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VALIS Trilogy #3
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, the final novel in the trilogy that also includes Valis and The Divine Invasion, is an anguished, learned, and very moving investigation of the paradoxes of belief. It is the story of Timothy Archer, an urbane Episcopal bishop haunted by the suicides of his son and mistress - and driven by them into a bizarre quest for the identity of Christ.
255 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1982
About the author
Philip K. Dick
1,253 books20.6k followersPhilip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. In 1952, he began writing professionally and proceeded to write numerous novels and short-story collections. He won the Hugo Award for the best novel in 1962 for The Man in the High Castle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year in 1974 for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Philip K. Dick died on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California, of heart failure following a stroke.
In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten of his stories have been adapted into popular films since his death, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.
In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten of his stories have been adapted into popular films since his death, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.
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May 29, 2023
My first thoughts about The Transmigration of Timothy Archer was what a terrible shame, what a great loss that Philip K. Dick died so young.
His voice had matured in the 80s but his imagination and his speculative genius was still very much intact and vibrant as in the 50s. My second thought was (and I have wondered this same thought after reading other books by him) why in the world was he not more popular in his own time.
He was ahead of his time, way ahead of his time. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code was published in 2003, but more than twenty years earlier, Philip K. Dick had asked many of the same questions and had arrived at far more insightful and artistic conclusions. Of course, sadly, while Brown has basked in comet-like literary and financial success, Dick died after years in poverty just as the world at large was becoming ready for him, just as another visionary genius was about to raise the curtain on the world Phil had made.
This is not so much pure science fiction as the more nebulous, but more quantitatively accurate term for PKDs work – speculative fiction.
In some respects, this was one of his greatest work, rivaling Ubik in its theological scope and determinism, while departing from Ubik’s fluid symbolism.
This has all the great themes of his canon: imagination, speculation, theology, mythology, mysticism, psychology, philosophy, references to classical music and art, German enlightenment, mental illness, drug use and yes, even an appliance repairman.
Dick fills this narrative with as much irony and paradox as his creative mind could muster. The narration by Angel Archer and the dialogue between Angel and Tim becomes a vehicle whereby Philip can explore the tangents where his world and our world intersect.
This is the introspective journey of Bishop Timothy Archer, and told by his daughter in law Angel (in a way vaguely reminiscent of Bergman’s Wild Strawberries) for truth, in his beliefs and in himself. This is about life and death and beyond.
*** 2023 reread -
I must again comment on the tragic loss of one of our most important writers. Philip K. Dick died in 1982, aged 53 (same age I am now). Let’s say he had continued to write to age 60, not at all unreasonable, we could expect from such a alternate history that we could have had at least a few more books. And if his focus was the same as his writing in this, what a great run of books that would have been.
This time I thought about how this excellent work, one of his best, compared to other works and other writers.
Timothy Archer is like the absent minded scientist in Vonnegut’s Cats Cradle (1963) and so Philip K Dick’s ice nine is the radical speculative interpretation of Christianity espoused by Timothy Archer. As has been noted elsewhere, Dick was no Bible thumping Christian, but rather a dangerous, first century scholar who exhaustively researched his subject and then funneled his narrative through his great imagination.
Likewise, we can see a love triangle like in Sartre’s No Exit. Here we find the survivors left behind by multiple suicides who share complicated love for one another, but whose existential crises connect them in strange ways.
Also, like Robert Silverberg‘s Dying Inside and Neil Peart’s Losing It, Dick creates a somber tone to explore a transition to something new, something else that is both a loss and a painful, confusing new reality.
Finally, like Hermann Hesse’s 1922 novel Siddhartha, we get to travel along a spiritual journey towards enlightenment. Like Hesse, Dick examines the pain and uncertainty in finding and seeking a new reality, this one entrenched in gnostic findings since before Jesus.
I also was amazed at Dick’s ability to convey a complicated and multifaceted characterization, something fans will note that he kept getting better and better at. While Timothy Archer was a fascinating character (who I imagined being portrayed by actor Bruce Gray) I was most intrigued by Angel Archer. Dick’s own struggles with addiction and mental health issues, made a part of several characters, were dissected by his third party observer Angel, who becomes the Mallory to Dick’s Kurtz, and as he did in his greatest novel A Scanner Darkly, we see a group of characters who interact with each other, each at a different level of addiction and or mental health disorder.
A MUST read for PKD fans and an excellent work for speculative fiction fans who are looking for a mature examination of early Christianity and of comparative theology.
His voice had matured in the 80s but his imagination and his speculative genius was still very much intact and vibrant as in the 50s. My second thought was (and I have wondered this same thought after reading other books by him) why in the world was he not more popular in his own time.
He was ahead of his time, way ahead of his time. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code was published in 2003, but more than twenty years earlier, Philip K. Dick had asked many of the same questions and had arrived at far more insightful and artistic conclusions. Of course, sadly, while Brown has basked in comet-like literary and financial success, Dick died after years in poverty just as the world at large was becoming ready for him, just as another visionary genius was about to raise the curtain on the world Phil had made.
This is not so much pure science fiction as the more nebulous, but more quantitatively accurate term for PKDs work – speculative fiction.
In some respects, this was one of his greatest work, rivaling Ubik in its theological scope and determinism, while departing from Ubik’s fluid symbolism.
This has all the great themes of his canon: imagination, speculation, theology, mythology, mysticism, psychology, philosophy, references to classical music and art, German enlightenment, mental illness, drug use and yes, even an appliance repairman.
Dick fills this narrative with as much irony and paradox as his creative mind could muster. The narration by Angel Archer and the dialogue between Angel and Tim becomes a vehicle whereby Philip can explore the tangents where his world and our world intersect.
This is the introspective journey of Bishop Timothy Archer, and told by his daughter in law Angel (in a way vaguely reminiscent of Bergman’s Wild Strawberries) for truth, in his beliefs and in himself. This is about life and death and beyond.
*** 2023 reread -
I must again comment on the tragic loss of one of our most important writers. Philip K. Dick died in 1982, aged 53 (same age I am now). Let’s say he had continued to write to age 60, not at all unreasonable, we could expect from such a alternate history that we could have had at least a few more books. And if his focus was the same as his writing in this, what a great run of books that would have been.
This time I thought about how this excellent work, one of his best, compared to other works and other writers.
Timothy Archer is like the absent minded scientist in Vonnegut’s Cats Cradle (1963) and so Philip K Dick’s ice nine is the radical speculative interpretation of Christianity espoused by Timothy Archer. As has been noted elsewhere, Dick was no Bible thumping Christian, but rather a dangerous, first century scholar who exhaustively researched his subject and then funneled his narrative through his great imagination.
Likewise, we can see a love triangle like in Sartre’s No Exit. Here we find the survivors left behind by multiple suicides who share complicated love for one another, but whose existential crises connect them in strange ways.
Also, like Robert Silverberg‘s Dying Inside and Neil Peart’s Losing It, Dick creates a somber tone to explore a transition to something new, something else that is both a loss and a painful, confusing new reality.
Finally, like Hermann Hesse’s 1922 novel Siddhartha, we get to travel along a spiritual journey towards enlightenment. Like Hesse, Dick examines the pain and uncertainty in finding and seeking a new reality, this one entrenched in gnostic findings since before Jesus.
I also was amazed at Dick’s ability to convey a complicated and multifaceted characterization, something fans will note that he kept getting better and better at. While Timothy Archer was a fascinating character (who I imagined being portrayed by actor Bruce Gray) I was most intrigued by Angel Archer. Dick’s own struggles with addiction and mental health issues, made a part of several characters, were dissected by his third party observer Angel, who becomes the Mallory to Dick’s Kurtz, and as he did in his greatest novel A Scanner Darkly, we see a group of characters who interact with each other, each at a different level of addiction and or mental health disorder.
A MUST read for PKD fans and an excellent work for speculative fiction fans who are looking for a mature examination of early Christianity and of comparative theology.
March 1, 2019
In early September 1969, the Rt Rev. James A Pike, fifth Bishop of California, got lost in the middle of the Judaean Desert, fell into a canyon, and died of exposure. It was a dramatic end to a dramatic life: Pike had been one of the first celebrity bishops, and had led calls for female ordination, spoken up for LGBT acceptance, and marched to Selma with Martin Luther King. After the suicide of his son, he had become immersed in spiritualist enthusiasm, visiting mediums, holding a televised séance, and publishing a rather embarrassing book on the subject (The Other Side).
Before his death, Pike had been in a long-term, secret relationship with his secretary, and had even officiated at the wedding of her stepdaughter. The secretary's stepdaughter was called Nancy Hackett, and her marriage was to the writer Philip K Dick.
This is Dick's novelisation of the spiritual journey his sort-of-father-in-law went on – the bishop renamed, here, to Timothy Archer but otherwise by all accounts faithfully portrayed. In this version, though, Dick himself is replaced by a female narrator, Angel Archer, who is married to the bishop's son and who has to endure the deaths of, in turn, her husband, her best friend, and finally the bishop himself, at the end of his long quest for spiritual enlightenment.
So much about this book seemed almost miraculous to me, especially in the context of Dick's career: its female protagonist, its real-world setting, and most of all its amused, rational worldview. As the last novel he finished, it raises tantalising questions about the kind of books Dick might have gone on to write – if he'd had the chance. Death hangs over the world depicted in the novel, and it hangs over the novel itself too.
Mind you, a lot of these elements almost didn't fall into place. When Dick first came up with the idea for this book, he conceived of it as another science fiction novel, involving CIA plots and alien invasion. Fellow SF author Norman Spinrad convinced him (or so Spinrad claims) to drop all the paraphernalia and just publish it as a piece of straight fiction. It therefore has this wonderfully grounded, contemporary quality which is apparent from the opening lines:
Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this Earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn't hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed and I think I know why we are on this Earth; it's to find out that what you love the most will be taken away from you, probably due to an error in high places rather than by design.
Angel Archer, our narrator, is a joyful companion, regarding the world around her with dry wit and a lit joint, and always ready with a quick slogan: ‘No single thing abides, and all things are fucked up’. She's Dick's first decent female character since Juliana Frink all the way back in Man in the High Castle at the start of his career, and he had evidently gone through something of a realisation about this issue. ‘My depiction of females has been inadequate and even somewhat vicious,’ he wrote to his agent – and Angel is certainly a very welcome surprise, giving a completely new tone to his writing.
Apart from anything else, she's funny, which is something that Dick doesn't usually do very well. That's important in a book built round a series of tragic deaths, and it helps create the novel's tone of wry scepticism. After VALIS and The Divine Invasion, scepticism is the last thing I'd been expecting – every time Bishop Archer became convinced of another crazy theory about life after death or the Zadokites, I kept waiting for one of Dick's dei ex machina to reveal that, ta-da, he was absolutely right. But it never happens.
Instead, Angel looks at the bishop and wonders much the same things that people had begun to wonder about Dick himself: ‘How could an intelligent, educated man, a great man, really, one of the most powerful men of his time—how could he begin to believe in that?’
The book ends up finding meaning not in abstruse theological ideas or conspiracy theories, but in practical comforts – food, friends, independence, music, silly jokes, personal relationships. Thanks to these things, Angel at the end of the book sees herself as gradually recovering from her losses, a lone survivor from a group that had been unfairly struck down:
A spectator to the destruction of my friends, I said to myself; one who records on a notepad the names of those who will die, and who did not manage to save any of them, not even one.
