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The Divine Invasion

(VALIS Trilogy #2)

Philip K. Dick

3.81 · Rating details · 7,044 ratings · 381 reviews

In The Divine Invasion, Philip K. Dick asks: What if God — or a being called Yah — were alive and in exile on a distant planet? How could a second coming succeed against the high technology and finely tuned rationalized evil of the modern police state?

The Divine Invasion "blends Judaism, Kabalah, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity into a fascinating fable of human existence" ...more

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Paperback, 238 pages

Published July 2nd 1991 by Vintage (first published June 1981)

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Jan 03, 2013 Lyn rated it really liked it

The Divine Invasion is a sci-fi alternate reality version of the second coming of Christ, told as only Philip K. Dick could.

More serious than VALIS and one his more serious works overall, PKD demonstrates his deep erudition of the Bible. Fundamentalists may be put off, and the reader looking for pure science fiction may be overwhelmed with his frequent references and quotes from the Bible, but this is an important work and one that must be read by a true student of PKD.

Dick also weaves a firm ...more

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Feb 23, 2019 BlackOxford rated it it was amazing

Shelves: sci-fi, philosophy-theology, american

Lest God Forget

One of the central issues in Christian theology is the way in which the divine and the human can plausibly be combined in Christ. Once it was decided dogmatically that Christ was divine, the theological discussion turned to his two ’natures’ existing in one person. The resolution of this then raised the question of whether the two natures implied two ‘wills’. The controversy subsequently cascades into a series of doctrines and heresies. Monotheism was supposed to simplify things. Lest God Forget

One of the central issues in Christian theology is the way in which the divine and the human can plausibly be combined in Christ. Once it was decided dogmatically that Christ was divine, the theological discussion turned to his two ’natures’ existing in one person. The resolution of this then raised the question of whether the two natures implied two ‘wills’. The controversy subsequently cascades into a series of doctrines and heresies. Monotheism was supposed to simplify things. Christianity is nothing if not intellectually complex.

So lots of theological loose ends about Christ, even today. And there are at least two aspects of Christianity’s inherent complexity that have never been fully explored. The first is the reason why YHWH of the Old Testament would find it necessary to send himself in physical form to live as a human being. He had after all been present in his emanation as Sophia, or Wisdom, and participating in human life for some time (as Dick casually notes). The rather slapdash theory of the Atonement, that the sacrifice of Christ was necessary because of the immensity of evil in the world, is an obvious divine own goal. It was after all God who created the evil. And he tried to wipe it out with the flood once before and failed. So this strategy of upping the bet smacks of some desperation. No, Atonement doesn’t hack it.

Second, there are further attributes of Christ aside from his general nature and will which are as yet unexplained. In particular his memory seems to be an obvious theological sticking point. According to the Gospel of John, Christ was in on the creation. And according to the Apostle Paul, he was the vehicle of creation who was meant to give the whole caboodle to his Father at some future point. But in the other gospels, Jesus seems to have forgotten entirely about the rather pivotal role in the history of the universe. A lapse that no one before Dick seems to have noticed.

Dick has connected these two missing links, as it were, in this marvellous tale of the Re-Incarnation, the first attempt (or second, counting the flood) having failed rather obviously in not ridding the world of evil. The perennial question is ‘why?’ What went wrong such that things have since his appearance been as screwed up as they ever have been? And what’s all this business that Paul was pushing about an imminent second coming? Why not get the job done in one visit? We’d expect as much from the plumber; why not God who also charges premium rates?

Dick’s theological hypothesis is that YHWH is, or is becoming, a bit forgetful. It could be that divine dementia threatens. The strain on the sacred cerebrum is undoubtedly intense, if not infinite. A bit of occupational therapy and determination of whatever the correct heavenly dosage of Haldol was for YHWH apparently took a bit longer than Paul expected.

