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Title: Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick by Lawrence Sutin ISBN: 0-8065-1228-8 Publisher: Citadel Trade Pub. Date: June, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.58 (12 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Simply Divine
Comment: Author Sutin does a marvelous job of conveying the real Philip K. Dick. He conducted interviews with each of Dick's five wives and his contemporaries in the SF field, including Ellison with whom Dick had a nasty feud.
I feel that I can understand Dick's novels much better given that all of them are so heavily biographical. A writer is always told to 'write what you know', but Dick takes it to extremes. Knowing so much about his life, I'm able to see deeper into character and setting.
Sutin does the reader the favor of sifting through Dick's enormous memoirs, showing us the parts that illuminate PKD's manic personality.
I haven't read enough biographies to determine whether this one is complete, but judged on its own, Divine Invasions gives a thorough account of the life of one of SF's brightest lights.
Rating: 3
Summary: Philip K. Dick, Self-Devourer
Comment: By the time of his premature death in 1982, Philip K. Dick had shrewdly submitted and withdrawn so many hypothetical explanations for his chaotic life and unusual experiences that it made rational judgement and objective analysis impossible for those who were paying attention. Many people were paying attention, and waiting a little too passively for his every next pronouncement on the divine. What is amazing today isn't the great number of fans his science fiction work has generated globally, but the increasing deification of Dick as an illuminated cyberpunk guru and Fortean poster boy of the first order. Certainly Dick documented his experiences more thoroughly, if not more clearly, than most; but since millions of people experience paranormal or metaphysical phenomena every year, and some year after year as Dick did, exactly how and why does Dick stand out from the rest?
Lawrence Sutin's book, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, doesn't attempt to answer this question, taking for granted as it does that Dick was a unique case and a genius; but it does given the general reader a broader overview of Dick's life than has thus far been available. Sutin states that he has respectfully declined to psychoanalyze or diagnose Dick; fair enough; but, considering the events of Dick's life, why not have given the finished text to a reputable psychiatrist for an opinion? Because Sutin, obviously an admirer of his subject, 'wants to believe,' as Dick did. Clearly, Dick, who believed his traumas at the hands of others began while still in the womb, had many legitimate physical, emotional and mental problems of a severe, documentable nature. While no psychiatrist's opinion is verity, in light of Dick's chronic drug addiction, institutionalizations, suicide attempts, and diagnoses of schizophrenia (his aunt was a catatonic schizophrenic), an objective analysis of the facts of Dick's life as it is currently understood would be helpful to fans, Forteans, and general readers alike. For those genuinely interested, separating the various facets of Dick's existence as carefully, cautiously, and sensitively as possible is a must, and the only proper route to an accurate understanding.
Dick had been paranoid, emotionally infantile, co-dependent, and narcissistic all of his adult life when he suffered his first 'Valis' ('Valid?' 'Validation?') experience in 1972. He was also too blinded by his own unconscious egotism-which was everywhere in evidence--to consider that what he-an avowed Gnostic--had experienced may simply have been a miraculous manifestation of the divine. Mystifier Dick spent the next 9 years anguishing over his experiences in private and public, often sounding like the madman he may have irregularly been and alienating friends and colleagues.
Though Dick claimed to be well-versed in Jung, he seems never to have applied himself to Jung's The Psychology of The Transference, a book which concisely offers an explanation for Dick's visionary, archetypal experiences without in the least flattening them into dusty meaninglessness (Jung states: "The unconscious manifests itself in a sudden incomprehensible invasion.") Considering the hatred Dick harbored for his parents throughout his lifetime, it's unfortunate he didn't stringently apply himself to Freud as well. For backward-looking, Oroborous-like Dick never tired of habitually swallowing his own tail. His vision of an immense evil face in the clouds-which he readily identified with his father--and his 'Valis' experiences--whatever else they may have been---point directly to both a highly charged and constellated father complex and a gaping maw of family romance. Dick consciously recognized his morbid ties to his family, but blithely moved beyond these, favoring KGB agents, CIA mind control, beams from distant planets, orbiting satellites and shadowy conspiracies as the more likely culprits. Like a 1970s Richard Shaver, Dick went out on some very long, thin, and unsupportable limbs to attempt to justify his experiences, as if Plato's allegory of the cave had never entered the historical record.