And this is how Dick saw himself – unaware that he wouldn't be a lone survivor for very long. The painful thing about Timothy Archer is how confidently it suggests that rumours of Dick's insanity were premature – but it came almost too late to matter. You read passages like the one above with a shock of realisation: by the time they were published, he would already be dead.
September 14, 2022
"...the Old Testament gives us many instances of Yahweh addressing his people through the prophets. This fountain of revelation dried up, finally. God no longer speaks to man. It is called 'the long silence.' It has lasted two thousand years."Once upon a time there was a Bishop of California, a good man and a flawed one, a man who made mistakes but tried to do the right thing, a man whose son killed himself, a man who went on a spiritual journey after that death, a man who then also died tragically. This was a real bishop and his name was James Pike. One upon a time there was a book about the Bishop of California, a good man and a flawed one, and all the rest of it, the sadness and the tragedy and the death and the seeking and the death, the death. This is Philip K. Dick's bishop and his name was Timothy Archer.
"Jung speaks... of a person, a normal person, into whose mind one day a certain idea comes, and that idea never goes away. Moreover, Jung says, upon the entering of that idea into the person's mind, nothing new ever happens to that mind or in that mind; time stops for that mind and it is dead. The mind, as a living, growing entity has died. And yet the person, in a sense, continues on.
If it arises as a problem, your mind will fight it off, because no one really wants or enjoys problems; but if it arises as a solution, a spurious solution, of course, then you will not fight it off because it has a high utility value; it is something you need and you have conjured it up to fill this need."
Once upon a time there was a character named Angel, the protagonist in a book about a bishop and a death, and another death, and finally, another death. She was a good protagonist and a flawed one, she tried to do the right thing, she tried and she failed. But is it even failure if you are living in a flawed world, a vastly imperfect creation, one where the Creator has walked away, or flown away or floated away or transubstantiated away or or or, who cares, they left, He left, bored and uninterested in providing even the smallest sign of His caring, let alone His love. You can't blame an angel for failing in a world that sees both success and failure as equally meaningless. At least Angel tried.
Once upon a time there was an Angel who tried, who tried to not let the idea get in her head, that there was something more, some meaning to it all, a God who created order and meaning, that life and death both had meaning, she tried not to believe in all of that. She failed. Once upon a time she decided she could at least save one person, she wasn't able to save the others but surely she could at least save this Bishop, the most helpless and yet the strongest of them all. She failed. Once upon a time she decided she could at least help herself, she could try to achieve some sort of understanding, or at least a kind of equanimity with what had happened in her life, she could at least try to make sure she was more than a hollow where a person once was, a life that once had people in it, all of them gone now. She--
"I turned to my own menu, and saw there what I wanted. What I wanted was immediate, fixed, real, tangible; it lay in this world and it could be touched and grasped; it had to do with my house and my job, and it had to do with banishing ideas finally from my mind, ideas about other ideas, an infinite regress of them, spiraling off forever."Once upon a time there was Angel, and she succeeded, in that one small thing, in that decision to keep trying, she'd leave the world of ideas behind and focus on the material world, hope wasn't lost yet, she would save this fourth person and so would be saving herself, and she--
Once upon a time there was a Bishop who transmigrated, he had left the world and then he came back into it, into the body of another, yet another person who needed saving. The Bishop had searched and he had failed and he had died and he had came back and he--
Once upon a time there was an author named Philip K. Dick who tried, who really tried, to understand God and the world and all of the ideas in his head, so many of them, he tried to organize his thoughts and create a kind of narrative out of them, he tried to understand death and reality and his place in it all, he succeeded and he failed and he--
July 16, 2017
This is a re-read for me and perhaps not exactly my favorite of his last and greatest sequence of linked novels that began with VALIS, but it is still profound and beautiful.
Truly, it is a very good book, but it stands as both a major departure from PKD's normal fiction. That's to say, it's a novel that explores all the same themes that he's is known for, but he does it in a very firmly grounded and mainstream way that very much does NOT touch upon his more traditional SF style.
Suicide, madness, drug use, heavy intellectualism comes right to the fore... but rather than deal with it from inside the person most afflicted with it or get funky with some really strange happenings, we follow Timothy Archer's daughter in law, Angel, as she tries to come to grips with the grief of losing Tim along with all of Tim's friends.
Sound simple? Well, grief isn't simple and Tim's life and intellect was pretty fantastic and the impact he had upon everyone was pretty profound. His struggles with faith and his eventually giving up the cloth and going to great lengths, intellectual or otherwise, to discover the real truth about Jesus, has long term effects on everyone.
That's not to say there isn't a lot of really strange things happening here, however, but they're all based on reality and scholarship and the deepest quest for meaning that anyone can or ought to strive.
What if Christianity was a mushroom cult, that systematic drug use and hallucinations WAS the body of Christ? That all the early Christians were, after all, drug pushers? I love it. It's even based on some really impressive scholarship. But beyond that, there's also the idea that this mushroom also opens our minds to see the truth of reality and in so doing, allows us to link-in with the system of the universe and carry on past death for real. So, blithe and humorous assumptions aside, this was the real aspect of faith and the promise... and the tragedy is... that we lost this bridge.
Even so, my takeaway from this book, with this topic, is only a single feature in a very rich tapestry of characterizations, explorations, and fundamental human experience. Don't take my word for it. Read it with the other VALIS novels and get really surprised that this was so mainstream. I know I was.
And now I really can't wait to pick up Radio Free Albemuth again! It, perhaps more than all the rest, is the capstone of all these ideas and it is a firm adventure in revolution and science fiction greatness as well! All the ideas and themes come back in full force.
What a fantastic storyteller!
Truly, it is a very good book, but it stands as both a major departure from PKD's normal fiction. That's to say, it's a novel that explores all the same themes that he's is known for, but he does it in a very firmly grounded and mainstream way that very much does NOT touch upon his more traditional SF style.
Suicide, madness, drug use, heavy intellectualism comes right to the fore... but rather than deal with it from inside the person most afflicted with it or get funky with some really strange happenings, we follow Timothy Archer's daughter in law, Angel, as she tries to come to grips with the grief of losing Tim along with all of Tim's friends.
Sound simple? Well, grief isn't simple and Tim's life and intellect was pretty fantastic and the impact he had upon everyone was pretty profound. His struggles with faith and his eventually giving up the cloth and going to great lengths, intellectual or otherwise, to discover the real truth about Jesus, has long term effects on everyone.
That's not to say there isn't a lot of really strange things happening here, however, but they're all based on reality and scholarship and the deepest quest for meaning that anyone can or ought to strive.
What if Christianity was a mushroom cult, that systematic drug use and hallucinations WAS the body of Christ? That all the early Christians were, after all, drug pushers? I love it. It's even based on some really impressive scholarship. But beyond that, there's also the idea that this mushroom also opens our minds to see the truth of reality and in so doing, allows us to link-in with the system of the universe and carry on past death for real. So, blithe and humorous assumptions aside, this was the real aspect of faith and the promise... and the tragedy is... that we lost this bridge.
Even so, my takeaway from this book, with this topic, is only a single feature in a very rich tapestry of characterizations, explorations, and fundamental human experience. Don't take my word for it. Read it with the other VALIS novels and get really surprised that this was so mainstream. I know I was.
And now I really can't wait to pick up Radio Free Albemuth again! It, perhaps more than all the rest, is the capstone of all these ideas and it is a firm adventure in revolution and science fiction greatness as well! All the ideas and themes come back in full force.
What a fantastic storyteller!
January 6, 2024
[Read to the end for my PKD Round-Up: 10 Best and Honorable Mentions.]
My 34th PKD novel. 3.5 overall.
Not unlike the two novels that precede in PKD's final trilogy - 'VALIS' and 'The Divine Invasion' - 'The Transmigration of Timothy Archer' is ultimately a frustrating experience. All three contain elements of 'The Good, The Less-Good and The Irritating'.
But 'TToTA' has a distinction: it actually does read like a novel. Even with its focus on character over plot, it still has a reader-friendly storyline that you can easily cling to. In a way, it has that hangdog quality that can be found in Dick's 'Confessions of a Crap Artist' (so far, the only non-SF PKD book I've read). The narrative holds a series of events causing a build-up of emotions that will lead to a catharsis.
~ all of which are rooted - haphazardly - in an exploration of Christian doctrine and (more importantly) illumination. What the novel primarily seems to indirectly put forth is that Christianity remains a puzzle; a mystery that is asking to be felt, not solved.
But the book's titular character is hellbent (if you will) on a solution. ~ which gets him into all sorts of trouble with institutional dogma. ~ as well as with those closest to him. Even if you're well-meaning - as Timothy Archer is - you can't open a diatribe involving 'Who is / was the real Jesus?' and expect compliance with far-flung theories.
'TToTA' details the 'facts' of Archer's own undoing.
But it is also an entertainment. Along with the author's preoccupation with psychosis, we're given elements of the supernatural: some characters speak (or cause things to happen) from the grave; at one point, a dead man 'returns' through the form of a living relative.
Throughout, PKD wants us to take a look at what it is we believe (if anything) about this world and 'the next world':
Now for the Round-Up for this months-long project. My PKD 10 Best excludes a few titles which, over the years, have been critics' or readers' favorites. It also excludes a few that I kind of like but not enough for them to break through to a 10 Best or Honorable Mention list. It also includes some titles which I feel are unjustly ignored.
10 Best (more or less in this order):
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Ubik
A Maze of Death
The Penultimate Truth
Clans of the Alphane Moon
We Can Build You
The Simulacra
The Crack in Space
The Man in the High Castle
Honorable Mentions:
Radio Free Albemuth
Vulcan's Hammer
Counter-Clock World
The Man Who Japed
The Cosmic Puppets
My 34th PKD novel. 3.5 overall.
Not unlike the two novels that precede in PKD's final trilogy - 'VALIS' and 'The Divine Invasion' - 'The Transmigration of Timothy Archer' is ultimately a frustrating experience. All three contain elements of 'The Good, The Less-Good and The Irritating'.
But 'TToTA' has a distinction: it actually does read like a novel. Even with its focus on character over plot, it still has a reader-friendly storyline that you can easily cling to. In a way, it has that hangdog quality that can be found in Dick's 'Confessions of a Crap Artist' (so far, the only non-SF PKD book I've read). The narrative holds a series of events causing a build-up of emotions that will lead to a catharsis.
~ all of which are rooted - haphazardly - in an exploration of Christian doctrine and (more importantly) illumination. What the novel primarily seems to indirectly put forth is that Christianity remains a puzzle; a mystery that is asking to be felt, not solved.
But the book's titular character is hellbent (if you will) on a solution. ~ which gets him into all sorts of trouble with institutional dogma. ~ as well as with those closest to him. Even if you're well-meaning - as Timothy Archer is - you can't open a diatribe involving 'Who is / was the real Jesus?' and expect compliance with far-flung theories.
'TToTA' details the 'facts' of Archer's own undoing.
But it is also an entertainment. Along with the author's preoccupation with psychosis, we're given elements of the supernatural: some characters speak (or cause things to happen) from the grave; at one point, a dead man 'returns' through the form of a living relative.
Throughout, PKD wants us to take a look at what it is we believe (if anything) about this world and 'the next world':
"The problem... lies with your belief-system. ... Who can say, truly say, what is possible? We have no knowledge of what is and isn't possible; we do not set the limits - God sets the limits. ... This is an age where there is little faith. It is not God who is dead. It is our faith that has died."In this spiritual effort, PKD gives us a terrific Doubting Thomas as a protagonist: Angel Archer - Timothy's daughter-in-law and our unofficial arbiter who tends to respond with snark:
"I want to obtain your promise not to discuss what I'm going to say; not to talk about it with anyone. This part hasn't been released to the media."Sitting in for us, Angel is an average Joe in her attempts to counter with common sense:
"May I die horribly."