This situation is problematic, according to Dick’s hypothesis, because the universe only exists to the extent that it is a memory in the mind of God (an idea widely shared by some pretty reputable thinkers like Leibniz). If that memory were in jeapordy, there is a clear rationale for drastic action. This is theological creativity at its best and certainly superior to the bulk 0f professional theological thought. This concept represents much more than Einstein’s metaphor for the laws of nature as the buried thoughts of God. Einstein didn’t mean it; Dick does. It is the world’s existence as God’s active memory which is at stake. If God forgets, even momentarily, the whole thing pops out of existence as suddenly as it popped in. Suck on that for a bit of relativity, Albert.

Hence the real role of Christ entering into creation - to make sure that God keeps us all in mind, and therefore in existence. The Old Testament divine emanation of Sophia (aka the Holy Spirit to Christians, and Pallas Athena/Diana to interested pagans) is inadequate for the job because he/she/it has no memory, only eternal thoughts. The Spirit just has to carry out instructions; history is demarcated to other members of the Trinity. And who knows but that there are many matters on the divine agenda more important than the continuing existence of the universe. Memory is a specialised job calling for very specific talents. Only one man for the job, obviously.

So Paul the Apostle was indeed correct; Christ’s mission was to save the world, quite literally. But although Paul remembered, Christ forgot. Both his eternal past and his intended future got a bit blurry, suggesting, perhaps, an inherited divine genetic defect. Or perhaps the job takes practice (accounting, therefore, for the second coming). Fortunately YHWH’s memory did not completely fail him (or us) in the interval between the Roman massacre of the final Jewish stronghold of Masada (when YHWH was forced into exile in a distant star system) and the present day (or rather the present day of the future when star travel has become technologically feasible).

Dick’s cinematic revival has more or less the same cast of characters as the original stage-production - the pregnant virgin, the stand-in father, the same prophet from the original cast, Elijah (a bit older but once you’re past 4000 who’d notice); as well as a chorus of worshipping followers and evil assassins. The Christian-Islamic Church (Elijah is a saint for both) is no help of course, aligned as it is with the global Communist Party as The Adversary, that is to say Satan, of old.

So the dramatic tension builds with clear biblical gravitas. Can the invading forces re-establish the power of YHWH in the evil zone? Will YHWH resist the temptation to nod off during the crucial scene? Can the new Emanuel remember his lines? On the more serious side, would it really be so hard for Christ just to forget the bad bits that keep recurring to YHWH and keep the rest (Just sayin’)? There’s at least as much action as Star Trek and much more theological wit. ...more

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Feb 21, 2019 Warwick rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi, fiction, read-in-other

This is kind of like when an old friend calls up and says he wants to see you, and you're like ‘Great! Come round!’ because he's smart and interesting and funny, and you sit around the table and open a bottle of wine, looking forward to an evening catching up, and he looks at you all excited and says he's got something absolutely amazing to tell you – and you're all, ‘Oh yeah? What is it?’ and he leans forward with his eyes shining and says:

‘I've found Jesus!’

And you kind of grin, but then you r ...more

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Mar 25, 2013 Bradley rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fantasy, 2017-shelf, reality-bending, sci-fi, worldbuilding-sf

This happens to be my third read and like the one that immediately precedes it, it's well worth the extra effort.

Absolutely amazing is only a part of what it is. It's also a complicated exploration of comparative religions, a roaring tale of a battle between God and the Devil, and it's also about totally re-writing reality because it's all a hologram... or is it?

