The excellent new Erik Davis book High Weirdness (review coming soon) focuses much of its attention in the Philip K. Dick section on VALIS. That's a Dick novel I haven't read yet, but I plan to read it soon (although I will read the new Neal Stephenson novel first).
I mentioned this to Ted Hand on Twitter and he replied, "VALIS is the book that sent me down the road of years of grad school in philosophy, esotericism and religious studies, approximately as big a deal as Cosmic Trigger. It's also important for being a key literary experiment where PKD injects himself and his 'Exegesis' into the book."
The discussion began when Ted listed his top five PKD novels: Time Out of Joint, Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, VALIS. I told him I'd have to delete Time Out of Joint to make room for The Man in the High Castle. Discussion here.
3 comments:
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer remains my favorite.
Been wanting to read this. And "High Weirdness" looks really cool!
VALIS is good, if a bit depressing... to me it’s missing the humor found in other PKD, but it does have some brilliant moments.
Maybe watch The Man Who Fell To Earth before reading it, if you haven’t already.
I happen to be making my way thru that Stephenson book right now... mostly enjoying it. He has a habit of going into elaborate details on technical side-treks that, for me, just raise more questions. The “hard problem of consciousness”? Not that hard.
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