The Divine Invasion
Science Fiction Book Club, 1982
The Divine Invasion (1981) is the second novel in the VALIS Trilogy, in which God, exiled from an Earth controlled by a totalitarian Christian-Islamic theocracy, arranges to return in the body of a child born on a remote colony world. Science Fiction Book Club edition, matching the design of the Timescape first edition.
Hardcover. Book Club Edition (BCE). Octavo, blue paper covered boards. Date code "M21" on lower left margin of page 215. Garden City, NY: Science Fiction Book Club (SFBC), 1982. Wintz & Hyde SF20.2. ISBN: 0671417762. #11184.
Fine in very good or better dust jacket with a couple closed tears and some edge-wear to extremities.
Hardcover. Book Club Edition (BCE). Octavo, blue paper covered boards. Date code "M21" on lower left margin of page 215. Garden City, NY: Science Fiction Book Club (SFBC), 1982. Wintz & Hyde SF20.2. ISBN: 0671417762. #11184.
Fine in very good or better dust jacket with a couple closed tears and some edge-wear to extremities.
Additional Details
The Divine Invasion (1981) is the second novel in the VALIS Trilogy and its most overtly mythological. The setting is a distant star system, CY30-CY30B, where humanity maintains isolated domes on a methane-covered moon. Herb Asher is a reclusive colonist who fills his dome with recorded performances of Linda Fox, a singer whose voice he has elevated into something approaching worship. His neighbor Rybys Rommey is twenty-seven years old and dying of multiple sclerosis, marooned on the same moon and largely ignored by the medical system that should be serving her. When the deity of the mountain, Yah, commands Herb to care for her and eventually help her return to Earth, Asher has no real choice. Yah burns down his equipment and erases his tapes to make the point.
Rybys is pregnant. The child she carries, Emmanuel, is the divine in human form, conceived for the purpose of returning to Earth, which has fallen under the control of a totalitarian Christian-Islamic theocratic state and its secular counterpart, the Scientific Legate. The two institutions maintain a mutual surveillance state enforced partly through Big Noodle, a vast artificial intelligence that processes government information. God has been absent from Earth, exiled and forgotten, and Emmanuel is to correct this. But the journey damages him, and he arrives in a child's body with his memories and full power suppressed.
Elias Tate, an ancient prophet who moves through history under different names, shepherds Emmanuel through childhood. The girl Zina, who becomes Emmanuel's playmate, turns out to be the female divine principle, the Shekhina of Kabbalistic tradition, who has been present on Earth throughout the occupation, hidden but not entirely extinguished. The Adversary, Belial, operates through institutional structures, through the Church, through the Legate, and through human fear and compliance. Dick's theology is dense and earnest, drawing on Kabbalah, Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, but the novel's emotional center is simpler. A cold, methane-covered moon, a dying woman, a frightened man, and a God who has to threaten to burn your tapes before you'll go check on your neighbor.
First published in hardcover by Timescape/Simon & Schuster in 1981.
Rybys is pregnant. The child she carries, Emmanuel, is the divine in human form, conceived for the purpose of returning to Earth, which has fallen under the control of a totalitarian Christian-Islamic theocratic state and its secular counterpart, the Scientific Legate. The two institutions maintain a mutual surveillance state enforced partly through Big Noodle, a vast artificial intelligence that processes government information. God has been absent from Earth, exiled and forgotten, and Emmanuel is to correct this. But the journey damages him, and he arrives in a child's body with his memories and full power suppressed.
Elias Tate, an ancient prophet who moves through history under different names, shepherds Emmanuel through childhood. The girl Zina, who becomes Emmanuel's playmate, turns out to be the female divine principle, the Shekhina of Kabbalistic tradition, who has been present on Earth throughout the occupation, hidden but not entirely extinguished. The Adversary, Belial, operates through institutional structures, through the Church, through the Legate, and through human fear and compliance. Dick's theology is dense and earnest, drawing on Kabbalah, Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, but the novel's emotional center is simpler. A cold, methane-covered moon, a dying woman, a frightened man, and a God who has to threaten to burn your tapes before you'll go check on your neighbor.
First published in hardcover by Timescape/Simon & Schuster in 1981.
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