"I'm not sure an education is an advantage. All I do is work in a record store. And I wasn't hired for that because of anything I learned in the English Department at Cal."What Angel may or may not believe will, in the course of 'TToTA', be tossed like a salad. As a reader, you may feel the same effect. This may not be a transformative novel but it does have certain strengths. Its main question may be its strongest.
Now for the Round-Up for this months-long project. My PKD 10 Best excludes a few titles which, over the years, have been critics' or readers' favorites. It also excludes a few that I kind of like but not enough for them to break through to a 10 Best or Honorable Mention list. It also includes some titles which I feel are unjustly ignored.
10 Best (more or less in this order):
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Ubik
A Maze of Death
The Penultimate Truth
Clans of the Alphane Moon
We Can Build You
The Simulacra
The Crack in Space
The Man in the High Castle
Honorable Mentions:
Radio Free Albemuth
Vulcan's Hammer
Counter-Clock World
The Man Who Japed
The Cosmic Puppets
November 26, 2015
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer: Explores madness, suicide, faith, the occult
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
Philip K Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth (1985) and VALIS (1981) were strange but moving attempts to make sense of his bizarre religious experiences in 1974 when a hyper-rational alien mind contacted him via a pink laser from space. He then wrote The Divine Invasion (1981) and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982), both loosely connected titles in the VALIS TRILOGY, although the latter was posthumously substituted for the unfinished The Owl in Daylight. Sadly, these were the final novels that PDK wrote before his death in 1982. The Divine Invasion is a complex retelling of the second coming of Christ to an Earth dominated by the fallen angel Belial. If you crave deep philosophical discussions of Gnosticism, anamnesis, and salvation, you’ll be entranced. Otherwise, you may be completely lost.
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982) is a much more controlled, almost mainstream novel narrated by a female protagonist in the first person (perhaps the only example in PKD’s oeuvre?) about the complex relationships between an eccentric but extremely erudite Catholic Bishop named Timothy Archer, his lover Kirsten Lundborg, her schizophrenic son Bill, the Bishop’s son Jeff Archer, and his wife Angel Archer. The book delves into despair and suicide, questions religious faith, and shows the damage caused to loved ones who try to save troubled souls. It’s a big departure for PKD, and it’s sad to see that he didn’t have more opportunities to explore this direction.
The story is told by Angel Archer, the wife of Jeff Archer, who himself is the son of Episcopalian Bishop Timothy Archer. The Bishop is a highly-educated former lawyer, a Renaissance man who challenges many key Catholic doctrines, questions segregation, favors the ordaining of women, enjoys debates on controversial topics, reads Latin and Greek, and is a well-known public figure due to frequent public appearances. In fact, PKD based this character very closely on the real life of James Pike, the Episcopalian Bishop of California from 1958-1966, whose story very closely resembles that of Timothy Archer. In fact, PKD was close friends with him, and he officiated at PKD’s marriage to Nancy Hackett, the step-daughter of Maren Hackett, a woman who Pike was romantically involved with after his second marriage collapsed. This complex interweaving of PKD’s personal life and friends with his fiction is a trademark of his later period, as he increasingly used it to explore his own troubled life and departed from his earlier pulp SF origins.
In the novel, Angel Archer is married to Jeff Archer, the Bishop’s son. Angel Archer initially works at a small law office in Berkeley run by two political activists who represents drug pushers. She pays the bills since Jeff cannot, and eventually becomes manager of a Berkeley record store, something PKD did in real life. When Angel introduces her feminist activist friend Kirsten Lundborg to Tim, he agrees to give a free lecture for Kirsten’s feminist advocacy group. But unknown to Angel, Tim and Kirsten begin an affair as well. When she confronts the Bishop about it, he easily deflects her accusations with his legal skills, pointing out that he himself is not married and Kirsten is a single mother, so they are not adulterers. However, Angel is concerned that this romantic relationship with Kirsten, who becomes the Bishop’s personal secretary, will damage his credibility as a public religious figure.
Meanwhile, Angel’s husband Jeff Archer develops an attraction to the older Kirsten, and when he discovers she is having an affair with his father, this causes him severe psychological trauma. As time goes on, he begins to suffer from depression and signs of madness. Eventually he commits suicide, causing intense feelings of guilt in Tim and Angel. Subsequently, Kirsten develops cancer and starts taking barbiturates for the pain. She gets increasingly hostile and paranoid, suspecting Angel and Tim having an affair behind her back, and becomes very bitter and angry at life.
Events further devolve as strange ghost-like phenomena occur to Tim and Kirsten, such as objects in the house falling and breaking, Kirsten feeling the pain of pins being pushed under her fingernails, and finally they visit a spiritual medium who reveals in a séance that Tim’s son Jeff is trying to communicate with them and warns Kirsten that her life is in danger. To Angel’s dismay, Tim believes these supernatural explanations and decides to write a book about their experiences. Angel knows this will destroy all Tim’s remaining credibility, but he is determined to see it through. Eventually Kirsten kills herself with an overdose of barbiturates. This not only confirms the psychic’s prediction, but also adds further guilt and pain to the lives of Tim and Angel. They struggle to understand why their loved ones chose to take their own lives and why they could not prevent it.
Tim then learns that an archaeological dig in Israel has unearthed Zadokite Gnostic scrolls that refer to many of Jesus’s famous statements, but over two centuries before the birth of Christ. This throws most of Tim’s beliefs in Christianity into question, particularly the core doctrine of Jesus Christ being the son of God and not just a prophet. He is determined to go there himself to investigate these claims, and goes out into the Judean desert to recreate the experience of Jesus wandering in the wilderness. Alone and disoriented, he falls to his death and is not discovered for days.
Saddled with tragedy after tragedy, Angel Archer seeks spiritual help from a guru named Edgar Lightfoot, whose teaching focus on Zen Buddhism as a form of psychotherapy and healing. There she encounters Kirsten’s schizophrenic son Bill, who has survived all these deaths without feelings of guilt. As they spend time together, Bill one day reveals that the spirit of Timothy Archer now inhabits his mind, and divulges details about Tim that would not be easily known, and also speaks in tongues, quoting from Dante’s Divina Commedia, one of Tim’s favorite literary and religious works. Angel realizes that his mind has completely succumbed to madness, but is still drawn to the possibility of reconnecting with Tim’s spirit. The book ends on this ambiguous note.
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer represents perhaps the most personal of PKD’s works other than A Scanner Darkly, Radio Free Albemuth and VALIS, and is the most mainstream of his later novels. Despite the painful and depressing subject matter, I felt it was a very courageous attempt to search for the reasons behind madness, despair, suicide, religious faith, and whether there is anything that can be done to prevent such tragedies. The sense of inevitability in the characters runs deep, and yet avoids cheap sentimentality. As you might expect, he does not arrive at a life-affirming realization at the end, but he has taken the readers for quite a ride. This book in not really SF or fantasy at all, and would not likely appeal to many genre readers, but for those PKD fans intent on knowing his final thoughts on life, it is an important work and well worth reading.
Originally posted at Fantasy Literature
Philip K Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth (1985) and VALIS (1981) were strange but moving attempts to make sense of his bizarre religious experiences in 1974 when a hyper-rational alien mind contacted him via a pink laser from space. He then wrote The Divine Invasion (1981) and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982), both loosely connected titles in the VALIS TRILOGY, although the latter was posthumously substituted for the unfinished The Owl in Daylight. Sadly, these were the final novels that PDK wrote before his death in 1982. The Divine Invasion is a complex retelling of the second coming of Christ to an Earth dominated by the fallen angel Belial. If you crave deep philosophical discussions of Gnosticism, anamnesis, and salvation, you’ll be entranced. Otherwise, you may be completely lost.
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982) is a much more controlled, almost mainstream novel narrated by a female protagonist in the first person (perhaps the only example in PKD’s oeuvre?) about the complex relationships between an eccentric but extremely erudite Catholic Bishop named Timothy Archer, his lover Kirsten Lundborg, her schizophrenic son Bill, the Bishop’s son Jeff Archer, and his wife Angel Archer. The book delves into despair and suicide, questions religious faith, and shows the damage caused to loved ones who try to save troubled souls. It’s a big departure for PKD, and it’s sad to see that he didn’t have more opportunities to explore this direction.
The story is told by Angel Archer, the wife of Jeff Archer, who himself is the son of Episcopalian Bishop Timothy Archer. The Bishop is a highly-educated former lawyer, a Renaissance man who challenges many key Catholic doctrines, questions segregation, favors the ordaining of women, enjoys debates on controversial topics, reads Latin and Greek, and is a well-known public figure due to frequent public appearances. In fact, PKD based this character very closely on the real life of James Pike, the Episcopalian Bishop of California from 1958-1966, whose story very closely resembles that of Timothy Archer. In fact, PKD was close friends with him, and he officiated at PKD’s marriage to Nancy Hackett, the step-daughter of Maren Hackett, a woman who Pike was romantically involved with after his second marriage collapsed. This complex interweaving of PKD’s personal life and friends with his fiction is a trademark of his later period, as he increasingly used it to explore his own troubled life and departed from his earlier pulp SF origins.
In the novel, Angel Archer is married to Jeff Archer, the Bishop’s son. Angel Archer initially works at a small law office in Berkeley run by two political activists who represents drug pushers. She pays the bills since Jeff cannot, and eventually becomes manager of a Berkeley record store, something PKD did in real life. When Angel introduces her feminist activist friend Kirsten Lundborg to Tim, he agrees to give a free lecture for Kirsten’s feminist advocacy group. But unknown to Angel, Tim and Kirsten begin an affair as well. When she confronts the Bishop about it, he easily deflects her accusations with his legal skills, pointing out that he himself is not married and Kirsten is a single mother, so they are not adulterers. However, Angel is concerned that this romantic relationship with Kirsten, who becomes the Bishop’s personal secretary, will damage his credibility as a public religious figure.
Meanwhile, Angel’s husband Jeff Archer develops an attraction to the older Kirsten, and when he discovers she is having an affair with his father, this causes him severe psychological trauma. As time goes on, he begins to suffer from depression and signs of madness. Eventually he commits suicide, causing intense feelings of guilt in Tim and Angel. Subsequently, Kirsten develops cancer and starts taking barbiturates for the pain. She gets increasingly hostile and paranoid, suspecting Angel and Tim having an affair behind her back, and becomes very bitter and angry at life.
Events further devolve as strange ghost-like phenomena occur to Tim and Kirsten, such as objects in the house falling and breaking, Kirsten feeling the pain of pins being pushed under her fingernails, and finally they visit a spiritual medium who reveals in a séance that Tim’s son Jeff is trying to communicate with them and warns Kirsten that her life is in danger. To Angel’s dismay, Tim believes these supernatural explanations and decides to write a book about their experiences. Angel knows this will destroy all Tim’s remaining credibility, but he is determined to see it through. Eventually Kirsten kills herself with an overdose of barbiturates. This not only confirms the psychic’s prediction, but also adds further guilt and pain to the lives of Tim and Angel. They struggle to understand why their loved ones chose to take their own lives and why they could not prevent it.
Tim then learns that an archaeological dig in Israel has unearthed Zadokite Gnostic scrolls that refer to many of Jesus’s famous statements, but over two centuries before the birth of Christ. This throws most of Tim’s beliefs in Christianity into question, particularly the core doctrine of Jesus Christ being the son of God and not just a prophet. He is determined to go there himself to investigate these claims, and goes out into the Judean desert to recreate the experience of Jesus wandering in the wilderness. Alone and disoriented, he falls to his death and is not discovered for days.
