Dick - Valis

Dicks plastic realities tell us more than well ever want to know about the inside of our heads and the view looking out. In his tortured topographies of worlds never made, we see mindscapes that we ourselves, in our madder moments, have glimpsed and thought real. Dick travelled out there on our behalf. It is our duty to read the reports he sent home. James Lovegrove

Dick quietly produced serious fiction in a popular form and there can be no greater praise. Michael Moorcock

One of the most original practitioners writing any kind of fiction, Philip K. Dick made most of the European avant-garde seem navel-gazers in a cul-de-sac Sunday Times

The most consistently brilliant SF writer in the world

John Brunner

Dicks abundant storytelling gifts and the need to express his inner struggles combined to produce some of the most groundbreaking novels and ideas to emerge from SF in the fifties and sixties

Waterstones Guide to Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror

In all his work he was astonishingly intimate, self exposed, and very dangerous. He was the funniest sf writer of his time, and perhaps the most terrifying. His dreads were our own, spoken as we could not have spoken them

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

Also by Philip K. Dick

N OVELS

Solar Lottery (1955)

The World Jones Made (1956)

The Man Who Japed (1956)

The Cosmic Puppets (1957)

Eye in the Sky (1957)

Dr. Futurity (1959)

Time Out of Joint (1959)

Vulcans Hammer (1960)

The Man in the High Castle (1962)

The Game-Players of Titan (1963)

The Penultimate Truth (1964)

The Simulacra (1964)

Martian Time-Slip (1964)

Clans of the Alphane Moon (1964)

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965)

Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965)

The Ganymede Takeover (with Ray F. Nelson) (1967)

The Crack in Space (1966)

The Zap Gun (1967)

Counter-Clock World (1967)

Do Androids Dream of

Electric Sheep? (1968)

Galactic Pot-Healer (1969)

Ubik (1969)

Our Friends From Frolix 8 (1970)

A Maze of Death (1970)

We Can Build You (1972)

Flow My Tears, The

Policeman Said (1974)

Confessions of a Crap Artist (1975)

Deus Irae (with Roger Zelazny) (1976)

A Scanner Darkly (1977)

The Divine Invasion (1981)

Valis (1981)

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982)

Lies, Inc (1984)

The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike (1984)

Puttering About in a Small Land (1985)

In Milton Lumky Territory (1985)

Radio Free Albemuth (1985)

Humpty Dumpty in Oakland (1986)

Mary and the Giant (1987)

The Broken Bubble (1988)

S HORT S TORY C OLLECTIONS

The Variable Man (1957)

A Handful of Darkness (1966)

The Turning Wheel (1977)

The Best of Philip K. Dick (1977)

The Golden Man (1980)

T HE C OLLECTED S TORIES O F P HILIP K. D ICK

1. Beyond Lies the Wub (1987)

2. Second Variety (1987)

3. The Father Thing (1987)

4. The Days of Perky Pat (1987)

5. We Can Remember it for you Wholesale (1987)

VALIS

Philip K. Dick

A Gollancz eBook

Copyright Philip K. Dick 1981
All rights reserved.

The right of Philip K. Dick to be identifed as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This edition first published in Great Britain in 2001 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martins Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company

This eBook first published in 2010 by Gollancz.

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 575 09836 7

This eBook produced by Jouve, France

All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

www.orionbooks.co.uk

Contents

To Russell Galen,
Who showed me the right way.

Acknowledgements

Excerpt from The Pre-Socratics by Edward Hussey; copyright 1972 by Edward Hussey. By permission of Charles Scribners Sons.

Excerpt from The Introduction from Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching, translated by D. C Lau; copyright 1963 by D. C. Lau. By permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

Excerpt from The Nag Hammadi Library in English, On the Origin of the World, James Robinson, General Editor; translated by Hans-Gebhard Bethge and Orval S. Wintermute; copyright 1977 by E. J. Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands. By permission of Harper & Row.

Excerpt from Our Oriental Heritage by Will Durant; copyright 1935, 1963 by Will Durant. By permission of Simon & Schuster, a Division of Gulf and Western Corporation.

Excerpt from A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick; copyright 1977 by Philip K. Dick. By permission of Doubleday and Company, Inc.

Excerpt from Gnosticism from The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, by Hans Jonas; Paul Edwards, Editor in Chief; copyright 1967 by Macmillan, Inc. By permission of the publisher.

Excerpts from On Death and Its Relation to the Indestructibility of Our True Nature, from The Will to Live; Selected Writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, by Arthur Schopenhauer, edited by Richard Taylor; copyright 1962 by Doubleday and Company, Inc. By permission of the publisher.

Excerpt from The New Encyclopaedia Britannica; copyright 1980. By permission of the publisher.

Excerpt from Protestantism by J. Leslie Dunstan; copyright 1961. by J. Leslie Dunstan. By permission of George Braziller, Inc.

VALIS (acronym of Vast Active Living Intelligence System, from an American film): A perturbation in the reality field in which a spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic vortex is formed, tending progressively to subsume and incorporate its environment into arrangements of information. Characterized by quasiconsciousness, purpose, intelligence, growth and an armillary coherence.

Great Soviet Dictionary Sixth Edition, 1992

Horselover Fats nervous breakdown began the day he got the phonecall from Gloria asking if he had any Nembutals. He asked her why she wanted them and she said that she intended to kill herself. She was calling everyone she knew. By now she had fifty of them, but she needed thirty or forty more, to be on the safe side.

At once Horselover Fat leaped to the conclusion that this was her way of asking for help. It had been Fats delusion for years that he could help people. His psychiatrist once told him that to get well he would have to do two things: get off dope (which he hadnt done) and to stop trying to help people (he still tried to help people).

As a matter of fact, he had no Nembutals. He had no sleeping pills of any sort. He never did sleeping pills. He did uppers. So giving Gloria sleeping pills by which she could kill herself was beyond his power. Anyhow, he wouldnt have done it if he could.

I have ten, he said. Because if he told her the truth she would hang up.

Then Ill drive up to your place, Gloria said in a rational, calm voice, the same tone in which she had asked for the pills.

He realized then that she was not asking for help. She was trying to die. She was completely crazy. If she were sane she would realize that it was necessary to veil her purpose, because this way she made him guilty of complicity. For him to agree, he would need to want her dead. No motive existed for him or anyone to want that. Gloria was gentle and civilized, but she dropped a lot of acid. It was obvious that the acid, since he had last heard from her six months ago, had wrecked her mind.