How to read the VALIS Trilogy, Philip K. Dick's most challenging Science Fiction work... 

Cheers Huw! Hope you are well, old friend!

Thanks. I started reading PKD in 1976 and by the mid 80s had read everything published and covered the posthumous works as they were published, plus the early bios and critical writings. Hope you enjoy tackling these and do subscribe and check out my backlist of videos.

You went in at the hard end- very brave!

@@outlawbookselleroriginal haha yes 🤣

Same here. It’s still my favorite of his.

Same here. Just finished reading Valis as my first PKD. (Maybe Electric Sheep back then, I can't remember exactly.) Phew, a 'tour de force', but well worth it.

I thought the film version of 'A Scanner Darkly' was one of the best book to film adaptations of PKD. Captured the tone of the book. Will you be reviewing the book? As always, loving the content.

@@ScottManton - I probably will review it at some stage, but in a different context to what everyone else would do, so watch this space! My next Dick review will focus on another novel, may film it this week - but tuesday nights video has a Dick connection too, so do watch that one! Thanks as always for yr support, Scott!

Pleasure, thanks for yr comments. I think to fully appreciate VALIS one has to get the old head around the context (which also adds to my argument that it's an ambitious but flawed work, hence my preference for the less ambitious but more accomplished-in-itself 'Radio Free Albemuth'). More in depth PKD to come here..

I don't recall a specific order, more of a free form suggestion- Radio Free Albemuth, Valis Divine Invasion Transmigration of Timothy Archer ? Just to save on later comments. 😉 I too like the freeform idea.

@@salty-walt -Yep, that's the order you should go with. RFA first, then publiucation order.

Best of luck with it. You will get lost anyway, but the real key to it is a good read of 'Radio Free Albemuth', brilliant in itself and it will ground the rest for you. Let me know how you get on!

I just finished it. It kind of left me with a similar feeling to completing To the Lighthouse. Some parts particularly read like theological essay, others like b grade science fiction, and long traces of difficult confusion

@@Itsthatguywiththings I think Dick was reaching to articulate his thoughts through his fiction, something he'd always done, but didn't essentially succeed in 'VALIS' particularly. I'm sure that, had he lived, he'd have got there. 'The Transmigration of Timothy Archer', his final mainstream novel, is worth reading as an add-on. But religious themes pop up often in his work, from 'The Cosmic Puppets' early on to 'Do Androids Dream...' and in 'Our Friends From Frolix 8' among others.

@@Itsthatguywiththings well, I just finished Salman Rushdie’s MIDNIGHTS CHILDREN and have made it through half of Don Delillo’s UNDERWORLD, so wild and whirling novels have sort of been my thing lately…I’m getting a copy of RADIO FREE ALBAMUTH first, then diving into the VALIS trilogy with your heads up firmly in the front of my brain. Thanks

Thanks. I think people over-focus on 'VALIS' and I do think the key is to read around it as well. Glad you liked it.

been bingin on your channel homie, this my go-to book review/new recommendations HQ to frequent now! So thank YOU! Also, the whole theological thing deters me from VALIS, perhaps because it came from a place that held in PKD's heart a sort of reality that for most, if not all, of my life I've shied away from. And to read the words of such an interesting, brilliant thinker who I feel is more suitable in a metaphysical layout. Would you say he falls too heavy/preachy into the god stuff?@@outlawbookselleroriginal

@@Cuckold_Cockles Yes and No. I think the media gets hung up on this, as it is one way of making him sound more 'profound' in a manner they can relate too, but I think he was profound anyway. I'm more interested in his What Is Real? obsession and that is there from the start... thanks for your kind comments!

I totally agree, when I was reading about his ideology of that nature last night it really stuck with me. It's almost as if he believe time itself to be "God", seeing as it's the only true constant thats forever changing, but not changing at all in some sense. Makes me think of Solipsism, which used to catch my eye as a youngin'. Anyone who expresses that publicly can't be convicted by the beliefs of regimented religion and the socially accepted ideas about God. He definitely saw things in his own individualistic way and I admire the hell out of him for it.@@outlawbookselleroriginal

I too was a massive 'Dick Head' (and still am really) but I never let my pleasure in his work overtake my enjoyment of SF per se. I'd read everything in print by early 85 and was picking up the unpublished stuff as it came out, so I have many rare titles in hardcovers from this time. There will be more PKD to come here before too long.