Saddled with tragedy after tragedy, Angel Archer seeks spiritual help from a guru named Edgar Lightfoot, whose teaching focus on Zen Buddhism as a form of psychotherapy and healing. There she encounters Kirsten’s schizophrenic son Bill, who has survived all these deaths without feelings of guilt. As they spend time together, Bill one day reveals that the spirit of Timothy Archer now inhabits his mind, and divulges details about Tim that would not be easily known, and also speaks in tongues, quoting from Dante’s Divina Commedia, one of Tim’s favorite literary and religious works. Angel realizes that his mind has completely succumbed to madness, but is still drawn to the possibility of reconnecting with Tim’s spirit. The book ends on this ambiguous note.
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer represents perhaps the most personal of PKD’s works other than A Scanner Darkly, Radio Free Albemuth and VALIS, and is the most mainstream of his later novels. Despite the painful and depressing subject matter, I felt it was a very courageous attempt to search for the reasons behind madness, despair, suicide, religious faith, and whether there is anything that can be done to prevent such tragedies. The sense of inevitability in the characters runs deep, and yet avoids cheap sentimentality. As you might expect, he does not arrive at a life-affirming realization at the end, but he has taken the readers for quite a ride. This book in not really SF or fantasy at all, and would not likely appeal to many genre readers, but for those PKD fans intent on knowing his final thoughts on life, it is an important work and well worth reading.
June 16, 2016
“No single thing abides; and all things are fucked up.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
Transmigration of Timothy Archer was brilliant in parts, very engaging, but there were also pieces that just didn't quite fit. I'm willing to give PKD a lot of credit for attempting, so late in his life, a 'mainstream novel'. Ultimately, however, I couldn't quite swallow the whole book (oh me of little faith). I'm not sure if it was a dissatisfaction with it not living up to my expectation(s), or having too much of the novel actually exist there AND me just wanting more. I think part of it was Dick set the reader up. He wanted to yank the reader left, and then yank the reader right, then trip the reader, so we can see what it is like to live in his head as he is trying to make sense of his own mortality and faith.
I love that each of his three Valis/God/Gnostic books: Valis, The Divine Invasion, Transmigration of Timothy Archer are so different. For me, the structural and style differences in these books allowed PKD creative room to explore his big religious themes: God, faith, salvation, love, fate, compassion, the search for identity, knowledge, etc, from as many sides and angles as possible.
Bishop Archer describes the book's central quandary when he says:
"My point," Tim said, "is that if the Logia predate Jesus by two hundred years, then the Gospels are suspect, we have no evidence that Jesus was God, very God, God incarnate, and therefore the basis of our religion is gone. Jesus simply becomes a teacher representing a particular Jewish sect that ate and drank some kind of – well, whatever it was, the anokhi, and it made them immortal."
PKD doubles down when Bishop Archer finds out that the anokhi is a psychedelic mushroom out of which the Zadokites made a broth and a bread. The Zadokites drank the broth (blood) and ate the bread (body). Thus, Dick essentially turned early Christianity into a secret mushroom cult. So, in this novel Jesus (and his apostles) becomes dope dealers and smugglers. Throw into this reincarnation, mysticism, drugs, a ton of 70s music, cars, Berkeley, etc., and you get the raw and messy PKD working hard to both mess with your head and sort it all out. I'm still trying to decide what he really wanted to do, and what he actually ended up doing to me.
― Philip K. Dick, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
Transmigration of Timothy Archer was brilliant in parts, very engaging, but there were also pieces that just didn't quite fit. I'm willing to give PKD a lot of credit for attempting, so late in his life, a 'mainstream novel'. Ultimately, however, I couldn't quite swallow the whole book (oh me of little faith). I'm not sure if it was a dissatisfaction with it not living up to my expectation(s), or having too much of the novel actually exist there AND me just wanting more. I think part of it was Dick set the reader up. He wanted to yank the reader left, and then yank the reader right, then trip the reader, so we can see what it is like to live in his head as he is trying to make sense of his own mortality and faith.
I love that each of his three Valis/God/Gnostic books: Valis, The Divine Invasion, Transmigration of Timothy Archer are so different. For me, the structural and style differences in these books allowed PKD creative room to explore his big religious themes: God, faith, salvation, love, fate, compassion, the search for identity, knowledge, etc, from as many sides and angles as possible.
Bishop Archer describes the book's central quandary when he says:
"My point," Tim said, "is that if the Logia predate Jesus by two hundred years, then the Gospels are suspect, we have no evidence that Jesus was God, very God, God incarnate, and therefore the basis of our religion is gone. Jesus simply becomes a teacher representing a particular Jewish sect that ate and drank some kind of – well, whatever it was, the anokhi, and it made them immortal."
PKD doubles down when Bishop Archer finds out that the anokhi is a psychedelic mushroom out of which the Zadokites made a broth and a bread. The Zadokites drank the broth (blood) and ate the bread (body). Thus, Dick essentially turned early Christianity into a secret mushroom cult. So, in this novel Jesus (and his apostles) becomes dope dealers and smugglers. Throw into this reincarnation, mysticism, drugs, a ton of 70s music, cars, Berkeley, etc., and you get the raw and messy PKD working hard to both mess with your head and sort it all out. I'm still trying to decide what he really wanted to do, and what he actually ended up doing to me.
January 31, 2011
Some notes upon finishing the book.
This is NOT the third book in the "VALIS Trilogy". It is what the author says it is in What If Our World Is Their Heaven, a literary novel that took more out of him to write than four SF novels. He had something to get out about life in general, and his experience with Bishop James Pike in particular, and this is it, a thing in itself. There is nothing here that requires the kind of suspension of disbelief demanded by genre SF. All is derived from conventional religious and cultural discussions and equally conventional material about the paranormal (mediums, their influence and authenticity and post mortem channeling) with some fictionalized modern archeology bearing on the sources of Christian thought. There is no endorsement of or necessity for belief in the paranormal here, all such elements are left uncertain with different characters holding(and changing) different and conventional views. That is only to say that it is not really a part of the flow of immediately prior P.K.Dick works represented by VALIS, A Scanner Darkly, Divine Invasions etc but a really good straight literary novel reflecting Dick's philosophical ideas but in no way a genre work. The development of Angel Archer as first person narrator and the places the narrative takes her are sufficient and excellent without the undue strain of integrating it with any of the preceding works.
There is one really unconventional idea, that an origin of the Eucharist, dating back to 200BC, may have involved a psychotropic mushroom prepared as both food and drink. That idea like many others plays a part but does not become a crucial element itself, nor is it entirely settled by the end, nor does settling it matter. One may use that idea to argue a link to A Scanner Darkly, for example, but does that accomplish much? In the absence of a real speculative dystopian setting, what of it?
Dick does a masterful job of integrating his usual themes without resorting to anything fantastic. One Dick thread that appears in this book is very ingeniously deployed. In the genre works e.g. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Impostor we often find the question of what distinguishes humans from very sophisticated machines. In this non-genre setting, the narrator discusses this in regard to herself, if after all the losses suffered she has been reduced to a machine, the humanity having been ground out of her by events. A machine in a sense found in philosophy or spiritual works not a literal mechanism, however sentient or possessed by a sense of identity, as in a genre work.
If there is one Dick trademark that is really absent in this story is the background of a dystopia. Our actual world, set at the time of John Lennon's murder, is dystopia enough for this story. It does not stray from this realistic setting nor does it posit any speculative alternative history from it.
In the documentary The Penultimate Truth About Philip K. Dick one of the interviewees expressed relief at reading this book saying: "At least, Phil didn't die insane" (or words to that effect). With that assessment I completely agree, this book is literature not genre and never actually goes off into psi-psycho-shifting reality territory but is well grounded in reality taking philosophical mystery, traditional questions of religious faith and human error into account. It also highlights the real tragedy of his being struck down as he was in the midst of what was clearly the height of his powers as a writer that might have gone yet higher.
As you may have noticed I an fed up with the compulsion is some quarters to regard the "VALIS trilogy" as complete.
The final book of the "VALIS Trilogy" would have been The Owl In Daylight that never reached a tangible preliminary written form when the author died. (That title comes from a southern expression meaning dazed and confused, apparently owls can only function well at night and will fly erratically and even injure themselves in day time. The interviews cited above did not give me any specific idea what additional layers of meaning he meant to add to the phrase, only that he like it enough to use it.) He did outline a very interesting idea of aliens that developed in a world where speech and hearing would not evolve (although I disagree with the idea they do not have words at all) and might experience human auditory events as extrasensory perception or revelation, and would use technology to experience these things via a human host. That sort of premise does require the usual suspension of disbelief of SF genre work. (Whether the S means "Science", or Ellison's "Speculative").
This grouping of the last three books is very convenient for some hardcore fans, readers who are obsessed with the idea of trilogies (one of my favorite trilogies is the five Douglas Adams books, and would Dick have stopped at the magic number three?), and even more so for frustrated publishers, but does not really exist. We are left with a gap in the work that can not be reliably filled, not that no one will or even should try (as ex-wife Tessa already has, but that is another story, or even a yet to be written novel of family intrigue over the estate of a famous writer). But the culprit was a great book out of sequence that the author had to write before finishing the other task. We should be grateful for what we have here and not invent structures that do not exist.
This is NOT the third book in the "VALIS Trilogy". It is what the author says it is in What If Our World Is Their Heaven, a literary novel that took more out of him to write than four SF novels. He had something to get out about life in general, and his experience with Bishop James Pike in particular, and this is it, a thing in itself. There is nothing here that requires the kind of suspension of disbelief demanded by genre SF. All is derived from conventional religious and cultural discussions and equally conventional material about the paranormal (mediums, their influence and authenticity and post mortem channeling) with some fictionalized modern archeology bearing on the sources of Christian thought. There is no endorsement of or necessity for belief in the paranormal here, all such elements are left uncertain with different characters holding(and changing) different and conventional views. That is only to say that it is not really a part of the flow of immediately prior P.K.Dick works represented by VALIS, A Scanner Darkly, Divine Invasions etc but a really good straight literary novel reflecting Dick's philosophical ideas but in no way a genre work. The development of Angel Archer as first person narrator and the places the narrative takes her are sufficient and excellent without the undue strain of integrating it with any of the preceding works.
There is one really unconventional idea, that an origin of the Eucharist, dating back to 200BC, may have involved a psychotropic mushroom prepared as both food and drink. That idea like many others plays a part but does not become a crucial element itself, nor is it entirely settled by the end, nor does settling it matter. One may use that idea to argue a link to A Scanner Darkly, for example, but does that accomplish much? In the absence of a real speculative dystopian setting, what of it?
Dick does a masterful job of integrating his usual themes without resorting to anything fantastic. One Dick thread that appears in this book is very ingeniously deployed. In the genre works e.g. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Impostor we often find the question of what distinguishes humans from very sophisticated machines. In this non-genre setting, the narrator discusses this in regard to herself, if after all the losses suffered she has been reduced to a machine, the humanity having been ground out of her by events. A machine in a sense found in philosophy or spiritual works not a literal mechanism, however sentient or possessed by a sense of identity, as in a genre work.
If there is one Dick trademark that is really absent in this story is the background of a dystopia. Our actual world, set at the time of John Lennon's murder, is dystopia enough for this story. It does not stray from this realistic setting nor does it posit any speculative alternative history from it.
