Valis

I consider myself a very spiritual person and I believe that it is a person’s responsibility to question what it means to be spiritual in order to better understand one’s own faith.

As I am, Philip K. Dick was obviously obsessed with wanting spiritual answers. Valis is very entertaining, but it also made me question all that I believe in a way that expanded and made my spirituality stronger.

This book served as a primary inspiration for my book. One of Dick’s later works, it follows a drug-addled protagonist, Horselover Fat, in his search for the Vast Active Living Intelligence System: an artificial AI that coincides with Dick’s vision of a gnostic God.

There are few books, in my view, that will change how you will see the world. Typically, experience does that, but this book is almost a substitute for experience. At the least, it will disorient you. Like Dick’s other works, it is disorienting.

You may not remember the story, the characters, or even the message! But… show more.

Blimey. Even by PKD’s standards, this is an unconventional read. VALIS is a story which seeps into the author’s real life, or vice versa. It includes autobiographical elements as well as science fiction and philosophy. Its bravery impresses me. This is art written with the utmost passion, honesty and perhaps even desperation, as it details the author’s mental illness and unexplained experiences and tries to make sense of them. And yet it also manages to be great fun. Really. 

VALIS—Vast Active Living Intelligence System—is one of PK Dick’s most inspiring, and at the same time, depressing, novels. A bizarre film leads a rag tag group of friends to even more bizarre adventures. They meet a 2-year-old Messiah who cures the protagonist’s psychosis. Any more would be spoiling the plot.