@@outlawbookselleroriginal Through the years I have found other SF writers equally imaginative and innovative as Dick, if not more. Disch, Ballard, Priest, Lem and others come to mind. PKD has become nostalgic for me since he was one of the first SF authors I read, but SF is so much bigger and varied.

@@danieldelvalle5004 -Agree. The others you mention are all faves of mine. I've known Priest personally since 87 and I write for an annual Ballard anthology. Disch and Lem are great too.

I'd been reading PKD for 5 years when the film came out, so your feelings are probably similar to mine. 'Androids' was my first, then 'Martian Time-Slip', 'Galactic Pot-Healer' and 'Counter-Clock World' - I'd read all of these before seeing the film and probably some others. I srated reading SF at age 7 and never looked back. I must re-read 'Archer' as it's been a long time...

@@outlawbookselleroriginal After posting the above I re-read TIME OUT OF JOINT. I had forgotten the book. It is now among my favorites, and is probably his first great book, though I'm going to re-read JAPED now. Re-reading a novel after 40 years is a strange experience when the story is a paranoid PKD vision! Déjà vu colors everything.

@@LocoFocoLit - Yep, it's a classic. 'Japed' less so, but still worth a revisit!

You mention the theatrical cut voice over, which is a point of contention with many I absolutely adored it because I had grown up with Sam Spade-esque type voice over detective stories --so the voice over was familiar and hilarious to me I became one of those rabid Bladerunner fans who had to collect every pirate cut of the movie way before the box set was released

@@searchindex3438there is a an expanded directors cut that took the voice over out - but yeah i like it too for the same reasons.

Do check out my other PKD material - particularly my Frolix 8 review and Lies Inc Textual variations. More PKD to come!

@@outlawbookselleroriginal I have already booked marked those for watching later. Thanks again for the effort put into these posts. I find this has to be, for me, the best Sci-Fi youtube channel because you not only give a synopsis of the storyline but also some background on author, publishing house. I have, now, learnt that they are not simply hardback and paperback. Thanks again. Just one more thing have you done or would consider doing a vlog on how to clean second hand books, share some of the tricks of the book trade.

@@mikeprendergast1826 Thanks Mike, appreciate your comments, please share these sentiments on your other social media if you can. Tricks of the book trade? Well, I'll have to think about that!

Yep, they are well worth tracking down, my friend.

I'm in almost complete agreement with you. I feel the whole business about the ray of pink light has been overemphasized in the mass media- true, it's interesting, but people can forget that for all his 'visionary' uniqueness, Dick did have his issues. As for 'Blade Runner', I love it too, but at times it says the opposite of what Dick said in the novel and in his nonfiction writings- how we should not trust the machine. As for Mercerism and conservation, these are missing from the film aside from the brief mention of the artificial owl, which motivate Rick's day and desperation completely in the book. Plus, as you say, his novels are about 'the little man', something which comes across beautifully in many of them -'Frolix 8' and 'Galactic-Pot Healer' are two great examples of this, I feel.

I think this is part of the problem: Dick's oeuvre is so big that it takes ages to get your head around where he was coming from, plus you need biographical info too- and reliable sources!

Pleasure. More PKD here, there is a playlist- and a lot more to come.

I only sell a handful of things casually on ebay, I work for a high street bookseller, just to clarify and I only sell within Europe, I'm afraid. As I've been a prof SF bookseller, collector and reader for decades longer than the vast majority of people on booktube, you will find detail here you won't get elsewhere, so please watch the backlist, which has hundreds of SF videos. Thanks!

'In Search of Valis' was issued in hardcover as a limited edition, a trade edition and a trade paperback by Underwood Miller (a Californian small press), though the pbk was briefly available in the UK. The Exegesis was his private journal about religious matters and ideas, which found public expression in the VALIS trilogy.

There is now another collection of excerpts from the Exegesis available, under the title _The Exegesis of Philip K Dick,_ edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem. It is _very big_ (900 pages) but still nowhere near the whole thing, of course.

@@donaldb1 Wow, I thought it WAS the whole thing! I almost picked it up for $25 but I was being "good."

@@salty-walt I think you probably have to be _very interested_ in Dick's life and philosophy for it to be really worthwhile. I find myself dipping into it and finding it moderately interesting. The original is apparently around 8 thousand pages, mostly handwritten, and stored loose in a large number of boxes, or folders. The editors have done a good job extracting interesting material covering the whole of the last period of his life, arranging it into chronological order and adding a good number of annotations and a glossary of philosophical and theological terms and other regular references.

It's my fave KSR book, which I think says everything...

Every fiction is reality in Its paralel universe.

