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What he did not know then is that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

In 1974, PKD had an encounter �� a theophany �� that transformed and dominated the remaining years of his life. Was his encounter with God? With an alien intelligence system? With both? Or was he just a nutter? Valis is his autobiographical science fiction novel in which he attempted to sort that all out.

God is either powerless, stupid, or he doesn’t give a shit. Or all three.

PKD commenced by offering himself as the ultimate unreliable narrator, twinning himself into dissociative identities �� Phil, and his alter ego, Horselover Fat. The story proceeds from the mundane �� Horselover Fat’s despair over suicidal friends he was unable to save, bloviating, naval-gazing conversations about God, the Universe, and Everything among Fat and his circle of friends �� to the absolutely bizarre �� time juxtaposed over two millennia, mad, Demiurge god, contact from alien intelligence systems, glam rock gurus, and toddler messiah. All of this swims in a soup of ambiguous madness, dark humor, and gnostic theology.

The godhead is impaired. Some primordial crisis occurred in it which we do not understand.

All PKD’s best novels explore the nature of reality, madness, and the self. “What is real?”and “Who (or what) am I really?�� were questions that he posed over and over again. Valis has no ultimate answers to those questions. But in its autobiographical reveal of Dick’s own psyche, it shows why he was so obsessed with those questions that he could spin them into amazing art.

But underneath all the names there is only one immortal man, and we are that man

The Empire never ended