VALIS and Later Novels by Philip K. Dick: A Maze of Death / VALIS / The Divine Invasion / The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
edited by Jonathan Lethem
My continuing journey through the Philip K. Dick Library of America collections is nearing its end; the final one collects his "VALIS novels" from the 1980s... but despite the "later novels" subtitle, throws in also A Maze of Death, which was published in 1970 and thus chronologically goes back between Ubik (1969) and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). It comes from the very end of what I think of as his early period (1955-70), when he publishing two or three novels most years.
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Collection published: 2009 Novel originally published: 1970 Acquired: August 2014 Read: August 2022 |
It also feels like one of those early period novels; it clearly predates the shift that came with Flow My Years and A Scanner Darkly (1977). It's about ordinary people on another planet; a discontented group of space colonists have all been resettled on the uninhabited planet of Delmak-O... only they don't know why, because the message that's supposed to tell them this is damaged. You can see how this comes out of the same sort of area as, say, Martian Time-Slip (1964), though it's the first of Dick's novels that I've read where interstellar travel is in the foreground, not just interplanetary. (Certainly interstellar travel is an element in many of his other novels, but this is the first I've read where the narrative predominantly takes place outside of Earth's solar system.)
So it's clearly early Dick... and it's clearly also weaker Dick. It starts promisingly enough, and there's a bit of a trippy twist... but then there's another and another, and it felt more like a formula than something disconcerting. Like, Dick knew what people liked about his books was reality being upended, and so dutifully wrote a book that did it, but didn't put the work into making the reader feel upended. None of those moments here land the way similar ones did in Martian Time-Slip, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), or Ubik (1969). I don't know that I could tell you why without digging more deeply into A Maze of Death than I really feel motivated to do, but there it is.
So, I'm left a bit baffled as to why Library of America included this here. As I write this, I'm not quite done with VALIS, but I've read enough of it to know that what Dick is doing here, stylistically and thematically, is not really what he was doing in A Maze of Death at all. I guess they wanted the volume to be a bit longer, and A Maze of Death does have an attempt at creating an original religion in it. But honestly I wonder if a short volume omitting it would have been preferable; definitely weakest of the ten Dick novels I've read thus far.
Side note: once character is said to wear a "peek-n-squeeze bra." Other than the text of the novel itself, the only Google hit for this is a guy on Twitter wondering what a "peek-n-squeeze bra" is, and a bunch of people replying to him who also googled it and found him to be the only hit, going back to 2014! One commenter: "Every couple of years I get a notification in this thread - it’s like being in a bookclub for the most baffling phrase in science fiction." I think, though, that it might be a different term for a "peek-a-boo bra," where there's a cut-out for the nipples. It would make sense in context. I spent way too much time researching this (though it is mentioned at least twice in the next), and probably should have done it in private browsing! Who knows where Dick got the term from.
I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: VALIS / The Divine Invasion / The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Philip K. Dick
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