS is essential reading for any true Philip K. Dick fan, a novel that Roberto Bolaño called "more disturbing than any novel by [Carson] McCullers." By the end, like Dick himself, you will be left wondering what is real, what is fiction, and just what the price is for divine inspiration.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Early in 1974 Dick felt a "pink beam" flashing through his head, a religious experience--or mild stroke--which inspired him to write his vast theological "Exegesis". In Valis the pink beam illuminates Dick's mentally unstable friend Horselover Fat; Philip is Greek for lover of horses and Dick is German for fat.
Dick's alter ego Fat duly creates the weird Gnostic theology of the Exegesis, with its visions of salvation from the insane side of reality--the Empire, whose Black Iron Prison cages us all. "The Empire never ended." Also there's a three-eyed race among us and all time between AD 103 and 1974 may be a divine illusion...
The resulting debates between Fat and friends, including Dick, are often hilariously insane. It's clear that Fat is deluded--until they all see the SF movie Valis, whose rock star actor-director suggests David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth and which uncannily features Exegesis code phrases, timeslips, third eyes, early Christian symbols and pink beams.
Maybe the film's Vast Active Living Intelligence System, a satellite which controls minds via lasers, is the same as the messiah imagined by Fat? Naturally he and friends contact the director, leading to an unexpected interview with VALIS itself.
Dick was the supreme SF master of booby-trapped reality and Valis celebrates his own escape from the trap that claimed him in 1974. Chilling, moving and acknowledged by the SF Encyclopedia as the finest novel of Dick's last years. --David Langford
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Book Description Softcover. Condition: New. Reissue. VALIS is the first novel in a mesmerizing, science-fiction philosophical trilogy by Philip K. Dick, the Hugo Award-winning author of The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?-the basis for the film Blade Runner.Dick is one of the ten best American writers of the twentieth century, which is saying a lot. Dick was a kind of Kafka steeped in LSD and rage.*What is VALIS?When a beam of pink light begins giving a schizophrenic man named Horselover Fat (who just might also be known as Philip K. Dick) visions of an alternate Earth where the Roman Empire still reigns, he must decide whether he is crazy, or whether a godlike entity is showing him the true nature of the world.More disturbing than any novel by [Carson] McCullers, (*Roberto Bolao), by the end, like Dick himself, you will be left wondering what is real, what is fiction, and just what the price is for divine inspiration.Also in the VALIS Trilogy:The Divine InvasionThe Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Seller Inventory # DADAX0547572417
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