​@@Samuel42069Woah.... So deep man...

Yep, bought it in hardcover on publication, features in one of my shelf tour videos. Norman is THE MAN!

'Ambemuth' is more conventional, but benefits from more muscle, narrative drive and it grips. I see 'VALIS' as a failed but bold and magnificent experiment. I'm a huge Dick Head, as they say.

@@outlawbookselleroriginal it's on the list and bumped quite high, many thanks for the video. I'm also quite partial to a bit of Dick

Well, there's a lot of great things to love about his work!

Your 'friend' completely failed there, I agree!

It's just so obvious, right? If there had been a film of 'Tower of Glass' by Silverberg of the same quality as 'BR' it would have been Bob's making, not PKDs.

Thanks Mike, I'll check that out, interesting!

@@outlawbookselleroriginal One thing I forgot to mention, that you will know, but others may not, is that Jane was PKD's twin sister, who died six weeks after birth.

@@mikejcross -Yes, exactly. Friend of mine made a pilgrimage to PKD and Jane's tombstone when he went to California - and of course she probably influenced a key character in 'Dr Bloodmoney'.

Agreed. It's also by far the most comon gollancz yellowjacket by miles, not that there's anything wrong with that!

I've absolutely LOVED 'Primer' from the moment it was released- I actually think it's the BEST science fiction film of the century so far. 'Upstream Colour' I didn't like as much, but I have realised that's as much my mood at the time of watching it -twice- and that it deserves my attention again. The director, Shane Carruth, also does a fine acting job in an unsettling Sf Horror film entitled 'The Dead Center', which I imagine you've seen - if not, check it out!

@@outlawbookselleroriginal The Dead Center is a great bit of cosmic horror.

@@richardbrown8966 -Yep, it's a real startlet, right?

@@outlawbookselleroriginal Are you still going to do the Q and A video? PS. Just started the Tom Toner book from your recommendation. First 70 pages so far so good.

@@richardbrown8966 -yes, the Q&A will go up this coming saturday, all 59 minutes of it!

Thanks Martin, glad you liked it. I'm swimming in PKD material and have been for deacdes. WHat was the focus of your dissertation?

@@outlawbookselleroriginal It was on Dick's religious experiences and influences; I mostly focused on VALIS, The Divine Invasion and his exegesis. I'm glad to see I'm not the only PKD enthusiast.

@@martinkirsch5969 -Well, there's a lot of material there to work with!

do you have it available anywhere?

Well, PKD had a different profile in the UK to the USA - I discovered him in 76 and everything changed when he died. I feel there are loads of gaps in his 'popular profile' because he is discussed more than read, still. He has a large oeuvre and it takes years to get through it, and now there is a big cult of PKD that over-emphasises some aspects and under-emphasises others. Before 'Bladerunner' and the internet, PKD was just another writer only SF readers knew of. Better days...

@Nancy Pelosi None of this is news, of course, as SF in literature has always been decades ahead of film - but people keep giving film primacy and talking about it as if it's the key media manifestation of SF (which it is of course in saturation terms). In terms of Dick's influence over 'virtual reality', I'd say this begins early in his career, with the metafictional ending scene of 'High Castle' as its first significant manifestation. Of course Delany, Budrys and Priest had by the 70s already articulated much of what Gibson shot into the sky like fireworks. As you say, there's no need for a special PKD credit in the film, no more than the other writers I cite.

