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    The Divine Invasion
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    The Divine Invasion
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    The Divine Invasion
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Divine Invasion

    Written by Philip K. Dick

    Narrated by Dick Hill

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    God is not dead: he has merely been exiled to an extraterrestrial planet. And it is on this planet that God meets Herb Asher and persuades him to help retake Earth from the demonic Belial.

    Featuring virtual reality, parallel worlds, and interstellar travel, The Divine Invasion blends philosophy and adventure in a way few authors can achieve.

    As the middle novel of Dick's VALIS trilogy, The Divine Invasion plays a pivotal role in answering the questions raised by the first novel, expanding that world while exploring just how much anyone can really know - even God himself.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateOct 18, 2011
    ISBN9781455832033
    Author

    Philip K. Dick

    Over a writing career that spanned three decades, PHILIP K. DICK (1928–1982) published 36 science fiction novels and 121 short stories in which he explored the essence of what makes man human and the dangers of centralized power. Toward the end of his life, his work turned to deeply personal, metaphysical questions concerning the nature of God. Eleven novels and short stories have been adapted to film, notably Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly, as well as television's The Man in the High Castle. The recipient of critical acclaim and numerous awards throughout his career, including the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards, Dick was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2005, and between 2007 and 2009, the Library of America published a selection of his novels in three volumes. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

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    Reviews for The Divine Invasion

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    • 3/5
      Dick uses teachings of mystical Judaism and Christianity in an attempt to explain his unsettling sense of another reality breaking through this one and proving it to be illusory. Interesting ideas but the book seems a bit more like notes for a book rather than the book itself.
    • 3/5
      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
    • 4/5
      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.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Whether you enjoy him or not, I think that it'd be difficult to argue that our dear, departed Philip K. didn't write some of the most jarringly original novels that ever made it to print. From a certain perspective, "The Divine Invasion" covers a lot ground that will be familiar to PKD fans: psychic meddling, conspiracies, an obsession with multiple realities. (Really was there ever a writer who got more millage out of the idea that life could be but a dream?) Even so, "The Divine Invasion's inclusion of overtly religious and supernatural elements sets it apart from most SF: this isn't Asimov imagining a religious pseudo-future for science; the author's interest in religion-as-such seems genuine and well-informed. It's obvious that Dick spent a lot of time with some very arcane texts and little-known heresies while writing this one. Folklore, Gnostic musings, and obscure Jewish creation stories abound here, but they're more than just window dressing. The fact that they're essential to the book's plot sometimes gives one the impression that PKD's doing his darndest to invent a genre that might be termed "hard fantasy." Esoteric as a lot of this might seem, much of "The Divine Invasion," which also has its share of interstellar space travel and cryogenic suspension, comes off as shockingly immediate. A two or three decades worth of spooky little kids in horror movies didn't quite prepare me for the decidedly unnerving spectacle of two ten year olds, Manny, our Christ analogue, and his mysterious, playfully seductive friend Zina discussing the fate of the universe in a run-down special-needs school. The plot of "The Divine Invasion" is, in places frustratingly twisty, and, this being PKD, you the author's not to keen to give the question "is this really happening" a straight answer. I suspect that many committed PKD fans will have to read this one more than once to figure out exactly what's going on. Still, at the heart of the book there's a serious theological debate about the potential character flaws of the Old Testament God and the role of play in His creation. The theology in this one is almost entirely Jewish: Jesus barely gets a cameo appearance here. But as the novel nears its end, Dick makes a convincing case that evil tends to be dead serious: a distinct lack of a sense of humor is one of true evil's hallmarks. Of course, that's you could say that that's a typically Phildickian argument, but it's one worth taking away. I should track down the first book in this trilogy next, just to catch up.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 3/5
      This was a much better installment in the VALIS trilogy than the previous book, which I believe was meant to set up the foundation of the story. The characters here seem vivid, real, and inspired by the various people that Philip K. Dick knew amongst himself. There is also a deep intersection of Dick's own personality intertwining itself within the motivations, thoughts, and feelings of the main character. The logic in illogic, the paranoia, and the schizophrenic combination of plot-line and theme are all deeply reciprocal to the suspense that sent me, as a reader, spiraling page by page until the conclusion of the novel.

      Overall, it was a good work. Just shy of great, but impressive nonetheless.

      3.75.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I listened to the Audio Version of this book. Valis One was incredibly rich, full of literary nuggets. The Divine Invasion, the sequel, is an interesting adventure.I like this book more than VALIS... but both works are needed to understand the full vision and exegesis of Philip K. Dick. His exegesis of the Church is quit funny. for example the main narrator says "I am God's legal father." I can see where Douglas Adams may have got his ideas for the great computer and the ultimate answer of Life The Universe and Everything: 42.
      This type of book requires one to let the book evolve, and not attempt to confine it within an A-B=C plot line. The reader starts out in a simple pulpy reality of melodramatic science fiction. The melodramatic scene begins to unravel, as one ascends. The roller coaster takes you to a realm full of chaotic characters and scenes as imagined in Disney's Haunted House. We turn in the dark, and descend on a roller coaster built incredibly tall. So the descent takes us into a totally paranoid alternate
      reality. By the book’s end, there is nothing trustworthy left in the world.’ said Australian critic Bruce Gillespie.
      So, if you like your plot lines straight, and easy than Philip K. Dick may upset your settled reality. If however you understand that Phillip K. Dick will throw you for a loop, one can deal with confusion and being in the dark at times.The book was a tremendous journey into the lines between reality and make believe.
    • 5/5
      The second coming of God in Dick's style... What happens if Jah comes back to Earth, but he's a brain-damaged 10 years old boy... and it's not our Earth anymore... or is it? Here's everything what a PKD novel needs: paranoia, Valis, alternative histories, Gods and more paranoia... Great!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      PKD at his loopy best: starts out as a spirituality-based thriller (what if Christ were secretly reborn in a dystopian future?), but by the book's midpoint the entire universe has become queasy and unhinged as the novel's theological forces grapple and debate. Messier than "Valis," and with more "wtf?" moments, but a worthy follow-up nevertheless.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      During the run of Lost, some fans and reviewers listed books that somehow related to Lost, either directly or tangentially. This classic book was one of them. This book was merely an example of how bad science fiction could actually be. This book was similar to stories by Vonnegut - some of the worst stories in sci-fi history. Praised for their satire and humor, they merely relied on shock value, crude scatological language, and sexual references. One word - trash.
    • 4/5
      This isn’t even close to a recap of the plot of this book. We start out by going back in forth in time, only to find out some of the “back” is false memory. A man winds up marrying a pregnant woman to smuggle the unborn “savior” back to earth. The savior gets born. There is confrontation with a “devil”. And an artificial intelligence tries to jump in and mess up the plans. There is a lot more strangeness, but trying to describe or explain it would only confuse. It is a weird trip as Dick tackles his thoughts about God in the second of three books that are loosely linked on the subject.It is not to everyone’s taste. And many fans of Dick dismiss or actively hate this part of Dick’s writing. Yet, in its own way, it is classic Dick – unsure of which reality is real, trying to determine how it all fits together, and exploration of broad themes through bizarre circumstances.This book stands well on its own. And it reads well as the follow-up to VALIS. It will not be an easy read (good Philip K. Dick never is), but it contains rewards worth working for.
    • 2/5
      Perhaps someone will disagree, but I found this to be simply too weird and disjointed to enjoy. I think this happened to Dick novels after a while, unfortunately.