Well this was weird but fantastic book. First of all if you are not familiar with Philip K. Dick's books you might start with something easier (to be honest I find all of his books very easy to read but you might try his short stories first to see if you will like them) - works of this author are very psychedelic but ultimately coherent and easy to follow (at least for me :)).

Book is allegory on spiritual awakening of human society after millennia spent in the prison of purely materialist view of the world. Presenting human institutions (be it religious or secular - both bent on control and nothing else) as elements that have put ordinary man under oppression author gives us a story of spiritual awakening, return of the man to something more, to knowledge of universe that was once available to humankind but lost when people decided to accept only material.

Lots of things are mixed up here, alternate realities, religion and philosophy, strange deities that exist among us and subtly control humanity, stories told from so many perspectives that you wont know which one is real one ... all is here. But most important thing is story of journey to self-knowledge, being able to let oneself to learn the truth and finally become one with oneself.

Interesting book, recommended to fans of SF weird tales and Philip K Dick in particular. ( )

OK, so this is one of the post-pink-beam PKDs. Take that for what it's worth. When I read these in my twenties, I thought they were all garbage. Re-reading them now, I can see it served as a springboard for him to contemplate less nihilistic possibilities for man's place in the universe.

Things kick off with some standard PKD paranoia:

You can tell they're after you when they bore through the ceiling.

There's a basic story of a battle of good vs evil, in this case Yah (way! ... a new Marco Polo game?) vs Belial. The kabbalah shows up, of course, and the pink beam experience is described. All told, there's about twenty pages of the kind of religious nuttery that was rampant in the 70s and resurged in the 90s, just as the millenium was drawing to a close. As with many PKD novels, the opening bears little relation to the end, and the resolution to the cosmic battle happens in a single sentence shortly before the end.

Anyone coming to the end of their pandemic-era isolation will empathize with the main character as he gets drawn into the action:

Contact with another human. Herb Asher shrank involuntarily. Oh Christ, he thought. He trembled. No, he thought.
Please no.

Along the way, PKD predicts the current age of AI, in particular the failures of machine learning systems to generate sensible output:

on the standard of fifty they shall write: finished is the stand of the froward through the mighty acts of god, together with the names of the commanders of the fifty and of its tens. when they go out to battle, they shall write upon their wpsox to form a complete front. the line is to consist of a thousand men men men men men each front line is to be seven seven seven deep

Balls have zero, to me to me to me ( )

God Returns, in a Virgin, on a Space Rocket

When you read a sentence like the above headline, you can be in only one place, the mind of Philip K. Dick, the seminal American science fiction writer of the latter 20th century. In early 1974, Dick began hallucinating, after at tooth extraction for which he was administered sodium pentathol, and later a visit from a girl wearing an ichthyic necklace. Dick said, as quoted by Charles Platt in Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction, Volume 1, "I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane.” From this grew the VALIS trilogy, The Divine Invasion being the second in the series.

In The Divine Invasion, protagonist Herb Asher discovers that salvation is a personal experience, that each individual must choose between order and disorder, or sanity and insanity, or in terms of the novel itself, between good (Yahweh) or evil (Belial). So, while rages the titanic global war between good and evil, the battlefield reduces down to the conflict within the mind of each individual.

On a planet in a faraway binary star system, CY30-CY30B, which symbolically mirrors the dual nature of humans, Herb Asher lives in a dome, receiving and distributing entertainment transmissions to other dome dwellers. He finds his fulfillment into listening to Linda Fox, a galactic singing star. All is sameness, until Yah, a rumored god on the planet, enters Herb’s life, urging him to establish a relationship with Rybys Rommey, who works in another dome and who suffers from multiple sclerosis. She lives a life of despondency in her squalidly disordered dome, a personalized representation of the general disorder of the world under the influence of the evil Belial. The pair learn she is pregnant by Yaw, though a virgin, reflecting Christian belief. They must secret the unborn child Emmanuel (deliver from evil) to earth to take up the battle against Belial.

In the process of returning, a fly taxi accident occurs. Rybys dies; Herb’s placed in cryogenic suspension; Emmanuel is born with brain damage. Elias Tate, the current incarnation of the prophet Elijah, variously portrayed as a beggar and partner of Herb in an audio equipment business, spirits the baby from the hospital, saving him from execution by the religious powers that be, the Christian-Islamic Church in the West and the Communist Scientific Legate in the East. Emmanuel grows up under the care of Elias and his older companion-tutor Zina Pallas, Shekhinah, basically the Jewish concept of God dwelling within.

