I consider VALIS to be the PKD novel par excellence, since it was the first one I read. I agree, however, that it should not be the first novel a person reads when trying to start on PKD.
It is widely known that 1974 marks a before and after in the career of PKD, sicne he starts leaning towards more religio-spiritual themes in his later works. But another difference I find relevant is that the characters become (as PKD himself did) more and more unstable as well.
This is relevant because prior to the events that PKD experienced during February and March of ‘74, his stories and novels were mostly accounted for in a somewhat “standard” sci-fi fashion.
Without giving much of the plot away (although some might consider this too much of a spoiler), think of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964), Ubik (1969) and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), where the unaccounted for is explicable through the use of drugs. In A Maze of Death (1970), the reader is shown a particularly wickedly-morphed reality by means of their physical interconnection. The Penultimate Truth (1964) presents a world in which the fictional element is presented in the form of a time machine.
All of these seem normal sci-fi elements to be used to explain the fictional, the supernatural. In later works, most notably I’d say VALIS, PKD does not hold himself back from explaining his mental breakdown, or even splitting his self into two, the rational Philip and his irrational, somewhat deranged Horselover Fat.
This approach makes sense in the context of what he did experience back then. But this also makes Martian Time-Slip seem so out of place, yet full of surprises.
In Martian Time-Slip, we find many elements that will be present in his later works, such as the ever-present yet somewhat distant notion of suicide, where a friend or a side character wants to or has thought of it. We also find the recurrent main character that is a repairman, and the constant question throughout all of PKD’s books: What is real? What is fake?
And yet, what I found most interesting is that here, unlike most of his stories, PKD gives power to the mind! The explanation of the fictitous element, namely that of time-slip, is given in no way through the use of drugs, or through a time machine. It is a schizophrenic kid, and a potentially schizophrenic adult the keys to unlocking the nature of time.
I know that some of his works have emphasised the possibility of a mind with super-natural powers (such as the pre-cogs), but here the focus is that the potential element of the transformation is in somebody who we would consider “defective”, “subpar”.
In our modern society, a person has value not out of their status as a person, i.e., participant of humanity, but rather it is calculated through the amount of work that they perform, the surplus that they imply to the capitalist system. Dr. Glaub says that to Arnie Kott: “It’s people like you with your harsh driving demands that create schizophrenics.”
But who is the people like you? Arnie Kott is the person who has the most power in all of Mars, as he controls the water supply. Arnie is also the person who likes to control the lives of the people around him. We see him time and again call the aboriginal people of Mars the n-word, as they are unable to produce any value and their religious beliefs are ridiculed. He buys off the contract of a Jack Bohlen only to turn him into his personal aide, despite Jack’s slow but clear mental breakdown. He turns Manfred, an autistic kid, into a tool that will grant him even more money and power.
By the end of the book, we get to read Arnie experiencing a vision imposed on him by Manfred. He has a psychotic break and he is then disconnected from reality. He believes that what he is really experiencing, once out of his trance, is merely another trance.
All of the stories that I have mentioned, Dick precisely puts the multiplying realities in front; as backdrop he shows that there is a substratum that holds everything else together. We humans may not be able to understand it as a whole, but that is why Dick claims there is a God, a Zebra, a Ubik that is holding everything together.
This something is clearly a teological but also a metaphysical concept that Dick sometimes refers to in other writings. Logos can hold these two sides at once: Logos is the universal law that governs our universe, but Logos is also the way in which God presents itself, in other words, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Word also made itself flesh, and it tried to heal the cracks of our world.
PKD understands that our experience of the world is severely limited by our senses and that we should receive some help from someone who does know reality and its inner workings, such as Plato would have suggested in the book 7 of the Republic.
When we read Arnie delving into something that resembles insanity, we see that he refused to be helped, he was so focused on the money, the fleeting, the momentary, the shadows, that he is lost. He placed his gaze onto the material goods instead of the eternal. It is the Bleekmen, the intimately religious people who are able to have the most realistic experience, who are able to understand an autistic child for they are closer to God.
Manfred is able to see the future, but the future for PKD is something that is of utmost entropy. Yet PKD has also noted, along with Claude Shannon, that the more entropy a system has, the more information it contains. In other words, the more meaning is conveyed in a message, the more entropy it will have.
All the multiplying realities that PKD writes, be through drugs, through schizophrenic episodes, or any other means, are in a way showing the singular nature of our reality. As I mentioned before, there is something that is unified and real.
PKD writes his future self, with all of his fears of not being understood in Manfred, and all of his fears of ending up in a schizophrenic state in Jack, and but what remains after the storm ends is what we have already said: there is an order, a pink-beam, a Ubik, a God that will settle things for us if we are willing to listen to it.
Dick, Philip K. (2013 [1964]). Martian Time-Slip. Gollancz.
Other titles mentioned
Dick, Philip K. (2013 [1964]). The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Gollancz.
Dick, Philip K. (2005 [1964]). The Penultimate Truth. Gollancz.
Dick, Philip K. (2004 [1969]). Ubik. Gollancz.
Dick, Philip K. (2013 [1970]). A Maze of Death. Gollancz.
Dick, Philip K. (2001 [1974]). Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Gollancz.
Dick, Philip K. (2013 [1974]). VALIS. Gollancz.