In the documentary The Penultimate Truth About Philip K. Dick one of the interviewees expressed relief at reading this book saying: "At least, Phil didn't die insane" (or words to that effect). With that assessment I completely agree, this book is literature not genre and never actually goes off into psi-psycho-shifting reality territory but is well grounded in reality taking philosophical mystery, traditional questions of religious faith and human error into account. It also highlights the real tragedy of his being struck down as he was in the midst of what was clearly the height of his powers as a writer that might have gone yet higher.
As you may have noticed I an fed up with the compulsion is some quarters to regard the "VALIS trilogy" as complete.
The final book of the "VALIS Trilogy" would have been The Owl In Daylight that never reached a tangible preliminary written form when the author died. (That title comes from a southern expression meaning dazed and confused, apparently owls can only function well at night and will fly erratically and even injure themselves in day time. The interviews cited above did not give me any specific idea what additional layers of meaning he meant to add to the phrase, only that he like it enough to use it.) He did outline a very interesting idea of aliens that developed in a world where speech and hearing would not evolve (although I disagree with the idea they do not have words at all) and might experience human auditory events as extrasensory perception or revelation, and would use technology to experience these things via a human host. That sort of premise does require the usual suspension of disbelief of SF genre work. (Whether the S means "Science", or Ellison's "Speculative").
This grouping of the last three books is very convenient for some hardcore fans, readers who are obsessed with the idea of trilogies (one of my favorite trilogies is the five Douglas Adams books, and would Dick have stopped at the magic number three?), and even more so for frustrated publishers, but does not really exist. We are left with a gap in the work that can not be reliably filled, not that no one will or even should try (as ex-wife Tessa already has, but that is another story, or even a yet to be written novel of family intrigue over the estate of a famous writer). But the culprit was a great book out of sequence that the author had to write before finishing the other task. We should be grateful for what we have here and not invent structures that do not exist.
June 4, 2020
Let's begin by correcting a fallacy, this novel is NOT the third book of the Valis "Trilogy." Dick said as much when he was alive, but I suspect unscrupulous publishers designated it as such, after his death, to create sales. Right before his death, Dick was working on a book titled "The Owl at Midnight" that may have been intended as Book 3. But it's unclear. "Archer" was a standalone book and the last one Dick completed before he died.
-------------------------
This novel is based on a real person, Bishop James Pike, episcopal Bishop of California in the 1960's. Pike and Dick were friends. The story of Pike is quite bizarre and PKD has rendered it in novel form. This is likely why this novel has a different vibe than his other ones.
Meanwhile, as one short blog post explains....
"Pike is Philip K. Dick's subject in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, which is not a science fiction novel, but rather an inquiry into the intellectual credulity and psychological weaknesses that led to the destruction of Pike and his family, and which is told against the backdrop of the dynamic social fracturing that characterizes Berkeley in the 1960s. Smart, skeptical, lucid, learned, humorous, philosophically comprehensive, sharply drawn--Dick unequivocally denounces Pike and the "New Age" phantasm into which Pike (and so many) had fallen, and which ultimately led to Pike's death."
After the original Star Trek was cancelled (1969), Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) needed a job. He caught on right away with the original Mission Impossible TV show, for two seasons, but he was stuck with a character which always had to wear a disguise, so he left. After that it was various and sundry guest spots, but by the late 1970s he hosted and narrated the television series "In Search of ..., " which "investigated paranormal and otherwise unexplained events or subjects."
Here's Nimoy narrating the "In Search of ...episode about Bishop Pike. Cue X-Files theme.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_co...
=========
I originally read "Archer" back in the 80's. The person who gave it to me supplied very little background, except that he knew Bishop Pike. So I had little understanding of what the novel was really about. Before my re-read this time, I read an entire book about Pike.
Here's my review....
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
-------------------------
This novel is based on a real person, Bishop James Pike, episcopal Bishop of California in the 1960's. Pike and Dick were friends. The story of Pike is quite bizarre and PKD has rendered it in novel form. This is likely why this novel has a different vibe than his other ones.
Meanwhile, as one short blog post explains....
"Pike is Philip K. Dick's subject in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, which is not a science fiction novel, but rather an inquiry into the intellectual credulity and psychological weaknesses that led to the destruction of Pike and his family, and which is told against the backdrop of the dynamic social fracturing that characterizes Berkeley in the 1960s. Smart, skeptical, lucid, learned, humorous, philosophically comprehensive, sharply drawn--Dick unequivocally denounces Pike and the "New Age" phantasm into which Pike (and so many) had fallen, and which ultimately led to Pike's death."
After the original Star Trek was cancelled (1969), Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) needed a job. He caught on right away with the original Mission Impossible TV show, for two seasons, but he was stuck with a character which always had to wear a disguise, so he left. After that it was various and sundry guest spots, but by the late 1970s he hosted and narrated the television series "In Search of ..., " which "investigated paranormal and otherwise unexplained events or subjects."
Here's Nimoy narrating the "In Search of ...episode about Bishop Pike. Cue X-Files theme.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_co...
=========
I originally read "Archer" back in the 80's. The person who gave it to me supplied very little background, except that he knew Bishop Pike. So I had little understanding of what the novel was really about. Before my re-read this time, I read an entire book about Pike.
Here's my review....
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
May 22, 2022
9/10
This is a beautiful book. Especially considering that it was published shortly before his unexpected death.
This is a beautiful book. Especially considering that it was published shortly before his unexpected death.
January 4, 2019
Dick’s last novel, and one of his best. The story is told by a woman, Angel Archer, who becomes inadvertently responsible for the romance between her father-in-law, an Episcopal bishop named Timothy Archer (based on the real life James Pike), and Kirsten Lundborg, a disturbed woman with a schizophrenic son, Bill. Eventually Angel’s husband, Jeff Archer, the bishop’s son, commits suicide, and so does Kirsten.
Early in the novel, Jeff starts to do research on Hitler and Albrecht von Wallenstein, a general during the Thirty Years’ War; he conceives of a voluminous project that will explain how German culture could have fallen so far. As Angel explains, “…to him Jeff, Wallenstein loomed as one of the ultimate enigmas of Western history. Jeff noted that Hitler, like Wallenstein, relied in times of crisis on the occult rather than on reason. In Jeff’s view this all added up to something significant, but he could not fathom just what.” Three of the novel’s four main characters, in different ways, turn towards the occult, and are in different ways destroyed.
But Dick is thinking of the occult in a way that is, well, occult. On one hand, he regards it as that which cannot be empirically verified- that which must be taken (or not) on faith. But he also seems to be associating it with losing oneself to one’s own obsessions. Later in the novel, Angel imagines a life focused on the pragmatic and everyday: "What I wanted was immediate, fixed, real, tangible…it had to do with my house and my job, and it had to with banishing ideas finally from my mind, ideas about other ideas, an infinite regress of them, spiraling off forever.” Someone like Bill, Kirsten’s son, she later thinks, “…simply recycles his own thoughts forever, enjoying them even though, like transmitted information, they degenerate. They become, finally, noise. And the signal that is intellect fades out." Perhaps for Jeff, the first to commit suicide, his way of dabbling in the occult is his quixotic attempt to explain German history.
The jury seems to be split on Dick’s later novels, the ones he wrote after his religious experience (for lack of a better term) in the mid-70s, and I think I can understand why. On one hand, he really was becoming a better writer and artist, shoring up his weaknesses (character, style, sometimes plot); this shows in A Scanner Darkly, my favorite of his novels, and was a great development for him, as he was never in any danger of lapsing into stale form. Therefore, a bit of craftsmanship could only help. Phil being Phil, he still had a thousand and one anxieties, fears and glimpses into the realms of madness that he urgently needed to share with his readers. On the other hand, this also gets at what's genuinely frightening about his later novels. Granted, there was always something frightening about him- that becomes apparent when you read Divine Invasions by Lawrence Sutin- and granted, he always wrote under the influence, be it of speed, LSD, or the I-Ching. He was always deadly committed to what he was writing, he always meant it. But here he is writing under the influence of what he called VALIS, or Vast Active Living Intelligence System, the entity that he believed (or believed for a while, then doubted, then speculated about to the tune of thousands of pages) had contacted him, and the subject matter (in both this novel and VALIS, from a few years previous) seems less chosen than obsessed over. If you know a little about Dick’s life, it’s hard, when reading about Jeff Archer’s project, not to think of Dick’s Exegesis, on which he spent almost the last decade of his life, trying to understand if what he’d experienced in the 70s was a genuine religious experience, the result of drug use, a psychotic break, etc. Perhaps enjoying his own recycled thoughts forever, or at least until he died- and parts of The Transmigration… sound to me like he is trying to convince himself to let his obsessions go, to try not to die so young (suicide is a constant theme in Dick's late novels). It’s also hard not to think that he based Bill Lundborg, the schizophrenic son of Kirsten who comes to believe that the dead Timothy Archer has taken up residence in his mind, to some degree on himself- Dick also believed (although ‘believed’ is not the right word- he never made up his mind) that the consciousness of VALIS, possibly alien or divine, was directing or living inside him.
As in almost every Dick novel, and as in Dick's life, no clear answer is provided to the book’s main questions- the mystery only deepens in unexpected and strangely beautiful ways. It seems as though Angel is right to trust her sense of reason, but she remains tempted by the possibility of the sublime. And if, as the spiritual teacher Edgar Barefoot (a.k.a., Alan Watts) believes, Bill Lundborg speaks the truth, then the transmigration that is suggested in the book’s title- that is, something heretofore unverified by human reason- has happened, and faith is rewarded.
November 8, 2020
The greatest novel PKD wrote, a huge departure from the rest of his work both in literary tone and the sheer quality of his female protagonist. What a way to end a career.
July 31, 2007
see Dick. See Dick run. See Dick write about the sacred quest to escape one's body and transcend the narrow human perception of experience through the ongoing search for the essential logos via the ingestion of psychedelic mushrooms while retracing the steps of the Christ. (pant)
November 21, 2022
Emptiness growing, \\ expansion of consciousness, \\ experience death.
HAIKUPRAJNA - The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
https://haikuprajna.blogspot.com/2022...
...
Hello readers,
Few Philip K. Dick books take place in as real-life of a setting as “The Transmigration of Timothy Archer”.
This is a religious and metaphysical science fiction story which skews to the philosophical, told from the point of view of Angel Archer between the time it took her to enter the seminar of an Edgar Barefoot; she was married to Tim’s son Jeff before the deaths of the two along with Angel’s friend, and Tim’s wife, Kirsten Lundborg, who was the mother of Bill Lundborg.
This is another book from the VALIS series, which is really good in my opinion, and which deals with topics that are personal to the author.
The story of Timothy Archer feels real, first and foremost, because of its fictionalization of real events; it is a story about death and grief and coping with the suicides of loved ones, or rather their individual intentions to die, coping via religion or spirituality as a metaphor for how to survive, as stories we tell ourselves in order to do what will avoid death.
The day of John Lennon’s murder, after she had found out she was now all alone, Angel felt guilty over having arranged Tim and Kirsten’s meeting, which, in a roundabout way, was the catalyst that led to everyone’s deaths.
When Jeff committed suicide, his father, a Bishop, was sent on a spiritual journey to prove to himself that he had experienced his son’s return from “the other world”, knowing he was unable to prove it to others due to the necessity of belief.
Angel had made that blatant and clear to be tragic, as Tim’s search had ended in his death in the Dead Sea; what hooked me was how the narrative of the book was framed around her restlessness, how her expositioning was a distraction from her suffering, where the line between narrator and author bled often enough that one is left unsure whether they are reading real-life fact or fiction.
