Book Review

Rating: (4 out of 5)
Paperback: 240 pages
Publisher: Vintage (July 2, 1991)
ISBN-10: 0679734457
ISBN-13: 978-0679734451

Philip K. Dick has been done a disservice by being labelled (merely) a “science fiction” writer.

First of all, you have the quandary of the term “science fiction” and its implication that there’s something called “science fact.” Such a thing as “science fact” doesn’t yet exist. For the last few hundred years, mankind has been trapped in a state-and-church regulated hologram of science assumption or science estimation, science dogma might be a better term. Secondly, you forget that most of Philip K. Dick’s work fell off the back of his experimentation with potent psychedelic drugs. He was an addict of the chemicals and an addict of women, being married (and divorced) several times.

Book cover of “The Divine Invasion”by Philip K. Dick. And photo of the author © Anne Dick.

Philip K. Dick’s “The Divine Invasion” sits right in the middle of my most hated period of his production, the so-called God trilogy. In all honesty, most of Philip K. Dick’s work deals with the concept of the power of the great divine, if not perceived right and wrong, in some form or other. But never in such an obvious fashion as when “The Transmigration of Timothy Archer” and “Valis,” neither book inspired anything in this reviewer other than boredom which led to anger. But this book really hit the mark.

I mean, reviewing this as an atheist, forget the “truth of God” aspect, “The Divine Invasion” just goes off on one of PKD’s amazing boy’s own adventures. Sure, you’ve got the battle between the old God and the returned God and all the ethical/political aspects of that but it supremely transcends its subject matter to show what happens when two alien worlds collide. And that’s what Philip K. Dick does best.

Philip K. Dick was transmutating the drama of his everyday experience directly onto the literary page. He may have attracted the patronage of Donald A. Wollheim of sci-fi’s Ace Books but Dick’s strength was not in the narrative description of alternative worlds, his power lay in the structural underpinning of alien minds. He was so far ahead of his time and things he talked about have come to pass but that’s how science works, retrospectively.

But, as many of Dick’s linear extrapolations of the Nixon era were way off the mark, we can only assume that “predicting the scientific nature of the future” or at least writing about the dreamy possibilities was the furthest thing from his mind.

In Dick’s fugue-like drug inducement, future worlds or at least future frames of reference would nudge back at him, retrospectively, as if he were writing down a sense of the future rather than its content. How it might feel to live in the future. Loss of the self, and the painful rediscovery of what we are, as a race. It’s a story that deals with the horror of reality. Philip K. Dick was a horror writer above all other topics. His horror was ours yet to live, decades later. Thanks PKD for our world of impending horror.