The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
First edition, 1981
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982) is the third and final novel in the VALIS Trilogy, narrated by Angel Archer as she recounts the theological obsessions and deaths of the people around her, including her father-in-law Bishop Timothy Archer, loosely based on the real-life Bishop James Pike. Dick's last completed novel, nominated for the Nebula Award. First edition, published in hardcover by Timescape Books.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, bound in cloth-backed boards with gilt lettering on spine. New York: Timescape Books, 1981. Wintz & Hyde SF28.1. ISBN: 0671440667. #10122.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, bound in cloth-backed boards with gilt lettering on spine. New York: Timescape Books, 1981. Wintz & Hyde SF28.1. ISBN: 0671440667. #10122.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Additional Details
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982) is the third novel in the VALIS Trilogy and the most unusual of the three. It is not science fiction in any conventional sense. There are no alternate realities, no divine transmissions, no metaphysical machinery. What it is, instead, is one of the finest novels Dick ever wrote: a character study, a Bay Area social novel, and an elegy for a generation of people who pursued meaning with such urgency that it consumed them.
The narrator is Angel Archer, ex-wife of Jeff Archer, son of Bishop Timothy Archer of California. The novel opens on the day John Lennon was killed, December 8, 1980, with Angel driving across the Bay to a hundred-dollar seminar on Arabic mysticism in Sausalito. Her voice is sardonic, quick, deeply intelligent, and entirely unlike anything else in Dick's work. She thinks about her dead husband, her dead father-in-law, and the series of people who fell into the orbit of Bishop Archer and did not survive it. She is trying to make sense of events she witnessed and could not stop.
Timothy Archer is loosely but unmistakably based on James Pike, the controversial Episcopalian Bishop of California who lost his son to suicide, became obsessed with communicating with the dead through a medium, embraced heretical theological positions that led to an unofficial church trial, and died in the Judean desert in 1969. In Dick's version, Archer becomes obsessed with the Dead Sea Scrolls and a hypothetical pre-Christian mushroom cult whose practices seem to anticipate the Eucharist. He pursues this obsession through multiple bereavements, including the death of his son Jeff and his mistress Kirsten, who both die before the novel is half over. He eventually travels to Israel and dies there, alone, in the desert.
What makes the novel extraordinary is Angel. She is not impressed by certainty. She loved the people who died, and she is honest about what their certainty cost them and her. The question the novel is really asking is whether the pursuit of ultimate meaning is a form of courage or a form of self-destruction, and whether there is a meaningful difference between a visionary and someone who cannot stop. Dick does not answer this. Angel does not answer it either. She goes back to work at the record shop on Telegraph Avenue and keeps thinking about it.
The novel was Dick's last completed work, finished shortly before his death in March 1982 and published that same year. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel.
The narrator is Angel Archer, ex-wife of Jeff Archer, son of Bishop Timothy Archer of California. The novel opens on the day John Lennon was killed, December 8, 1980, with Angel driving across the Bay to a hundred-dollar seminar on Arabic mysticism in Sausalito. Her voice is sardonic, quick, deeply intelligent, and entirely unlike anything else in Dick's work. She thinks about her dead husband, her dead father-in-law, and the series of people who fell into the orbit of Bishop Archer and did not survive it. She is trying to make sense of events she witnessed and could not stop.
Timothy Archer is loosely but unmistakably based on James Pike, the controversial Episcopalian Bishop of California who lost his son to suicide, became obsessed with communicating with the dead through a medium, embraced heretical theological positions that led to an unofficial church trial, and died in the Judean desert in 1969. In Dick's version, Archer becomes obsessed with the Dead Sea Scrolls and a hypothetical pre-Christian mushroom cult whose practices seem to anticipate the Eucharist. He pursues this obsession through multiple bereavements, including the death of his son Jeff and his mistress Kirsten, who both die before the novel is half over. He eventually travels to Israel and dies there, alone, in the desert.
What makes the novel extraordinary is Angel. She is not impressed by certainty. She loved the people who died, and she is honest about what their certainty cost them and her. The question the novel is really asking is whether the pursuit of ultimate meaning is a form of courage or a form of self-destruction, and whether there is a meaningful difference between a visionary and someone who cannot stop. Dick does not answer this. Angel does not answer it either. She goes back to work at the record shop on Telegraph Avenue and keeps thinking about it.
The novel was Dick's last completed work, finished shortly before his death in March 1982 and published that same year. It was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel.
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