It has the Living Torah, it has the Kabbalah, it has Zoroastrianism and Maat and the Fairy Queen and Palas Athena. It has a brain dama ...more

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Apr 09, 2009 Will Byrnes rated it really liked it

Shelves: religion-and-sprituality, religion

There is the usual time-tripping here. Pay attention. It is like a LOST episode, and indeed probably inspired some of the concepts used in that estimable show. You need to keep track not only of where you are in space, but in time. The Divine Invasion (no, not a John Waters film) posits a scenario in which god, Yahweh, was essentially booted off planet Earth after the unfortunate events at Masada. Now resident in an alien hill and renamed Yah, (so much classier than Yo!) the big guy is looking t ...more

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Nov 20, 2015 Stuart rated it really liked it

Shelves: dystopian, religion, magic-realism-reality-as-illusion, fantastic-weird

The Divine Invasion: A dense gnostic allegory about salvation
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
Before his death, Philip K. Dick wrote several books about suffering, redemption, and the divine in the contexts of Christian Gnosticism, Jewish Kabbalism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, anamnesis, and the dualistic nature of the ultimate divine being. After writing two books that explored his personal religious experiences in 1974, Radio Free Albemuth (written in 1976 but not published until 1985) The Divine Invasion: A dense gnostic allegory about salvation
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
Before his death, Philip K. Dick wrote several books about suffering, redemption, and the divine in the contexts of Christian Gnosticism, Jewish Kabbalism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, anamnesis, and the dualistic nature of the ultimate divine being. After writing two books that explored his personal religious experiences in 1974, Radio Free Albemuth (written in 1976 but not published until 1985) and VALIS (written in 1978 but published in 1981), he wrote The Divine Invasion (written in 1980 but published in 1981), The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (written in 1981 but published in 1982), and an unfinished novel called The Owl in Daylight. Radio Free Albemuth was the first version of what was rewritten as VALIS, and The Divine Invasion and The Owl in Daylight were intended as a thematic trilogy. However, after PDK’s death in 1982, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer was substituted for the unfinished The Owl in Daylight and grouped together as the VALIS TRILOGY.

The Divine Invasion is dense religious allegory that begins with some of the familiar SF elements frequently in PDK’s earlier novels but quickly delves into his ideas about gnosis (finding knowledge, enlightenment or salvation by recognizing a higher spiritual realm separate from the material world), anamnesis (the process of “losing forgetfulness” or regaining knowledge), and the dualistic nature of the divine Godhead, which was separated in the Fall into a superior supreme being and a lesser creator god (a “demiurge”) who shaped the material world that humans live in.

The plot is very complex, but here goes. Herb Asher lives a solitary life on a planet called CY30-CY30B, where colonists live in isolated domes. Herb is contacted by a local deity named Yah, who contacts him in a vision and demands that he help his neighbor Rybys Rommey, a woman who is sick with multiple scleroisis and also is pregnant with Yah’s baby via immaculate conception. Herb has been a recluse content to listen endlessly to the pop music of star Linda Fox and handling communications for the colony.

With the help of a bearded beggar named Elias Tate, who is the immortal incarnation of the prophet Elijah, Herb agrees to serve as husband to Rybys (like Joseph to Mary), and they travel to Earth along with Elias, ostensibly to cure her illness. However, the Earth is ruled by a Christian-Islamic Church and a Scientific Legate who are warned of the arrival of this reincarnation of Yahweh (by an A.I. system humorously named the Big Noodle) and consider this a “Divine Invasion” and threat to their dominion of the planet. But in reality, it is the fallen angel Belial who rules this world and enslaves humanity in the prison of the material world.

The authorities pursue Herb and Rybys, seeking to kill the unborn child who will be Yahweh. They escape various attempts but finally are involved in a fatal car accident which puts Herb in a coma and kills Rybys. Herb’s body is placed in cryogenic storage while waiting for a spleen replacement, and the child Emmanuel survives but suffers a head injury that causes amnesia. Meanwhile, Elias Tate manages to save the child and smuggles it to safety. Emmanuel grows up in a special school with another girl named Zina, and she gradually helps him remember his divine origins through the process of anamnesis. It becomes clear through a series of dense philosophical discussions that Emmanuel and Zina are both aspects of the divine Godhead that was split asunder in the Fall, and that it is up to both halves to unite again and heal a sick and corrupt world.