Quote: ” ...there is a crucial sort of difference between pain and the narration of pain. I am telling you what happened. If there is vicarious pain in knowing, there is actual peril in not knowing. In aversion lies a colossal risk. ”
Timothy Archer sought to locate the genuine source of Christianity, which he said was hidden from the world for twenty-two hundred years. However, the Bishop was on trial for heresy, as his views differed from that of the Church; Tim’s troubles centred on translators coming across the sayings of Jesus predating Jesus by almost two hundred years, which shook the foundations of Tim’s faith, the revelation meaning that Jesus was using means that were available to the people of his time; however, the Church had failed to charge Tim and had “left him as a result even stronger than ever.”
Tim had become obsessed with locating the Original Source and with figuring out what it was, he had grown uncontent with faith alone and needed to experience the food and drink that turned one into God Himself, like a title or a role; Tim thought God was real while Angel thought he was “not really real” in the sense that he was intangible unlike a tangible wall or stone, thus Tim’s search for proof was futile and had in fact ended in futility according to the narrator.
Angel decided to visit Edgar Barefoot’s seminar, but she reflected on the bulk of the book’s narrative to herself before entering.
Quote: “... We are all just a moment in time in forward motion.”
The heartbreaking part was how Angel had gone along with Tim and Kirsten’s madness about Jeff because she wanted to believe that her dead husband was back, she loved him and, worse, she wanted to keep in contact with the Bishop and with her friend; however, she would still feel guilty after the fact.
Quote: “This is the famous nature of hindsight: to it everything is inevitable, since everything has already happened.”
She lost touch with Tim after Kirsten’s death, but he got back in contact to ask Angel to join him in going to the Dead Sea, which she declined because she did not want to die in the Desert. Tim was still chasing a drug for the insight he desired; he believed the anokhi mushroom was Christ, the wisdom of God, which was the only thing that--he thought--had the power to change his own fate, failing to understand that the transcendental form was the story of the anokhi.
After her first seminar, Edgar reintroduced Bill to Angel. Barefoot believed Bill was a Bodhisattva and had turned down nirvana to help others achieve it, which symbolized how Angel, unlike Tim, had accepted that transcendence, becoming comfortable in and unhindered by the world. Regardless of what really happened, Angel and Bill had the ability to summon the people they loved through their pooled memories of Tim, Kirsten and Jeff.
A haunting prophecy from 1982; quote: “It is like information theory; it is noise driving out signal. But it is noise posing as signal so you do not even recognize it as noise. The intelligence agencies call it disinformation, something the Soviet Bloc relies on heavily. If you can float enough disinformation into circulation you will totally abolish everyone's contact with reality, probably your own included.”
The ending featured a classic Philip K. Dick reality-twist, despite its otherwise real-life inspired setting, over Kirsten’s son and Tim’s transmigration, which was still grounded in doubtful reality because of Bill’s psychosis.
I saw the conflict of proof versus belief as a test for Angel Archer from God, where becoming rooted in the physical was the punishment for failure; Tim had tried to explain to Bill that it was impossible to explain Jeff’s return because belief is based on faith in one’s experience--this was proven to great effect through Bill being more pious about cars than Tim was about Christ, as Bill never needed more proof to assess any issue with his system, he had faith, the same as Angel.
Quote: “Believing something because it’s impossible... Not ‘despite the fact that it was impossible’...”
Insanity or unintelligibility equals being out-of-touch with reality, but reality operates despite the faults of irreality; Angel viewing death as a negative was rational and sane, even if she were incorrect and Tim were right, as chasing death would get one locked up in an institution or in another cycle of rebirth. Forming an idea bound by the future would root the idea in the future, thus determining fate--but it only did so if people believed it; Timothy Archer was punished for chasing and knowing God, needing and finding proof instead of believing.
Tim’s sin was missing the mark; the phrase “God is the Book of the Universe” was used as metaphor for Tim’s futility in finding God as an object at a single place in time and space.
Thank you for reading, please share your thoughts.
Allen W. McLean
...
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All readers are gifted a Kindle eBook every week on Free Fridays and Mondays--short story selection rotates every few weeks, so follow via email or visit My Author Profile on Amazon : [ https://www.amazon.ca/Allen-W-McLean/... ]
I write mindfulness meditation scifaiku and haiku poetry based on book reviews and on previews of my metaphysical stories, such as "Escape Perennial City" (available on Kindle Unlimited). Thanks to you, over 700 readers have joined us on Medium! Need followers to stay in the Medium Partner Program? Please follow us online and turn on email notifications; I'll follow you back! I have two short stories available to read, right now with no sign-up required, on Medium:
. "Ado the Owl" : [ https://medium.com/haikuprajna/202210... ]
. "Hector Blake" : [ https://medium.com/haikuprajna/hector... ]
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April's latest psychedelic music videos, art and poetry is available on all streaming platforms; Electric Armchair - We Are (Official Music Video) [Feast of Fools]: [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1cTw... ]
Electric Armchair - Living Ghosts (FULL ALBUM) : [ distrokid.com/hyperfollow/electricarm... ]
My metaphysical short story "ULTRAVIOLET" is available as an eBook on Kindle apps and devices; read right now with Kindle Unlimited : [ https://read.amazon.ca/kp/embed?asin=... ]
Kindle ebooks can be read on any device with a web browser at www.read.amazon.com
These poems will be collected in future editions of the HaikuPrajna Collection.
HAIKUPRAJNA - The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
https://haikuprajna.blogspot.com/2022...
...
Hello readers,
Few Philip K. Dick books take place in as real-life of a setting as “The Transmigration of Timothy Archer”.
This is a religious and metaphysical science fiction story which skews to the philosophical, told from the point of view of Angel Archer between the time it took her to enter the seminar of an Edgar Barefoot; she was married to Tim’s son Jeff before the deaths of the two along with Angel’s friend, and Tim’s wife, Kirsten Lundborg, who was the mother of Bill Lundborg.
This is another book from the VALIS series, which is really good in my opinion, and which deals with topics that are personal to the author.
The story of Timothy Archer feels real, first and foremost, because of its fictionalization of real events; it is a story about death and grief and coping with the suicides of loved ones, or rather their individual intentions to die, coping via religion or spirituality as a metaphor for how to survive, as stories we tell ourselves in order to do what will avoid death.
The day of John Lennon’s murder, after she had found out she was now all alone, Angel felt guilty over having arranged Tim and Kirsten’s meeting, which, in a roundabout way, was the catalyst that led to everyone’s deaths.
When Jeff committed suicide, his father, a Bishop, was sent on a spiritual journey to prove to himself that he had experienced his son’s return from “the other world”, knowing he was unable to prove it to others due to the necessity of belief.
Angel had made that blatant and clear to be tragic, as Tim’s search had ended in his death in the Dead Sea; what hooked me was how the narrative of the book was framed around her restlessness, how her expositioning was a distraction from her suffering, where the line between narrator and author bled often enough that one is left unsure whether they are reading real-life fact or fiction.
Quote: ” ...there is a crucial sort of difference between pain and the narration of pain. I am telling you what happened. If there is vicarious pain in knowing, there is actual peril in not knowing. In aversion lies a colossal risk. ”
Timothy Archer sought to locate the genuine source of Christianity, which he said was hidden from the world for twenty-two hundred years. However, the Bishop was on trial for heresy, as his views differed from that of the Church; Tim’s troubles centred on translators coming across the sayings of Jesus predating Jesus by almost two hundred years, which shook the foundations of Tim’s faith, the revelation meaning that Jesus was using means that were available to the people of his time; however, the Church had failed to charge Tim and had “left him as a result even stronger than ever.”
Tim had become obsessed with locating the Original Source and with figuring out what it was, he had grown uncontent with faith alone and needed to experience the food and drink that turned one into God Himself, like a title or a role; Tim thought God was real while Angel thought he was “not really real” in the sense that he was intangible unlike a tangible wall or stone, thus Tim’s search for proof was futile and had in fact ended in futility according to the narrator.
Angel decided to visit Edgar Barefoot’s seminar, but she reflected on the bulk of the book’s narrative to herself before entering.
Quote: “... We are all just a moment in time in forward motion.”
The heartbreaking part was how Angel had gone along with Tim and Kirsten’s madness about Jeff because she wanted to believe that her dead husband was back, she loved him and, worse, she wanted to keep in contact with the Bishop and with her friend; however, she would still feel guilty after the fact.
Quote: “This is the famous nature of hindsight: to it everything is inevitable, since everything has already happened.”
She lost touch with Tim after Kirsten’s death, but he got back in contact to ask Angel to join him in going to the Dead Sea, which she declined because she did not want to die in the Desert. Tim was still chasing a drug for the insight he desired; he believed the anokhi mushroom was Christ, the wisdom of God, which was the only thing that--he thought--had the power to change his own fate, failing to understand that the transcendental form was the story of the anokhi.
After her first seminar, Edgar reintroduced Bill to Angel. Barefoot believed Bill was a Bodhisattva and had turned down nirvana to help others achieve it, which symbolized how Angel, unlike Tim, had accepted that transcendence, becoming comfortable in and unhindered by the world. Regardless of what really happened, Angel and Bill had the ability to summon the people they loved through their pooled memories of Tim, Kirsten and Jeff.
A haunting prophecy from 1982; quote: “It is like information theory; it is noise driving out signal. But it is noise posing as signal so you do not even recognize it as noise. The intelligence agencies call it disinformation, something the Soviet Bloc relies on heavily. If you can float enough disinformation into circulation you will totally abolish everyone's contact with reality, probably your own included.”
The ending featured a classic Philip K. Dick reality-twist, despite its otherwise real-life inspired setting, over Kirsten’s son and Tim’s transmigration, which was still grounded in doubtful reality because of Bill’s psychosis.
I saw the conflict of proof versus belief as a test for Angel Archer from God, where becoming rooted in the physical was the punishment for failure; Tim had tried to explain to Bill that it was impossible to explain Jeff’s return because belief is based on faith in one’s experience--this was proven to great effect through Bill being more pious about cars than Tim was about Christ, as Bill never needed more proof to assess any issue with his system, he had faith, the same as Angel.
Quote: “Believing something because it’s impossible... Not ‘despite the fact that it was impossible’...”
Insanity or unintelligibility equals being out-of-touch with reality, but reality operates despite the faults of irreality; Angel viewing death as a negative was rational and sane, even if she were incorrect and Tim were right, as chasing death would get one locked up in an institution or in another cycle of rebirth. Forming an idea bound by the future would root the idea in the future, thus determining fate--but it only did so if people believed it; Timothy Archer was punished for chasing and knowing God, needing and finding proof instead of believing.
Tim’s sin was missing the mark; the phrase “God is the Book of the Universe” was used as metaphor for Tim’s futility in finding God as an object at a single place in time and space.
Thank you for reading, please share your thoughts.
Allen W. McLean
...
Need more Bite-sized Insights to relieve your stress and suffering?