Since the child Emmanuel suffers from a type of amnesia, Zina’s role is helping him understand who he is. And it’s this journey of discovery on his and Herb’s parts, the removal of the delusion of the world as it exist, that is, as a disordered place dominated by evil, a world in which Belial rules in the background. Zina helps Emmanuel discover his role as God in part through dialectic exchanges and by showing him her parallel world in which Belial has been banished, literally reduced to a baby goat, a buckling, a state that seduces both Emmanuel and Zina for an unfortunate moment to free him.

Belial seeks out Herb, who he attempts to win over, Herb’s individual struggle for his salvation. Fortunately, Linda Fox, his Advocate (you might think of the Advocate as your representative before God, or perhaps as your Guardian Angel), rescues him by killing Belial, thus restoring his salvation and his sanity. Dick sums this up with Linda Fox singing one of her John Dowland (English Renaissance composer and lutenist) musical adaptations (though these are Dowland’s words, from the last stanza of his A Pilgrim’s Solace):

When the poor cripple by the pool did lie
Full many years in misery and pain,
No sooner he on Christ had set his eye,
But he was well, and comfort came again.

If you are new to Philip K. Dick, this may not be the best book to begin with. However, if his later mystical side intrigues you, you may find The Divine Invasion enlightening. ( )

God Returns, in a Virgin, on a Space Rocket

When you read a sentence like the above headline, you can be in only one place, the mind of Philip K. Dick, the seminal American science fiction writer of the latter 20th century. In early 1974, Dick began hallucinating, after at tooth extraction for which he was administered sodium pentathol, and later a visit from a girl wearing an ichthyic necklace. Dick said, as quoted by Charles Platt in Dream Makers: The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction, Volume 1, "I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane.” From this grew the VALIS trilogy, The Divine Invasion being the second in the series.

In The Divine Invasion, protagonist Herb Asher discovers that salvation is a personal experience, that each individual must choose between order and disorder, or sanity and insanity, or in terms of the novel itself, between good (Yahweh) or evil (Belial). So, while rages the titanic global war between good and evil, the battlefield reduces down to the conflict within the mind of each individual.

On a planet in a faraway binary star system, CY30-CY30B, which symbolically mirrors the dual nature of humans, Herb Asher lives in a dome, receiving and distributing entertainment transmissions to other dome dwellers. He finds his fulfillment into listening to Linda Fox, a galactic singing star. All is sameness, until Yah, a rumored god on the planet, enters Herb’s life, urging him to establish a relationship with Rybys Rommey, who works in another dome and who suffers from multiple sclerosis. She lives a life of despondency in her squalidly disordered dome, a personalized representation of the general disorder of the world under the influence of the evil Belial. The pair learn she is pregnant by Yaw, though a virgin, reflecting Christian belief. They must secret the unborn child Emmanuel (deliver from evil) to earth to take up the battle against Belial.

In the process of returning, a fly taxi accident occurs. Rybys dies; Herb’s placed in cryogenic suspension; Emmanuel is born with brain damage. Elias Tate, the current incarnation of the prophet Elijah, variously portrayed as a beggar and partner of Herb in an audio equipment business, spirits the baby from the hospital, saving him from execution by the religious powers that be, the Christian-Islamic Church in the West and the Communist Scientific Legate in the East. Emmanuel grows up under the care of Elias and his older companion-tutor Zina Pallas, Shekhinah, basically the Jewish concept of God dwelling within.

Since the child Emmanuel suffers from a type of amnesia, Zina’s role is helping him understand who he is. And it’s this journey of discovery on his and Herb’s parts, the removal of the delusion of the world as it exist, that is, as a disordered place dominated by evil, a world in which Belial rules in the background. Zina helps Emmanuel discover his role as God in part through dialectic exchanges and by showing him her parallel world in which Belial has been banished, literally reduced to a baby goat, a buckling, a state that seduces both Emmanuel and Zina for an unfortunate moment to free him.

Belial seeks out Herb, who he attempts to win over, Herb’s individual struggle for his salvation. Fortunately, Linda Fox, his Advocate (you might think of the Advocate as your representative before God, or perhaps as your Guardian Angel), rescues him by killing Belial, thus restoring his salvation and his sanity. Dick sums this up with Linda Fox singing one of her John Dowland (English Renaissance composer and lutenist) musical adaptations (though these are Dowland’s words, from the last stanza of his A Pilgrim’s Solace):

When the poor cripple by the pool did lie
Full many years in misery and pain,
No sooner he on Christ had set his eye,
But he was well, and comfort came again.

If you are new to Philip K. Dick, this may not be the best book to begin with. However, if his later mystical side intrigues you, you may find The Divine Invasion enlightening. ( )

My video review can be found here: https://youtu.be/1IJouR_uRKk