Zina reveals to Emmanuel a more idyllic parallel universe in which both Herb and Rybys are still alive. Even more strangely, Belial is nothing but a baby goat in a NY zoo. Feeling bad for it, they innocently free the goat, but Belial seizes the opportunity to regain control of this parallel world. In this world, Herb works at a high-end electronic sound system store, and encounters a beautiful young aspiring singer named Linda Fox, who he knows will become a huge star in the future. He falls in love with her, but is tricked by Belial the goat into confronting her. Eventually, Linda Fox fights and defeats Belial, freeing the world of his evil and saving Herb in the process.

Though very dense and confusing at first, The Divine Invasion reveals itself as an allegory of how the two separate aspects of the divine being, in the form of the creator Yahweh (reborn in human form as the child Emmanuel) and the feminine aspect that remained in the material world to look after and protect mankind (represented by the girl Zina Pallas and Linda Fox). The two riven parts of the Godhead must recall via anamnesis that they are one entity, and thus united confront the fallen angel Belial, who controls the material world and keeps mankind subjected to his corrupt vision of reality. The conflict between the divine and Belial also represents the struggle for salvation of individual human beings, who must live in the corrupt material world and choose between the baser pleasures of the material world ruled by Belial and the higher spiritual plane of existence beyond our world of illusions ruled by the ultimate divine being, whose various aspects include Yahweh the Creator, Christ the Savior, the feminine goddess Diana, etc.

It’s difficult to view The Divine Invasion as a SF work, because it’s really an attempt to put PKD’s extremely complex and convoluted religious and philosophical beliefs into fictional form. And unlike the more auto biographical Radio Free Albemuth and VALIS, this book takes a much broader and more allegorical approach to his still-evolving Gnostic ideas about suffering and evil in the material world, the dual nature of the divine, and the possibility of salvation through gnosis. If you are interested in these ideas, especially as they relate to PKD’s own religious experiences and life story, then you will be able to appreciate how many of his early stories questioning the morality and reality of our world evolved into his much more convoluted thinking after his religious experiences of 1974. And while he flirted with madness and schizophrenia in Radio Free Albemuth and VALIS, he seems to have found a more coherent philosophical framework for his thoughts in The Divine Invasion. It is still a difficult book to understand, and may be very unsatisfying as a work of fiction, but it remains an essential read if you are a serious PKD student who wants to achieve ‘gnosis’ by diving down his rabbit hole.

There are also several biographies of PDK that would shed more light on his life and ideas, and I will have to make time for them someday. These include Lawrence Sutin’s Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick (2005) and Emmanuel Carrere’s I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick (2005), and of course the rambling, obsessive notes of PKD himself, meticulously edited and boiled down by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem in 2001 as The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. If you have read all these books, consider yourself a truly dedicated scholar of the most complex, troubled and fascinating personality to have ever been part of the SF genre. ...more

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Aug 17, 2013 Darwin8u rated it really liked it

Shelves: american, scifi, fiction, 2013

“I chose God over the material universe.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Divine Invasion

description

Book 2 of Philip K Dick's VALIS Trilogy (Gnostic Trilogy [God Trilogy]), 'The Divine Invasion' is a funky PKDesque exploration of good and evil, God and Belial, gnostic truth, etc. In this short novel, Emmanuel (God) is smuggled back to Earth via the womb of a Jewish woman with MS. She is accompanied by Herb Asher, a DJ protagonist of sorts (Jesus as a DJ's son) who marries Rybys (read Mary) to assist getting her and ...more

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May 17, 2012 JSA Lowe rated it really liked it

DAMN Philip K. Dick you have got some PROBLEMS, a great many of them with women. And you're so fucking brilliant and so messed up and weird. Did you realize there is ZERO feminist criticism of you? That's about to change, my new dead crazy fucked-up friend.

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Jul 01, 2017 Linda rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2017, audio

I liked it, although I was confused a good part of the time and a stronger background in religious matters would have helped. But still, great classic PKD scenes and dialogue.

