/lit/ - Literature

[pkd No.5165934]

probably the best book i've read in a while. are #2 and #3 good as well, or does it serve well as a stand-alone?

also, is this science fiction? it didn't really seem that way to me. not at all really. it had some elements of sf, but it felt way different. what kind of genre would you assign it to? just wondering.

but really, it's fucking great wow i thoroughly enjoyed the experience

[Anonymous No.5166009]

I haven't read two and three, but I think they were never truly completed because PKD died first. Also, from what I hear, they have little to do with Valis except for recurrent themes--they're not direct continuations of the plot or anything.

It is SF, but only in the sense that it utilizes science-fictional nova like a sentient God-like alien.

A couple other things on the genre front:
- It was described by Dick not as SF but as his gnostic explanation of the universe.
- The narrator, as you well know, is highly unreliable, so it could be that he's just crazy or making stuff up.
- PDK was suffering from acute mental illness when he wrote it, and for all intents and purposes Horselover Fat is him (a lot of stuff that happens to him happened to Dick, and even the name translates out, as explained in the book), so a lot of people see it as mostly auto-biographical.

[Anonymous No.5166387]

>>5165934
I read this book a few weeks ago and was floored by how thought provoking it was. It made me really want to read more PKD.

>>5166009
I don't think your second point really means anything? So what the narrator is unreliable? What do you mean by that? Sticking to the book, it seems almost impossible that Horselover/Philip is just making everything up since there is this whole cult recognition of it. If you want to explain more on that and how it relates to the genre of the book I'd be interested thanks.

[Anonymous No.5166614]

>>5166387
I'm just saying it can be read more as a psychological piece than as a proper SF text.
When you have a clearly unreliable narrator, there is always a bit of ambiguity as to what is really going on.
Poor analogy, I know, but consider a lot of Poe's horror stories, like The Fall of House of Usher. Are they really supernatural horror or just some guy projecting his subjective conscious onto a situation?

[Anonymous No.5166643]

>>5166614
No I get what you mean. It would be interesting to see the story from one of Horselover Fat's straightedge friends and some background on what PKD was like before he made up Horselover.

[Anonymous No.5166942]

>>5166643
>>5166387
Oh yeah. Also --- I forgot to mention:
If Fat was making it all up, the cult would necessarily be a figment of his imagination or an invention too. Perhaps there is no cult at all, as everything we learn about that rock star guy (forget his name) and the body he subscribes to is way too is filtered through the lens of the protagonist to be taken as 100% accurate or stable.
Think Frankenstein. If all we had were Dr. Frankenstein's bits, as opposed to the narration by the monster in the middle, there would be serious grounds for challenging his testimony altogether. It is because Shelley put in that second section where we get a new point of view, though, that we are apt to take the first part as more real than if it existed alone (albeit it is still highly subjective). The monster isn't "inherently" scary or blasphemous, so to speak, but to Dr. Frankenstein he is.
A good modern example of this unreliable reader-can't-take-stuff-the-narrator-says-for-granted tendency might be House of Leaves. Are we to take Johnny Truant at his word about everything? I think not. He might not even have found a manuscript written by Zampano at all. Zampamo is rendered deaf, blind, etc., just to really drive this point home. Truant could simply be fabricating (either conscious or unconsciously) his entire story.

[Anonymous No.5167633]

>>5165934
#2 (divine invasion) reads a lot like 'three stigmata of palmer eldritch), which to me was somewhat disappointing.

#3 (Transmigration of Timothy Archer) is VALIS-tier in depiction of characters / dialogues / dat feel. But less mindfuck.

Also, 'A Scanner Darkly' is up there with VALIS and Archer.

>>5166942
The pop star and his crippled associate are supposed to be David Bowie and Brian Eno. The movie reffered to as VALIS is supposedly 'The Man Who Fell to earth' - although the plot that is summarized is that of 'Radio Free Albemuth', the first novel PKD wrote about his 'psychosis/revelation'- which was turned down by his publishing agent.

One of PKD's ideas was that the 'divine' information is communicated through a lot of artists, more or less consciouss about it- he felt strongly about Bowie and Eno's stuff in that sense. The same theme reccurs in Divine Invasion, where the pop star reviving Dowland tunes, turns out to be a divine agent.

Regarding the whole unreliable narrator thing, I think VALIS was a serious attempt at making the narration somewhat reliable, by projecting all the madness onto the alter ego, and making the narrator a rational skeptic (same trick is used in Albemuth). Anyway, PKD excells at unreliable narration- it's his favorite mindfuck.