When the Christian god eventually manifests in a prolonged vision and establishes itself to Dick as the true force generating 'Valis,' Dick decides to accept this deity--for a few months anyway--but not before suggesting to 'God' that the two of them are one and equivalent. Dick completed over a million words of nonfiction speculation on the nature of these experiences, and Sutin writes that Dick's final estimation of 'Valis' was that "knowledge-not mere faith-as to the true 'hyper-structure' of the universe is possible." Funny, that's something any intelligent person knows just out of the gate. Astronomy, physics, the Neoplatonists, anyone?
Dick also seems to have conveniently failed to make the conspicuously obvious jump concerning psychic contamination. Before the 'Valis' incidents, he had written two novels (one, UBIK = 'Ubiquitous?') which dealt with strange amorphorous godlike entities who intrude unexpectedly on mortal men with devastating results. Why then didn't he draw the more reasonable conclusion that the explanation for 'Valis' could be found within his imagination and himself? Dick was not the first creative personality to experience seemingly divine inspiration; from Blake, Rilke, and Yeats to Robert Frost, Keith Richards and Tori Amos, the phenomena is universally experienced but little understood.
Clearly an ardent fan, author Sutin occasionally presents his material in too subjective a fashion. Readers may also reject Sutin's following claims: that modern science fiction does not stem from the early work of Wells, Verne, Huxley and others; that Dick was the first novelist ever to mention the I-Ching in an American work of fiction (Sutin must have read several hundred thousand books to verify this); and, perhaps mistaking a publishing house for an audience, that William Burroughs is a 'mainstream' American writer. Most glaringly, Sutin repeats the global error of stating that 'Fred' in 'A Scanner Darkly' does not realize he is also Robert Arctor, the person Fred has been assigned to surveil.
Fans of Dick's work, and especially those who share his seedy if prescient sensibilities, will find the book fascinating. With all the new information concerning Dick's life coming to light, the book is deservingly in need of a careful revision.
Rating: 5
Summary: Useful book for serious PKD readers
Comment: Sutin's sometimes sarcastic style might surprise the reader at first, but this is a very insightful look at the life and work of Philip K. Dick - it's also the most substantial book of its kind we have yet. Sutin does a good job of inserting his comments about the works while sharing with us their genesis at the same time; the analysis aspect of 'Divine Invasions' is fairly limited, but since it's not a scholarly book, it doesn't disappoint. It reads somewhat like PKD's own novels and short stories, with Dick himself as the central character. The extracts from the Exegesis show PKD at his speculative best and made me want to read more. One more note: in the last section, Sutin offers a 'guide' in which he rates PKD's books on a 1-10 internal scale, also providing capsule reviews of the works he didn't write about in the main narrative; it's sure to provoke arguments, as he thought it would. Serious PKD readers should definitely read this.
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Title: The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Philip K. Dick ISBN: 0679734449 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 02 July, 1991 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: What If Our World Is Their Heaven? The Final Conversations Of Philip K. Dick by Gwen Lee, Doris Elaine Sauter, Tim Powers ISBN: 1585673781 Publisher: Overlook Press Pub. Date: 15 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick : Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings by Philip K. Dick, Lawrence Sutin ISBN: 0679747877 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 30 January, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Valis by PHILIP K. DICK ISBN: 0679734465 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 02 July, 1991 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Do What Thou Wilt : A Life of Aleister Crowley by Lawrence Sutin ISBN: 0312252439 Publisher: St. Martin's Press Pub. Date: 14 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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