I'm enjoying the audio of the PKD novels I've listened to so far, and Dick Hill did a great job with this one.

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Feb 16, 2016 Gray rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2016-reads, philip-k-dick

"When has the government ever told anyone the truth?” (p.76)

The Divine Invasion was published in the same year as VALIS. It is the second book in the VALIS Trilogy, although there is only a brief mention of VALIS in the story. Like VALIS it addresses religion and philosophy, but it’s not as tightly structured or plotted as the first book. In fact, some parts of The Divine Invasion feel like they belong to a completely different story. According to Jonathan Lethem, one of the editors of Dick’s Ex ...more

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Apr 14, 2008 Jonathan rated it really liked it

the internal battle for reality, the good vs. the evil, the light vs. the dark, children vs. goats -
its a throwdown for all of humanity. its intergalactic and its terrifying, its your soul and its winner take all. Sunday, sunday, sunday - BE THERE!!!

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May 16, 2007 Andrew Horton rated it it was amazing

Now my favorite book in the so-called "Valis Trilogy," The Divine Invasion takes the heady gnostic concepts of Valis and truly presents them in an unabashedly "sci-fi" context - the infant Christ has been reborn on mars to a woman with M.S. after a divine conception, and must be smuggled back onto earth, which is completely under Satan's control via artificial intelligence and totalitarian government. And that's merely the setup for a book that ends up in a completely different place than you'd ...more

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Nov 11, 2013 Tom Bensley rated it really liked it

I feel sorry for Philip K Dick. I mean, before he died. It's probably a good thing he didn't live to see Hollywood steal all of his ideas and completely debase and dumb them down to make crappy forgettable movies, not mentioning his name anywhere for their inspiration.

But really, the guy didn't get the credit he deserved. He ate dog food and he only had time to write 200 pagers rather than the Infinite Jest-sized mega-beast I know he wanted to write. And then just as he was getting some money an I feel sorry for Philip K Dick. I mean, before he died. It's probably a good thing he didn't live to see Hollywood steal all of his ideas and completely debase and dumb them down to make crappy forgettable movies, not mentioning his name anywhere for their inspiration.

But really, the guy didn't get the credit he deserved. He ate dog food and he only had time to write 200 pagers rather than the Infinite Jest-sized mega-beast I know he wanted to write. And then just as he was getting some money and respect, he died due to his shitty lifestyle. Luckily before that he wrote a helluva lot of those 200-pagers and most of them feel connected, so reading his works feels like piecing together a huge novel with no order but clear development of thought. In some ways it's more fun like that.

Mostly my pity for him has come reading VALIS and now The Divine Invasion. I pity him because he was very disturbed in his later years and his entire foundations about reality and existence had been completely shaken by a strange divine experience he had. It sounds cool and the fiction he came up with is certainly awesome, but I don't think anyone would wish for what happened to Dick. Whether drug-induced or just crazyness or real divine intervention, Dick stopped believing that this world was the real one, because a pink beam of light told him and showed him otherwise. I feel sorry for him because after reading the scrawling, desperate madness of VALIS, I realised how much the experience fucked him up. But he wasn't crazy enough to go completely crazy. That book shows that he thought he was probably crazy but might not be, caught in a cage match with his own rationality and the experience he had, poking fun at himself for his readers but on an exhausting quest to find the truth.

But the 2nd book is different. Here, Dick seems to be entertaining the idea that the experience definitely happened and through protagonist Herb Asher, a strange paranoid fantasy comes through. Without spoiling too much, which is why I'm talking about the author and not the book, Dick wonders whether God or Gods were playing games with him. As if divine beings had chosen him to make bets with one another, to test the fabric of reality and to challenge human perception and faith. The Divine Invasion is much more controlled in its writing than the series' first, but the outrageousness of the story suggests Dick was completely on his own in discovering the secrets of the universe. Of what I've read, this for me is his most impenetrable work because it's too difficult to read the message he was trying to communicate to readers, but also because there is so much in here that needs further exploration. You know, like, more than 200 pages or so. And unfortunately the ending sucks. Hopefully the third book in the series will answer some of my questions. Whatever they are. ...more

