The Divine Invasion

Divine Invasion opens with Herb Asher (do I detect a botanical reference?) "dead and in cryonic suspension" overseeing information traffic from within his dome around the binary star system CY30-CY30B. His sickly female neighbor, dying of multiple sclerosis, becomes pregnant with a virgin birth (her hymen is intact and Herb is repulsed by her sickness) that turns out to be the result of Yahweh--God of the old testament. Although only perhaps (like us all?) vividly dreaming, Asher accompanies his legal wife (Yah has insisted he sympathize with her by vengefully threatening to destroy his most treasured belongings, especially his tapes of Linda Fox, a galactically renowned vocalist) through quasi-fascistic interrogations and security back to Earth. There his life is reminiscent but different than on the world of methane crystals housing the dome where he "really is." As the "legal father" of God (as he explains to a police man who stops him in his fly-car) he meets his step-son, the Christ-like child who combines infinity from God (the alien who comes in half-human form to Earth) and the earthly from his human wife. Emmanuel, the God-child, is engaged in both a battle of recalling his true nature and playing with his elusive female playmate, Zina. Zina knows things about him that he doesn't. She is Shekhina, "the immanent Presence who never left the world...the female side of God" who remained with the immanent world when the Godhead split. Elias Tate, Herb Asher's best friend, is the prophet Elijah on the two-star system, but a black man who works at an audio components shop on Earth. Thus the inimitable and brilliant Dick establishes an overlapping confluence between the celestial (the extraterrestrial) and the mundane--he literalizes the Gnostic worldview, spiced idiosyncratically with bits of his personal life, esoteric Judaism and mystical Christianity. (The well-regarded literary critic, Harold Bloom, tried to write--wrote--a fiction book based on Gnosticism that fell far short of this brilliant effort.) Quoting Church father Tertullian on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Asher's friend Elias, who counsels him to dump his wife and pursue his dream--Linda Fox, who in space is only a projection of artificial intelligence--explains: Et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est." He was resurrected from the grave; this is therefore credible, just because it is absurd. I think you have to give the benefit of the doubt not to those who cannot penetrate Dick's densely nuanced tangle of relevant references upon a single reading--but to Dick, who has instantiated Gnosticism in fiction with entertainment and story-telling acumen, imparting lodes of theological information along the way where others have failed. In Islamic culture being a writer may be considered suspect because one is competing with God. But Dick is alway competing with God--and making "Him" such as he is (here an alien with a penchant for intrauterine symbiosis) palpabl

Actually, this is the only other _Valis_ novel. There was supposed to have been a third, but Dick died before it was finished. _The Transmigration of Timothy Archer_, while good, is not properly part of the _Valis_ trilogy. This book, while set in the far future, does continue the specific themes introduced in _Valis_, and reference is made back to some of the specific characters. You see, this is the time when VALIS, the Logos, the greater face of God, or whatever name you choose to limit it by, breaks through into our "black iron prison" to reclaim it and banish the Empire and the black magician behind it. I admit that the story takes 50 or 60 pages to get up to speed, but by that time the IDEAS that are the real value of P.D.K.'s writing begin to surface. For instance, the idea of the "Hermetic Transform" and how the microcosm and macrocossm can interpenetrate and become One- and how to God time can run backwards. Pretty deep stuff compared to most of the semi-literate pap that is published nowdays. What really leaped out at me though was the fact that Dick wrote of the Torah as an interactive, holographic, computer code. It predicts the future because it is the blueprint for creation that even God refers back to. He wrote this in 1981- _The Bible Code_ wasn't published until 1997. Talk about being "ahead of the curve."

This is Dick at his best. This book is one of the most incredible novels I have ever read. I couldn't even read too much of it at one sitting because the concepts fried my brain so much, but I couldn't stop either. Only someone who was as insane as Philip K Dick was toward the end of his life could come up with insights and concepts as brilliant and moving as those presented here. The theology was incredible and the way he dissected God's mind blew me away. A must read for anyone. I have and will continue to praise this novel and recommend it to anyone interested.

Although Dick's final three books are best enjoyed as a trilogy, "The divine invasion" remains my favorite of the three. The science fiction setting of the book allows Dick the freedom to explore some of his more radical notions without having to ground them in the more mundane reality of the other books in his trilogy. One doesn't usually expect to encounter profound and moving meditations on the nature of good and evil in a science fiction book, yet Dick pulls it all together with his powerful storytelling ability.