I was pleased and surprised to see Dick's Valis brought up in the past two days - I just read those a few weeks ago and was intrigued by the "double time" that Horselover experienced, based on the concept that time "stopped" in 73 AD or so and "resumed" in the '70s, as well as the idea of salvation as a physical hybridization between human beings and a plasmate. I thought this was a pretty good illustration of the salvation I've tried to construct for the short sun books (with characters experiencing double time - Silkhorn going far back into the past to meet Severian (instead of both existing at the same time), and with salvation of humanity through a hybridization with vegetative matter). Additionally, the narrator of VALIS (Dick himself) suffers from a dissassociative disorder with the main character, Horselover Phat (Dick himself) and doesn't recognize that he is one person until most of the book is over. This kind of resonates nicely with Horn's condition as narrator.
ALAS, all of these parallels were for naught - I asked Wolfe if he had read VALIS and he said he was not familiar with it, nor with half of Dick's work. I was bummed - I was sure I had seen some influence, and I was just wrong. Marc Aramini