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Dec 20, 2011 Travis Todd rated it it was ok

It's baffling to me that this is considered to be part of a trilogy with Valis and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Sure, they all contain religious themes, and underlying each of them you can see the struggle of Dick to interpret his mystical experiences. But beyond that they have very little, if anything, to do with each other.
I consider The Divine Invasion to be much less satisfying than Valis. None of the characters come alive on the page. Emmanuel and Zina are profundity-spouting cip ...more

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Apr 22, 2011 David rated it really liked it

Shelves: science-fiction, religion

This story is an amalgamation of various religions and philosophies, along with a bit of science fiction and fantasy. God finds that he needs to be smuggled back to earth, in the womb of a virgin woman, Rybys. God's mission in returning to Earth is to battle against Belial, a sort of Satan in the guise of a caged animal at the zoo. Rybys is very sick, and is granted permission to return to Earth for medical treatments. However, Earth is ruled by tyrannical religious leaders who try their best to ...more

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Feb 08, 2011 Em Grove rated it it was amazing

One of my favorite Philip K. Dick books. It explores the theme of parallel universes that sneaks into most of his work, and gives a nail-biting account of Yahweh's, and creation at large's, struggle to survive in a world with harmful religious leaders and stifling bureaucracy. All of the characters really come to life for me, from the strong and grounded Rybys Rommey to the Scared-of-the-World Herbert Asher, who would prefer to live in his fantasies than reality, to the eerie and truly scary Bel ...more

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Apr 07, 2018 spikeINflorida rated it liked it

A potent and heady stew of Judaism, Kabalah, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity...all cooked-up from Phil's bizarre 1974 religious experience. Of the thirteen PKD novels I've read to date, THE DIVINE INVASION was the most difficult and least humorous. It is the second book in the Valis trilogy. Heavy on theologic and apostolic ruminations, it's an alternate reality version of Jesus Christ's return to Earth. Three stars for my favorite character Herb Asher and his zany wife Rybys Rommey and preache ...more

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Jul 06, 2007 Travis Johns rated it it was ok

Recommends it for: People on busses.

... Dick can do better. While Valis was an incredible novel that fully explored Dick's enlightenment/mental collapse via a lifelong addiction to uppers and his views of the divine, electronic music and pink lasers, this book seems to be more os a scifi thriller that really fails to go anywhere, despite the fact that it's set on both intergalactic exploration outposts, as well as parts of NY and LA. The climax was weak, the whole concept of the divine as an illegal "alien" being aided by the phys ...more

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Jun 22, 2008 Amy rated it did not like it

Shelves: 2008-books-read

What utter crap. The first 100 pages or so of the book were somewhat coherent while the last 140 were nearly unreadable. This is a book about how God manages to reincarnate himself again through a new virgin birth. And then Philip K. Dick goes off the crazy end and starts writing in his sleep or something. Kudos to those who loved this book and thought it was great ... but were you high when you were freaking reading it?

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Aug 24, 2008 Jim rated it it was amazing

Shelves: sci-fi-geek

Philip K. Dick did exactly the right thing with his encounter with the divine (or psychotic break, depending on who you ask). He /kept writing/. Divine Invasion is the second of the VALIS tetralogy, which includes VALIS, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, The Divine Invasion, and Radio Free Albemuth. (RFA was published posthumously, but it still addresses the same themes. The Divine Invasion is probably the most coherent of the "VALIS series". VALIS was groundbreaking, and it shattered any pr ...more

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Apr 24, 2015 Jimmy Ele rated it really liked it

