Subject: (urth) VALIS, etc.

From: maa32 <maa32 at dana.ucc.nau.edu>
Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2002 18:41:17 +0000

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

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