VALIS

VALIS is a novel by Philip K. Dick, published by Bantam Books in 1981. Its narrator, a science fiction writer called Phil, tells the story of his friend Horselover Fat, who is Phil himself under another name. In March 1974 Fat was struck by a pink beam of light that gave him information he could not have had, and he has spent the years since trying to find who sent it. His name for the source is VALIS, the "Vast Active Living Intelligence System". Dick drew the story from his own experience of 1974.^[1]

The central event, in the words of the novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, is that "Sometime in early 1974 Dick experienced a pink beam going off like a flashbulb in his head". Robinson adds that this is one way Dick described it. Dick called the episode 2-3-74, for February and March of that year, and spent many hours of the rest of his life trying to explain it to himself. The notebooks of those attempts are known as the Exegesis, and a selection appeared in print in 2011.^[2]

The book began as a favor to a publisher. In 1976 Dick had written a novel called Valisystem A (published after his death as Radio Free Albemuth in 1985), and an editor at Bantam asked for slight revisions. Dick, Robinson writes, "had found himself unable for over three years to make these small changes; so he satisfied the editor's request by writing a whole new book". Robinson calls Valisystem A the most explicitly autobiographical of Dick's novels up to that time, and an independent novel in which he "worked out the methods used to greater effect in the later book".^[2] Dick died in 1982, the year after VALIS appeared.

The book has two narrators. Phil speaks in the first person and Fat in the third, and both are Dick. The name Horselover Fat translates the author's own: Philip is Greek for "lover of horses", and Dick is German for fat. Phil's friends Kevin and David, and a two-year-old girl, Sophia, whom they take to be an incarnation of divine wisdom, make up the group that goes looking for the source of the beam.

In chapter nine the group sees a film, also called Valis, which blends the plot of Valisystem A, Fat's vision and his explanations of it. Robinson notes that the group sees it as if it were Roeg's film The Man Who Fell to Earth.^[2] Robert Galbreath read the book's theology as gnostic in 1982, and Umberto Rossi examined its design in 2012, where the story passes between its two narrators at what he calls "shunts".^[3][4]

Robinson, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Dick's novels at the University of California, San Diego, in 1982, later wrote the trilogy that begins with Red Mars.^[5]

The Divine Invasion (1981) and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982) complete what readers call the VALIS trilogy, although the second is not a sequel in its plot. In 2009 the Library of America collected VALIS, both of those and the earlier A Maze of Death (1970) in one volume, VALIS and Later Novels, number 193 in its series.^[6]

The novel is cited twice in the materials of Molecular Reality Corporation. The earlier appears in a knowledge base written in 2025 for Keltar, the company's puppet, which said that changing the electronics of the handheld MR1 Molecular Streaming Device took "60 seconds and a horselovers' head screwdriver. If you've read VALIS you'll know what we mean." Fat is a translation of Dick's first name and surname, so the screwdriver is a Phillips.^[7]

The second is a subject line. In 2026 Keltar wrote to several hundred people on the company's mailing list, and each subject line named a book or film that the recipient had given as a favorite on a form in 2021. One reads "VALIS would approve of this signal".^[7] Only one member named the novel.

• Favorite books and films of the Molecular Streaming Corps
• List of works that inspired Molecular Reality Corporation
• Mars trilogy
• MR1 Molecular Streaming Device