Shelves: foundation

This book is great for the dialogue between the characters. PKD takes a little bit from the various religions of the world and creates a science fiction story based very loosely on the second coming of Jesus Christ (Peace Be Upon Him). The novel is brilliant in it's depiction of two alternating realities (or worlds) at the same time. One world being more real than the next, and in the end creating a sort of amalgamation of both. The book is very epic in its prose and dialogue as mentioned before ...more

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Nov 30, 2018 Malum rated it it was amazing

Shelves: philip-k-dick, science-fiction

As with the previous book in the Valis trilogy, I give this one five stars with a big ol' asterisk next to it. There are people who are going to hate this book and throw it across the room, and I totally get it. It is weird, not much makes total sense at first glance, and the plot is all over the place. If you know and care who Philip K. Dick was and if you are into the weird ravings of crazy people (Grant Morrison and Robert Anton Wilson come to mind as other examples), however, then you just m ...more

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Jul 03, 2017 John rated it liked it

Meh. Not bad, but definitely not as good as VALIS. In that book, PKD seemed to care about the narrative just as much as he cared about pouring the kooky ideas out of his head. Not the case with this second book, unfortunately.

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Aug 08, 2016 Dan DalMonte rated it liked it

This novel was a difficult read. It contains a lot of profound meditation on theological issues like divine omnipotence and the reality of evil. It is so abstract though and there is not much of a plot, just a lot of wordy and artificial dialogue. It is based on a mystical experience that Dick had and it seems like he didn't spend much time integrating these experiences into a novel. Part of the problem could be that this novel is a part of a trilogy, which I did not know before I started readin ...more

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Aug 27, 2009 zim rated it it was amazing

"The Evil One in a cage at the zoo- what, with his own temperature and gravity and atmosphere, and imported food? An exotic life form?'
'He's angry as hell about it.'"

"You beguile me. You lead me from the path with sparks of light, dancing, singing, and the sound of bells; always the sound of bells."

"Do not make war on it but bring flowers."

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Jun 11, 2019 Quentin Crisp rated it liked it · review of another edition

Apparently this is the follow-up to Valis. It didn't, for me, have the same impact and internal cohesiveness as Valis, but was nonetheless compelling in its own way. Dick is very much concerned with the eschaton, and this interest is given flavour by preoccupations with alternate realities and the effects of psychosis. What Dick really desires, it would seem, is to penetrate the multi-layered fog of paranoia and reach the truth. The troubling question is this: is the multi-layered fog actually t ...more

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Dec 13, 2012 Sentimental Surrealist rated it it was ok

Shelves: 1981, 1980s, philosophy, religion, theology, would-you-look-at-this-mess, how-much-acid, good-but-nothing-special, who-are-you-calling-paranoid, read-2013

I'm not sure if the Divine Invasion is a good book or not, but I like it just the same. I like it because I have a taste for the bizarre and the out-there, and conceptually, this novel is as out-there as they come. This is the one where Philip K. Dick swan dives off the deep end, building on the metaphysical, theological, and philosophical mind-warp VALIS. I guess you can say it explains the events, what with the Empire and the pink dot and all, but it's the sort of explanation that might leave I'm not sure if the Divine Invasion is a good book or not, but I like it just the same. I like it because I have a taste for the bizarre and the out-there, and conceptually, this novel is as out-there as they come. This is the one where Philip K. Dick swan dives off the deep end, building on the metaphysical, theological, and philosophical mind-warp VALIS. I guess you can say it explains the events, what with the Empire and the pink dot and all, but it's the sort of explanation that might leave you with more questions than answers.

Luckily, it's a fascinating explanation. Dick was fascinated with Gnostic Christianity, which holds that the real god was exiled and a false one presides over a false universe; only the return of the true god will restore reality. Even before you factor in his own religious experience (better documented elsewhere), you can probably see why this might interest the man behind Ubik and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. This novel is best when it deals with its Gnostic aspects. It walks the reader through a blend of that, ancient Judaism, and Egyptian religion in a stunningly plainspoken way, bolstered by the guy's dry wit. It's almost a can't-miss concept, but it's made all the more fascinating when you place it within the broader framework of Dick's earlier novels - not just VALIS and Radio Free Albemuth, but plenty from even before his religious experience in the early '70s.

