214 pages
English language
Published Nov. 18, 1998 by Vintage Books.
Science fiction novel, a wild and visionary alternate history of the United States.
It is 1969, and a paranoid president has convulsed America in a vicious war against imaginary internal enemies. As the country slides into fascism, a struggling science-fiction writer named Philip K. Dick is trying to keep from becoming one of that war's casualties. Meanwhile, Dick's best friend, a record executive named Nicholas Brady, is receiving transmissions from an extraterrestrial intelligence, which he dubs Valis, who apparently wants him to overthrow the president.
Underground politics and theology and superior aliens, the music industry and secret police, hallucinations and science fiction writers - this posthumous book had the strange sort of mix that would be hard to imagine coming from another author. In the end it turns both dystopian and hopeful at the same time.