All readers are gifted a Kindle eBook every week on Free Fridays and Mondays--short story selection rotates every few weeks, so follow via email or visit My Author Profile on Amazon : [ https://www.amazon.ca/Allen-W-McLean/... ]
I write mindfulness meditation scifaiku and haiku poetry based on book reviews and on previews of my metaphysical stories, such as "Escape Perennial City" (available on Kindle Unlimited). Thanks to you, over 700 readers have joined us on Medium! Need followers to stay in the Medium Partner Program? Please follow us online and turn on email notifications; I'll follow you back! I have two short stories available to read, right now with no sign-up required, on Medium:
. "Ado the Owl" : [ https://medium.com/haikuprajna/202210... ]
. "Hector Blake" : [ https://medium.com/haikuprajna/hector... ]
Stay in touch with HaikuPrajna and Electric Armchair : [ https://haikuprajna.blogspot.com/p/fo... ]
. Newsletter (free) : [ https://www.getrevue.co/profile/haiku... ]
. Goodreads [ www.goodreads.com/author/show/1955739... ]
. Medium : [ https://haikuprajna.medium.com/ ]
. LinkedIn : [ https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/... ]
. Patreon : [ https://www.patreon.com/asquaredprodu... ]
. Instagram : [ https://www.instagram.com/haikuprajna/ ]
. Blog : [ https://haikuprajna.blogspot.com/ ]
. Pinterest : [ https://www.pinterest.ca/haikuprajna/ ]
April's latest psychedelic music videos, art and poetry is available on all streaming platforms; Electric Armchair - We Are (Official Music Video) [Feast of Fools]: [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1cTw... ]
Electric Armchair - Living Ghosts (FULL ALBUM) : [ distrokid.com/hyperfollow/electricarm... ]
My metaphysical short story "ULTRAVIOLET" is available as an eBook on Kindle apps and devices; read right now with Kindle Unlimited : [ https://read.amazon.ca/kp/embed?asin=... ]
Kindle ebooks can be read on any device with a web browser at www.read.amazon.com
These poems will be collected in future editions of the HaikuPrajna Collection.
December 6, 2016
"Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it."
That was different.
So I really do not know how I feel about this novel, but I continue to think about it; as many of my reviews indicate, I'm not particularly interested in religion or spirituality, so PKD's dive in to Christianity really put me off at first. Transmigration is a little bit different - while there is a certain guarded objectivity, there is also an intimacy and familiarity... and while that generally makes me fairly uncomfortable - well, it's insightful to the writer as a person, and I've progressively become more curious about Philip K. Dick.
Unexpectedly, I felt like the themes of loss in the novel were far more relatable than I'd expected. In A Scanner Darkly, I began to understand what a hazardous, damaging, strange life Dick had led; there is a significant list of friends who Dick lost to drug psychosis and even death. While I felt that A Scanner Darkly was, at the time, the most personal piece that I'd read of Dick's, I've revised my feelings after reading Transmigration - Transmigration feels like a rich, sorrowful, but ultimately optimistic personal journey. There's an arc to it.
Though Scanner Darkly goes through the obvious arc of drug use, to drug abuse, to... well, psychosis... I don't feel that the arc is as meaningful. The journey is fairly one-dimensional. Transmigration details the ups and downs of marriage, the process of losing one's faith, how one survives great and terrible loss, and more subtleties that I'm just not qualified or adequate enough a writer to capture.
So - while Transmigration details a great deal of spiritual and philosophical detail, it's both an intimate AND objective journey. The narrator, much like myself, views religion from a distance; there's very little interest, though the charisma and conversational strength of the religious figures in her life are admittedly compelling. It's not the religion that is of interest though (to the narrator), which felt like a nod to those of us readers who agree - I appreciated that. While I felt like VALIS and Divine Invasion were deeply invested with personal beliefs and philosophies, I also could not help but feel mildly marginalized by my lack of interest in those things. Transmigration is markedly different in that way.
Transmigration is not a favorite, at least on the first read - but it is eminently memorable and incredibly personal. It's also not typical PKD sci-fi, which is a bit of a breath of fresh strangeness - though in a good way. I have to admit, too, that I felt fairly miserable after finishing the novel - though I have quite a few more of Dick's novels to complete, this was his final published novel. Obviously, this marks the end of his writing progression - each of his novels goes off in it's own bizarre direction, but I have nothing new and shiny to look forward to. I was only one year old when Dick died - had he lived longer, I could have met him as an adult. This makes me terribly sad. I likely should have held off on reading Transmigration 'til last, and maybe later in life.
Don't let that hold you back, unless you plan (like me) on reading the entire PKD library. If anything, even then, perhaps it's greater motivation to see all of the strange things that brought him to this point.
That was different.
So I really do not know how I feel about this novel, but I continue to think about it; as many of my reviews indicate, I'm not particularly interested in religion or spirituality, so PKD's dive in to Christianity really put me off at first. Transmigration is a little bit different - while there is a certain guarded objectivity, there is also an intimacy and familiarity... and while that generally makes me fairly uncomfortable - well, it's insightful to the writer as a person, and I've progressively become more curious about Philip K. Dick.
Unexpectedly, I felt like the themes of loss in the novel were far more relatable than I'd expected. In A Scanner Darkly, I began to understand what a hazardous, damaging, strange life Dick had led; there is a significant list of friends who Dick lost to drug psychosis and even death. While I felt that A Scanner Darkly was, at the time, the most personal piece that I'd read of Dick's, I've revised my feelings after reading Transmigration - Transmigration feels like a rich, sorrowful, but ultimately optimistic personal journey. There's an arc to it.
Though Scanner Darkly goes through the obvious arc of drug use, to drug abuse, to... well, psychosis... I don't feel that the arc is as meaningful. The journey is fairly one-dimensional. Transmigration details the ups and downs of marriage, the process of losing one's faith, how one survives great and terrible loss, and more subtleties that I'm just not qualified or adequate enough a writer to capture.
So - while Transmigration details a great deal of spiritual and philosophical detail, it's both an intimate AND objective journey. The narrator, much like myself, views religion from a distance; there's very little interest, though the charisma and conversational strength of the religious figures in her life are admittedly compelling. It's not the religion that is of interest though (to the narrator), which felt like a nod to those of us readers who agree - I appreciated that. While I felt like VALIS and Divine Invasion were deeply invested with personal beliefs and philosophies, I also could not help but feel mildly marginalized by my lack of interest in those things. Transmigration is markedly different in that way.
Transmigration is not a favorite, at least on the first read - but it is eminently memorable and incredibly personal. It's also not typical PKD sci-fi, which is a bit of a breath of fresh strangeness - though in a good way. I have to admit, too, that I felt fairly miserable after finishing the novel - though I have quite a few more of Dick's novels to complete, this was his final published novel. Obviously, this marks the end of his writing progression - each of his novels goes off in it's own bizarre direction, but I have nothing new and shiny to look forward to. I was only one year old when Dick died - had he lived longer, I could have met him as an adult. This makes me terribly sad. I likely should have held off on reading Transmigration 'til last, and maybe later in life.
Don't let that hold you back, unless you plan (like me) on reading the entire PKD library. If anything, even then, perhaps it's greater motivation to see all of the strange things that brought him to this point.
October 29, 2010
wow. well, this is pretty fresh in my mind, and it's been a couple of weeks. that doesn't surprise me though because the ideas that dick toyed with in his last cycle of books are to me the most compelling, indeed the most disturbing and challenging to my mind. dick's narrator angel archer is one of his most resonant, matter-of-fact, and yes, human. she is a rare accomplishment in terms of his development of a female character, though this may well be because she has his own very human voice, or perhaps, as i speculated as i was reading it, the voice of the twin sister he had lost so young, whose voice he alone had heard before. angel is a comfortable narrator: she guides us through the big ideas and concepts about life, and after life, and death and ancient texts easily that are spun out by dick; she is our virgil, as he references and echoes dante's commedia throughout this work. you may find, as i have, that he whets one's appetite for embarking on that journey once again. i have inferno opened here before me romanced and bemused by dick in his very loving homage: the allusions only underscore his own exploration of theological ideas. dick embeds these ideas in a further layer: his relationship with the real-life bishop james pike, and some of the incidents of his real life are spun into the title character timothy archer, and it is through him the plot that drives the pedagogy adheres.
really, one of dick's best books in terms of pacing and execution: it is often acknowledged that dick's strength lies in his ideas but here, i find very little to quibble with, in fact he allows the tension to build into an almost unbearable peak -- i actually did stop three quarters of the way through because everything seemed to be spinning out of control but when i came back, still curious to see where he would go, he eased me downward, toward my own katabasis through his words, and finally dante's.
this is really a four and a half stars review.
really, one of dick's best books in terms of pacing and execution: it is often acknowledged that dick's strength lies in his ideas but here, i find very little to quibble with, in fact he allows the tension to build into an almost unbearable peak -- i actually did stop three quarters of the way through because everything seemed to be spinning out of control but when i came back, still curious to see where he would go, he eased me downward, toward my own katabasis through his words, and finally dante's.
this is really a four and a half stars review.
September 17, 2015
Imagine what it would be like to meet Philip K Dick at a dinner party in the mid 70's. He seems to be the person who would dominate a conversation, but in a good way. Filled with ideas, stories, convoluted connections and theories. After a few drinks I'd think "This guy is a genius!". But then when I woke up the next morning, I'm not sure if any of it would make any sense, but still I'd invite him over again to hear what he had to say. What a character he must have been! What a loss that he died so young!
When I finish one of his books, I usually think "Well, that was just OK". But then the ideas presented build over time, and I start to see a variety of different viewpoints, or possibilities, or maybe think of something new that at first wasn't so obvious. Some of his books can be somewhat obtuse, at least compared to a lot of other Sci-Fi, but then again that's why I like his writing. I'll always learn something new reading one of his novels, and I've never forgotten any of the ones I've read. I must have read the bios on Wikipedia of at least a dozen philosophers and religious leaders mentioned in this book.
I definitely get the sense that this one was a highly personal writing experience for Mr. Dick, considering that this book was influenced by his friendship with Bishop Pike. It must have also been influenced by his experiences in Feb-Mar of '74, when he felt that he had been taken over by the spirit of the prophet Elijah. Yes, that's right taken over by the prophet Elijah. So this is not really Sci-Fi for me. I'd think of it as really an essay on Christianity.
It helps to know a something about his life to understand and appreciate this book. Knowing the story of Bishop Pike, and Dick's own "religious experiences", I felt this book was a very touching tribute to a friend and a great insight into one of the great oddballs of 20th century Sci-Fi.
When I finish one of his books, I usually think "Well, that was just OK". But then the ideas presented build over time, and I start to see a variety of different viewpoints, or possibilities, or maybe think of something new that at first wasn't so obvious. Some of his books can be somewhat obtuse, at least compared to a lot of other Sci-Fi, but then again that's why I like his writing. I'll always learn something new reading one of his novels, and I've never forgotten any of the ones I've read. I must have read the bios on Wikipedia of at least a dozen philosophers and religious leaders mentioned in this book.
I definitely get the sense that this one was a highly personal writing experience for Mr. Dick, considering that this book was influenced by his friendship with Bishop Pike. It must have also been influenced by his experiences in Feb-Mar of '74, when he felt that he had been taken over by the spirit of the prophet Elijah. Yes, that's right taken over by the prophet Elijah. So this is not really Sci-Fi for me. I'd think of it as really an essay on Christianity.
It helps to know a something about his life to understand and appreciate this book. Knowing the story of Bishop Pike, and Dick's own "religious experiences", I felt this book was a very touching tribute to a friend and a great insight into one of the great oddballs of 20th century Sci-Fi.
August 17, 2017
Well, I hate to say this but this was my least favorite of the VALIS books. My guess is because it was too mainstream and not enough far-out weird stuff. So even though a lot of the religious stuff bored me (mostly because a lot of it is just over my head), the story itself with Angel, Tim, and all the other characters, did not fill in the rest of story with the wacky dialogue and interactions that I enjoyed in the previous two books. Yeah, there were some great scenes, but just not enough to pull the book as a whole up to a level that I fully enjoyed.
