if we’re into this, Valis, The Divine Invasion, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, A Maze Of Death, and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch are all facets of the same diamomd.
IMHO, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is by far the best PKD book.
I'd add Ubik to this as well, and would personally rate it higher than the Three Stigmata. For me, Ubik is PKD's greatest and most accessible book.
1st rank - Ubik, The Three Stigmata, A Martian Time Slip, Faith of Our Fathers
2nd rank - (The Divine Invasion or The Galactic Pot Healer ... don't remember which now... it's been a long time), A Maze of Death
3rd rank - VALIS, Eye in the Sky
Honorable mention: the middle of Lies, Inc -- it has a weak start and ending, but the middle is up there with the best PKD has ever written.
I found The Transmigration of Timothy Archer to be pretty boring, but I didn't make it all the way through, and some PKD books (like Lies, Inc) start dull and turn great, so I might give it another go sometime.. but the impression I got when first reading it was that this was a book written around the time PKD was starting to transition to writing more "serious literature" (aka not scifi), and to me PKD is just much stronger at writing scifi, particularly of the really mind-bending, bad acid trip kind, and he just wasn't cut out to write "serious literature"... so yeah, right now I'd pass on The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.
I'm also kind of sick of his obsession with his pink light mystical experience.. I wish he'd just gotten over it already and moved on to something else. Writing about it once was more than enough.
+1 for Ubik. It's really the quintessential example of his reality bending core theme. Everytime you think you've got a handle on what's happening, he pulls the rug out from under you, all the way to the end. Some of his other books try to do the same thing, but tie things up too nicely (like Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said).
I took two tries to get into Transmigration of Timothy Archer. What got me through the second time was finding out that it was a fictionalized portrait of a real and fascinating person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Pike
I also just liked reading Dick's descriptions of the Bay Area.
When I see these stories of mine, written over three decades, I think of the Lucky Dog Pet Store. There's a good reason for that. It has to do with an aspect of not just my life, but the lives of many freelance writers. It's called poverty [........] So anyhow, there I am at the Lucky Dog Pet Store on San Pablo Avenue, In Berkley, California, in the Fifties, buying a pound of ground horsemeat.
Philip K. Dick in the introduction to the Golden Man, 1980
I've been in (EDIT: the Berkeley house on that page)! There's a little plaque inside. It is just a house, though. I didn't experience any onset of hebephrenia.
the fact that it’s based on Bishop Pike is indeed one hook. This is where I have first learned about John Allegro and his wild theories on Christianity. These theory fascinate me to this day.
Don’t know if you ever read any of his non-SF stuff, but it’s worth a pop - Confessions of a Crap Artist and Mary and the Giant stand out as the most interesting to me. Both follow the same vein as his SF work, insofar as he takes a reasonable premise (mid-century America in this case), strips it to its symbols, and then parades them in front of you as a banal pastiche which improbably anneals into tantalising insight of the mindsets, wants and desires of the characters, who are transparent avatars of their culture. Mary, for instance, could almost be a piece of paper with “MARY” printed on it, but through that empty vessel one understands the thingness of the characters’ perceptions.
I tried reading Confessions of a Crap Artist, but had the exact same reaction as I did to The Transmigration of Timothy Archer... boredom. Couldn't finish it. I just didn't think it was good. I couldn't see what you saw in it. Someday maybe I'll give it another chance.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the basis for Blade Runner, is really a fantastic novel too. It has been overshadowed by the film, but it’s prediction that organic life would become a status symbol as it was destroyed replaced by Capitalist simulacra seems especially relevant today. I think about it all the time when I see Instagram influencers with hobby farms or children playing Pokémon during our ongoing mass extinctions.
if we’re ranking stuff, Ubik is definitely in the top 3. I was strictly talking about the 2 3 74 phase and all the works that came from that. In a pure PKD fashion the Three Stigmata was written way before that.
it depends. It captures really well the experience of a bad trip (spoiler alert: I don’t think that anything that happens after Leo meets Palmer actually happens and it’s just Leo tripping hard)
IMHO, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is by far the best PKD book.