VALIS

Paranoia or Prescience?

Several chapters back in The Light Beyond The Mountains, I referenced the work of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. I’ve never been one for science-fiction much, even though some of my favourite movies are of the genre: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, Blade Runner, Arrival, Minority Report. Two on that list, as many will know, are adaptations of works by Dick – ‘PKD’, as he’s known to his devotees: Blade Runner was adapted from ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’, published in 1968, and Minority Report from ‘The Minority Report’, which was published more a decade or so earlier.

Even as a fan of these films, I’d never given a lot of thought to the person who dreamed them up, beyond the fact I knew him to be something of a tortured talent. Dick died young in 1982, at the age of 53, after many years of drug abuse and psychotic illness. Anyone who can come up with the kinds of ideas that fed those films, though, had to have a rare gift; and PKD seemed to have it in spades.

So, it was with a sense of excitement that I picked up a copy of ‘VALIS’, a PKD work I’d never heard of until its recommendation by someone who will need little introduction here: Jacques Vallée.

The famous French ufologist counts VALIS as one of his favourite books of all time. And since Vallée is a towering talent himself in fields that interest me – his analyses, for example, of how consciousness connects to ufology and related arcana – I overcame a lifetime of science-fiction avoidance and began to read VALIS, a book with a striking cover that was first published in 1981.

I’m not going to outline the plot here – partly because, if you haven’t read it, and are into SF, you really should; but mainly because it is almost impossible to sum up in a sentence or two.

Instead, I’m going to do something else I don’t often do: I’m going to allow Wikipedia to do the talking for me. ‘Valis,’ it says, ‘is a 1981 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, intended to be the first book of a three-part series. The title is an acronym for Vast Active Living Information System, Dick’s gnostic vision of God. Set in California during the 1970s, the book features heavy autobiographical elements and draws inspiration from Dick’s own investigations into his unexplained religious experiences over the previous decade.’

As I will recount in the next chapter of The Light Beyond The Mountains, I read VALIS on a long flight to Las Vegas, where I’d been invited to attend an awards ceremony presided over by the hotel chain billionaire and long-time UFO investigator, Robert Bigelow. As readers of The Light will also know, in 2021, Mr Bigelow decided to inaugurate his Bigelow Institute of Consciousness Studies – BICS – with an essay contest that invited entrants to ‘provide proof of the survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death’. The substance of my entry in that competition has featured in the last several chapters of The Light. Next week’s chapter marks the threshold of the second half of the book - the narrative takes off following the BICS awards ceremony, where I received a runner-up prize – the winning submission being a work from a true luminary of the consciousness and parapsychology fields: Jeffrey Mishlove.

The ceremony took place in the giant aerospace facility in North Las Vegas Bigelow built to supply lightweight habitable space modules to NASA. These were once optimistically referred to as ‘hotels in space’. Sadly, they never happened in the way everyone hoped (even though the modular concept was tested successfully in orbit) – and the plant was mothballed during the pandemic. Bigelow’s real interests, however, have always lain in the paranormal space.

So, reading VALIS on the flight out to Las Vegas seemed appropriate – part of a circle of coincidence and synchronicity that had led me from a career reporting on the nuts and bolts of aerospace and defence to my interest in consciousness and the nature of reality.

But VALIS wasn’t what I expected at all. For a start, the plot is all over the place. Its mix of invention and autobiography, which PKD makes no attempt to disguise throughout the narrative, juxtapose bizarrely – and concentrate as hard as I could, I found much of it on a first read impenetrable.

Why, then, had Vallée loved it so, and why is it a key to the narrative of my own book?

I’m not going to answer those questions directly here. Instead, I’m going to invite you to watch and listen to a speech PKD delivered to an audience at a science fiction festival in Metz, France, in 1977. Its title: ‘If You Find this World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others’.

As one commentator has written of it, the audience would leave that speech ‘bewildered and mystified’.

But, as that same commentator also notes, fans have come to see it since as a kind of crypto-key to decoding many of PKD’s works – including ‘The Man In The High Castle’ and his later novels, such as ‘A Scanner Darkly’ and ‘Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said’. But it’s really in VALIS you see why the events he describes in the speech and the book are indivisible.

When I followed the threads of that speech – which, in a few words, lead to parallel universes, some very off-message notions of God, inner knowing (gnosis), and overlapping realities – I also began to see why VALIS had captured Jacques Vallée in the way that it had.

People have questioned whether PKD’s works were the product of his mental illness – even though PKD himself dismissed it as the source of his creativity. I’m glad that he did, because, as critic and editor Travis Diehl writes in an essay on PKD, his books not only foresaw the themes of the movie The Matrix, but, as the years have passed, and our world becomes ever more matrix-like, his ‘apparent paranoia comes to seem more and more like prescience’.

I couldn’t agree more.

If you’re half-inclined, and haven’t already, I urge you to give VALIS a go – and then a second and a third, as I did - and see where it takes you. Having gone on that journey, I am now very firmly in the Vallée camp – it ranks amongst the most interesting books I have ever read.