Valis, Volume 1

Front Cover
Vintage Books, 1991 - Fiction - 241 pages
Although known during his lifetime as a writer of science fiction, and more recently as the inspiration for such films as Blade Runner and Total Recall, Philip K. Dick properly belongs in the tradition of Vonnegut, Calvino, and Robertson Davies. His novels place touchingly ordinary men and women in intimate congress with the unknowable and the awe-full. Valis is the first book in Philip K. Dick's incomparable final trio of novels (the others are The Divine Invasion and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer). This disorienting and bleakly funny work is about a schizophrenic hero named Horselover Fat; the hidden mysteries of Gnostic Christianity; and reality as revealed through a pink laser. Valis is a theological detective story, in which God is both a missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate crime.

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Contents

Chapter 1
9
Chapter 2
18
Chapter 3
31
Copyright

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About the author (1991)

Phillip Kindred Dick was an American science fiction writer best known for his psychological portrayals of characters trapped in illusory environments. Born in Chicago, Illinois, on December 16, 1928, Dick worked in radio and studied briefly at the University of California at Berkeley before embarking on his writing career. His first novel, Solar Lottery, was published in 1955. In 1963, Dick won the Hugo Award for his novel, The Man in the High Castle. He also wrote a series of futuristic tales about artificial creatures on the loose; notable of these was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was later adapted into film as Blade Runner. Dick also published several collections of short stories. He died of a stroke in Santa Ana, California, in 1982.

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