The problem is, it's not much of a novel. Granted, VALIS flips between philosophical discourse and bizarre plot, and I gave that five stars. But the genre roulette approach it takes is all sorts of fun, the metafictional narrative technique is at once completely badass and a remarkably original way to get the story across, and its occasional fits of paranoid anti-government lunacy (which are made 100% more paranoid and kookier when you consider the events of this book) are entertaining. It's a hard book to put down, in other words, which is probably why I blazed through it in an afternoon.

This doesn't offer us anywhere near as much to keep us going when hte discourse ain't flowing. There's a dystopic church-cum-political organization that just sort of hangs out; there's a "multiple timelines at once" plot which is more clumsy and confusing than anything else; there's a messy, urgent rush towards a massive anticlimax; and there are irritatingly flat characters who aren't much more than mouthpieces for the aforementioned discourse, which often swoops in at the last minute and saves the day for me.

Man, I don't even know what to do with this one. It seemed to me like, in an effort to process his religious practice, Dick crammed more than he should have into these 260 pages. Maybe if he had written one novel about exiled God Yah's attempt to communicate with Herb, Elias and Rybys and a second novel about their attempts to reinstate the true god on Earth, he could've solved this novel's issues with character development and pacing; besides, nothing wrong with a VALIS tetralogy. Or pentalogy, because why not let Radio Free Albemuth join the fun? As it stands now, it's an uneven mess with too many intriguing ideas for me to slap it with the two-star rating I imagine it objectively deserves. Shame - there were two good novels waiting to be developed here. ...more

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Jan 27, 2013 Lit Bug rated it it was ok

Difficult prose to read, and a good story, but on the whole, I cannot say that I loved it... I might not take it up again. The story was excellently interwoven, but somehow the issue of "Divinity" robbed this sci-fi of the thrill I was looking for. I prefer an Aristotelian tragedy, where the protagonist unwittingly brings upon his own misfortune, realizing it when its pretty late, humanity leading itself to downfall with the aid of technology, and instead I found just a Biblical story set in the ...more

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May 23, 2012 Matt rated it liked it

"That was a strange book" said anyone who ever read Philip K. Dick. But anyway, the familiar PKD theme of being unable to distinguish fiction from reality continues here, except that in this one he weaves Judeo-Christian history through it and re-writes it with a twist. The thing that always blows my mind is how many great sci fi movies came out of PKD's stories-(Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report)he came up with so many incredible plot lines. There's a point in this one where the chara ...more

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Apr 04, 2017 Theo Logos rated it liked it

Shelves: philosophy-religion, scifi

If you were amazed by Valis, you likely will find The Divine Invasion disappointing in some degree. This second book of the thematic Valis trilogy lacks the emotional power of the semi autobiographical first entry, and is a narrative nightmare, even by Dick's standards. Still, it engages fiercely with the author's lifelong questioning of reality and identity, and mixes these themes freely with the obsession of his final decade - the line between spiritual gnosis and madness. If you have the pati ...more

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About Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick

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Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. In 1952, he began writing professionally and proceeded to write numerous novels and short-story collections. He won the Hugo Award for the best novel in 1962 for The Man in the High Castle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year in 1974 for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Philip K. Di ...more

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Quotes from The Divine Invasion

“What a tragic realm this is, he reflected. Those down here are prisoners, and the ultimate tragedy is that they don't know it; they think they are free because they have never been free, and do not understand what it means.” — 25 likes

“Sometimes I think this planet is under a spell," Elias said. "We are asleep or in a trance, and something causes us to see what it wants us to see and remember and think what it wants us to remember and think. Which means we're whatever it wants us to be. Which in turn means that we have no genuine existence. We're at the mercy of some kind of whim.” — 24 likes

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