My fave author. I have Sutin's edited PKD exegesis In Pursuit of Valis.
I reread that almost as often as the booksOriginally Posted by Sturgeon's Lawyer
^^^
One of my favorite Dick books. (H'mmm. That just sounds wrong...) It was partly autobiographical. Phil had a longterm struggle with drugs. (He once wrote four novels in a few months, fueled by amphetamines, including two -- Ubik and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch -- that many count among his best.)
When he first showed up in the science fiction field, his stories were so unique that the term "phildickian" was coined to describe them. My other favorites of his are Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said and VALIS.
The latter, it should be mentioned, grew out of his attempt to understand something really weird that actually happened to him:
In February 1974, he was a bit down and out, strung out, and depressed, and recovering from a wisdom tooth extraction aided by sodium pentathol. A delivery girl brought him a prescription of Darvon. She was wearing the Christian "fish" symbol. Sunlight glinted off it, and he saw and felt a pink laser beam that began a series of hallucinations(?) that lasted several weeks. He initially regarded this as hallucinations brought on by the medication -- hallucinations from drugs being something Phil knew quite a bit about -- but came to feel that he "experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane." This also imparted a great deal of information of some sort into his brain. He spent the rest of his life trying to sort that information out, in a 9000-page journal referred to as "The Exegesis."
But in the short term, after the initial experience, he got up and told his wife that his infant son Christopher had a birth defect that would kill him unless they took him to the doctor immediately. Now, it's important to understand that the kid was showing no signs that there was anything terribly wrong; but some of that mysterious information had informed him of this. The wife took Christopher to the doctor on an emergency basis, and came home an hour later with a reference to a surgeon: the kid had a "right hernia" of the abdominal wal that reached down into the scrotal sac. After the surgery was complete, the surgeon informed them that "Your baby could have died at any time."
So there appears to have been something to Phil's experience. He both believed and doubted that:
1. the "pink laser" was directly from God;
2. that it was from a spacecraft that he referred to as the Vast Active Living Intelligent System -- VALIS;
3. that it was a hallucination;
4. that he was living two lives in parallel, one as Phil Dick and one as an ancient Christian named Thomas, being persecuted in ancient Rome;
5. that the world had actually ended in the first century A.D. and everything since was a mass hallucination or illusion;
6. that "the Empire never ended" -- that modern Western civilization hid an ongoing contiunation of the Roman empire;
...and many more bizarre things.
And this is just scratching the surface.
Phil Dick was a ... unique ... human being.
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