So, I'm hovering around 2.5 stars. Mostly 2 stars, with periodic 3 star scenes. Oh well, time to go back and read some of his earlier works now.
So, I'm hovering around 2.5 stars. Mostly 2 stars, with periodic 3 star scenes. Oh well, time to go back and read some of his earlier works now.
July 6, 2021
Es como Franny and Zoey de Salinger pero pasada por ácido: la familia disfuncional que se obsesiona con textos antiguos e imágenes primigenias. Algo así como una metafísica punk para cazadores de rarezas. Acá se cumple a cabalidad la ley de Sturgeon: PKD escribió una novela excepcional que tiene todos los elementos de cualquier gran novela: una erudición algo glotona, humor cáustico y reflexión histórica -la ficción como gemelo oscuro de la Historia, De Certeau dixit-. Pienso en Sturgeon porque a PKD se le clasifica como autor de ciencia ficción, pero acá escribe tan bien como el mejor novelista de la Literatura con mayúscula, si es que existe tal cosa. En fin.
December 6, 2018
This book feels more like Valis than it does The Divine Invasion. Like the first volume of the trilogy, it is grounded in the here and now, the supernatural elements are in the fringes of the story rather than in your face, and it feels like a very personal work.
It is also a great early novel about Gnosticism and obviously had a lot of research put into its development.
Also, even though it comes last in the trilogy, I feel that this book is probably the most accessible of the three.
It is also a great early novel about Gnosticism and obviously had a lot of research put into its development.
Also, even though it comes last in the trilogy, I feel that this book is probably the most accessible of the three.
June 17, 2021
Philip K. Dick is always worth a reread. I'm consistently awestruck by his understanding of human beings, his wit, his humor, and his humility. People say that he isn't a stylist but I disagree. His last couple of books, especially Transmigration, really have an elegant and deep prose.
December 29, 2020
I nearly give this book 5 stars, but there is too much death and madness in it. I really don't know what I would do if those closest to me killed themselves, leaving me with practically no one. I suppose Angel handled it relatively well given the situation she was in.
PKD includes plenty of philosophy, poetry, music, and mental illness in the book. I paused my reading one night to listen to Beethoven's Fidelio, because PKD piqued my interest. I did not know about the piece of music. A good book causes you to think about it when you are not reading it. A good book presents something to you that you have never thought or heard. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer meets my criteria for a good book.
PKD includes plenty of philosophy, poetry, music, and mental illness in the book. I paused my reading one night to listen to Beethoven's Fidelio, because PKD piqued my interest. I did not know about the piece of music. A good book causes you to think about it when you are not reading it. A good book presents something to you that you have never thought or heard. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer meets my criteria for a good book.
January 13, 2020
obviously philip dick was in dire need of talking to somebody about the media he had consumed for all of his life prior to writing this book. there are big, sometimes huge chunks of paragraphs splattered throughout the book where his characters (mostly the bishop) talking about.. stuff. & you might think it would be boring, & it could be if you have zero interest in theology like me but somehow I found it entertaining. I was also pleasantly surprised to see how well informed philip dick was about classical music.
October 23, 2008
PDK's swan song, as it turned out. It is also his most life-affirming book he ever wrote. Part biographical, part literary fiction and part paranormal mystery and 100% Masterpiece, this book is told from the perspective of a woman, something Dick had never done before. That he pulls it off so easily is a testament to the narrative powers that Dick possessed. Sadly, he died weeks after completing this outstanding book. The plot twist is particularly to die for.
September 2, 2018
This, PKD's 'swan song' of the post-pulp master, is a triumph. A perfect novel. Perhaps there is a little too much theology for most reader`s taste, but it is funny, intelligent and utterly thought provoking. By this time, he had fully reached his abilities, which makes this the perfect choice as the final PKD novel to read. So unfortunate it is not to know what he would have come up with had he lived a few decades longer.
November 13, 2008
One of my very favorite books, since way back when I first read it in 97 or 98. Not really "sci-fi", and although it's technically the third book in the Valis trilogy, you don't need to read the others to read this, and there aren't any spoilers for the first two books, it's standalone. Deals with a lot of the emotions around people you love dying.
May 7, 2016
Easier to pay attention to than The Divine Invasion, but still heavy on the Sunday School, I find myself missing the mind-trip of the previous novels. PKD seems to handle women better as first-person female protags. The best parts are when Angel philosophizes about books and records.
May 25, 2018
Matching Soundtrack :
Soon - Yes
Soon - Yes
September 17, 2013
A woman, you say? Narrating a Philip K. Dick novel? Wait a minute. Wait. A. Minute. For one, everyone knows that the only first-person narrators allowed aboard the Philip K. Dick train are fictional characters known as Philip K. Dick. For another, the guy's misogynist tendencies cannot be missed. And I can't say I'm a fan of them, but since he tells cool stories, I'm willing to bear with him. For the record, he does a decent job with the woman. Philip K. Dick didn't make his name on his characters, but Angel Archer is definitely one of his more memorable protagonists. Maybe it's only because of the "OMG a woman with an interior life in a Philip K. Dick novel" factor, but look. She's just as sarcastic, frank and world-weary as any of Phil's male heroes, and this means that she, like them, comes off as an asshole from time to time. But in the end, you get the sense she's someone who really cares about those around her, but has grown so sick of not being listened to that she snarks just to stay sane. Look, I'm not saying he died and came back to life as Virginia Woolf or anything, but it's a step in the right direction.
Really, there's a lot of new territory explored here. It's certainly a long way from the dystopian reality-melting postmodern sci-fi adventures the guy cut his teeth on. It's mostly a very restrained novel, which pulls it away from the prior two VALIS novels: while there's much theological discussion between Angel and her bishop stepfather Timothy, the theology is in service of a broader plot. This makes it a massive step above The Divine Invasion, where characters delivered their discourses and the plot occasionally peeked its head out and asked "hey, what about me?" and was given five pages of extraordinarily half-assed attention before the discourse kept up. It's different here, though. Here, Timothy theories reminiscent of VALIS' gnosticism and devotes his life to proving them, sacrificing his relationship with a troubled family and position in the church at their expense; Angel frequently warns him of his actions' consequences, but her warnings in vain. Sounds like a compelling narrative to me.
It's just not the type of narrative you'd expect from its author. The first two VALIS novels had been unabashedly strange and written on the grandest scale imaginable, but outside of a seance which actually works and the promised transmigration, everything that occurs here is in the realm of the possible. And yet, the theories and themes explored still fit in well with the first two, even though the conflict the first two set up doesn't resolve. Apparently, this was what Dick wanted his unfinished Owl in Daylight to do (this wasn't supposed to be a part of the trilogy, but a thematic companion), and while it's a shame he didn't live to finish the trilogy the way he'd wanted to, at least we got this out of the bargain. I'll tell you what, though - after how messy the Divine Invasion was, I could've gotten used to a few more novels like this.
Really, there's a lot of new territory explored here. It's certainly a long way from the dystopian reality-melting postmodern sci-fi adventures the guy cut his teeth on. It's mostly a very restrained novel, which pulls it away from the prior two VALIS novels: while there's much theological discussion between Angel and her bishop stepfather Timothy, the theology is in service of a broader plot. This makes it a massive step above The Divine Invasion, where characters delivered their discourses and the plot occasionally peeked its head out and asked "hey, what about me?" and was given five pages of extraordinarily half-assed attention before the discourse kept up. It's different here, though. Here, Timothy theories reminiscent of VALIS' gnosticism and devotes his life to proving them, sacrificing his relationship with a troubled family and position in the church at their expense; Angel frequently warns him of his actions' consequences, but her warnings in vain. Sounds like a compelling narrative to me.
It's just not the type of narrative you'd expect from its author. The first two VALIS novels had been unabashedly strange and written on the grandest scale imaginable, but outside of a seance which actually works and the promised transmigration, everything that occurs here is in the realm of the possible. And yet, the theories and themes explored still fit in well with the first two, even though the conflict the first two set up doesn't resolve. Apparently, this was what Dick wanted his unfinished Owl in Daylight to do (this wasn't supposed to be a part of the trilogy, but a thematic companion), and while it's a shame he didn't live to finish the trilogy the way he'd wanted to, at least we got this out of the bargain. I'll tell you what, though - after how messy the Divine Invasion was, I could've gotten used to a few more novels like this.
June 4, 2022
2022 Reading Challenge #12: The last book by a famous dead author ☑
I guess I just don't have the attention span for introspective fiction (if I'm correct in defining "introspective fiction" as a work that is primarily a character pondering to themself). I gave Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World three stars, Arudpragasam's A Passage North only two, and now The Transmigration of Timothy Archer has met with a similar fate. In all three cases, the writing is undeniably good, and in PKD's case in particular there are definitely some interesting musings (about religion, faith, psychology, death, etc.), but I guess I'm not "intellectual" enough to sustain interest/enjoyment in ideas if there aren't also things happening. The quandaries put forth about superstition, insanity, are good food for thought, but it got boring for me. If you like books that read like philosophical debates, you'll probably enjoy this a lot more than me.
The plot, insofar as there is one, follows Angel Archer as she reflects on and tries to come to terms with the suicides of her husband and best friend, Kirsten, and the subsequent death of her father-in-law, former-Bishop Timothy Archer. The discovery of some scrolls that suggest Jesus was just a prophet (and not even an original one at that), sends Archer into a theological crisis. Tim and Bill (Kirsten's schizophrenic son) are pretty interesting, but Angel is a pretty unremarkable narrator (although I fully enjoyed her dry sarcasm).
If you read through the 1 and 2 star reviews, a lot of people gripe about it not being science fiction. I agree that PKD's sci-fi is way better, but to knock this book simply because of the fact that it isn't just comes across as the consumer trying to tell the artist they aren't allowed to branch out. Oh, and even though I haven't read the first two books in PKD's VALIS trilogy, it really irks me that people call this the third installment, when it most certainly is not. This book is thematically related to the other two, but that does not make it part of the same series!
I guess I just don't have the attention span for introspective fiction (if I'm correct in defining "introspective fiction" as a work that is primarily a character pondering to themself). I gave Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World three stars, Arudpragasam's A Passage North only two, and now The Transmigration of Timothy Archer has met with a similar fate. In all three cases, the writing is undeniably good, and in PKD's case in particular there are definitely some interesting musings (about religion, faith, psychology, death, etc.), but I guess I'm not "intellectual" enough to sustain interest/enjoyment in ideas if there aren't also things happening. The quandaries put forth about superstition, insanity, are good food for thought, but it got boring for me. If you like books that read like philosophical debates, you'll probably enjoy this a lot more than me.
The plot, insofar as there is one, follows Angel Archer as she reflects on and tries to come to terms with the suicides of her husband and best friend, Kirsten, and the subsequent death of her father-in-law, former-Bishop Timothy Archer. The discovery of some scrolls that suggest Jesus was just a prophet (and not even an original one at that), sends Archer into a theological crisis. Tim and Bill (Kirsten's schizophrenic son) are pretty interesting, but Angel is a pretty unremarkable narrator (although I fully enjoyed her dry sarcasm).
If you read through the 1 and 2 star reviews, a lot of people gripe about it not being science fiction. I agree that PKD's sci-fi is way better, but to knock this book simply because of the fact that it isn't just comes across as the consumer trying to tell the artist they aren't allowed to branch out. Oh, and even though I haven't read the first two books in PKD's VALIS trilogy, it really irks me that people call this the third installment, when it most certainly is not. This book is thematically related to the other two, but that does not make it part of the same series!
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