@Nancy Pelosi -I've never been that enamoured of 'The Matrix' personally, as I felt it relied so much on the gimmick of "bullet time" which was of course deemed to be a big sfx innovation then. For me, sfx in films is only there to support the higher concepts of SF, which of course can pretty much only be put across clearly in language - and obviously 'The Matrix' does this, but I find it a bit too surface-led compared to -for example - Cronenberg's 'Videodrome' (widely regarded to be a key cinematic work that arose alongside Cyberpunk SF), a film that relies as much on telling moments of dialogue as much as sfx. This may sound strange - especially given the fact that I have a large number of SF films on DVD/BD - but I'm not a massive fan of SF cinema, as overall I feel it distracts people from literary SF and detracts from it, as it's often decades behind it. I don't actually think PKD was that directly influential upon cinema except in the adaptation of 'Radio Free Albemuth' and Cronenberg's 'Existenz' and 'Scanners' - and that latter owes as much to Van Vogt and Kuttner as PKD, since they influenced him (PKD that is). I think part of the big problem with PKD's status as the American SF figure singled out by the 'mundane' world of the arts as THE science fiction writer of note is that there were/are several other geniuses who are as important in different ways - Silveberg, Delany & Ellison to name but three (but they didn't die young and have not to date been subject to successful film adaptations). It was 'Blade Runner' that made PKD arguably influential over cinema. I'm more interested in genuinely radical SF films whose literary influences are more diffuse - such as 'Alphaville', 'Stereo', 'Crimes of the Future' (1970 original version), and 'Taking Tiger Mountain' -to name but three - than most of the SF cinema out there. Take Nolan - his over-reliance on spectacle often conceals the reality that his concepts are actually much less impressive than they'd be if they weren't dressed up so much and overblown...which is why his best SF film is the most understated one ('The Prestige', written by Brfitain's Dickian genius Christopher Priest). I think my issue with 'The Matrix' is my issue with 'Cyberpunk' generally - to me, there is hardly any true Cyberpunk beyond Gibson and Sterling, simply a collection of tropes and surface stylistics that are easily replicable on screen and in prose. What's missing from most 'Cyberpunk' is Punk itself - Gibson said his key influences re "Neuromancer" were Bester, a Beat Generation anthology and the first Velvet Underground album. I find little trace of these in 'The Matrix', so I don't see it as Cyberpunk. Virtual Reality existed in SF as I've already said before Gibson - take Vernor Vinge's 'The True Names' for example. I'm simply not that interested in the surface gloss of most SF movies. Sorry, but that's my feeling about SF cinema generally - unless it gives me 'the bucket of water in the face' effect I'm not keen. Thanks for your thoughtful posts and I hope you find more here to stimulate you- there'll be more discussion of this kind of thing as I cover more 80s material in future...promise!

Yes, I know. If you've read 'VALIS' you tend to know this. I read it in the early 1980s, when it was first published.

Well yes. This is well known. Tom Disch' comments on this are quite illuminating.

I was a young child in the 70s and noticed from the TV news that pre-empted cartoons offered enough information that anyone paying attention would have been able to predict the growing possibility of a 9/11 event it’s just that most adults weren’t paying attention-or they were paying attention to the wrong aspects Penn Gillette once said that if anyone could have foretold they should have …anyone paying attention could have done it Because at that time there was a rash of air terrorist hi jack activity, but the US didn’t have terrorist policy at the time because of having to cherry-pick support of para military groups of unstable countries, and were more concerned about the Cold War, and there was a general belief that war would never happen on home soil, so it caused hamstringing and conflict of interest So like where PKD talks about ‘subversive de-centralized society whose purpose is to overthrow the US government’ there was the Symbionese Liberation Army - and various ‘outside agitators’ as they were called in the movie The Graduate For instance one could say Shirley Jackson’s 1948 controversial short story “The Lottery” in the New York Times pre-sages such events as the recent Texas school shooting in South Texas The tag line was “Lottery in June. Corn will come soon” about a lottery in a rural area where each year before the corn harvest all members of all the generations in town prepare to stone a town member via lottery …so, even toddlers are being taught to collect rocks without any concept of the situation The twist is, no one can remember the history of the lottery, so no matter how the chosen woman screams it falls on tone deaf ears The story received the most mail in history of responses at the newspaper …and Ms Jackson’s parents were appalled that she would submit such a story Currently in South Texas, and Southern California, (and anywhere there are predominantly Latin communities or other individuals who subscribe) -the unofficial folk religion of Santa Muerte is currently one of the fastest growing unofficial belief systems The patronage of the official Catholic faith healing Marian shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City has been eclipsed in patronage by shrines of Santa Muerte in Mexico City since the early 2000s The 1400s origin story of Santa Muerte was that the unofficial folk religion was started when the Spanish Conquistadors brought Catholicism and the idea of patron saints to Mexico but the words and concepts did not readily translate well So originally the unofficial ‘patron saint’ was male and was the ‘patron of lost love’ but currently it is the female ‘patron saint of gun violence’ -Holy Death via gun roulette --a lottery So, if you take US Constitutional rights of ‘freedom of religion’ and ‘the right to bare arms’ and end up with communities who variously believe in a concept of fate/roulette/lottery , there are going to be unfortunate consequences which becomes known as a ‘sign of the times’ Like ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ and ‘Andromeda Strain’ in time of Covid

you are not. not at all. but go look closer at that supertramp album cover.

Foo? A typo, I suspect :-) Well, personally, I think truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, but often it's the other way around - it just depends on who is writing it...have a good day!

​@@outlawbookselleroriginal true