Not really as much a sci-fi but an alternate theological outcome imagined in an alternate reality. Quick read. Like Valis, this one too refers back to those two months in PKD’s life forever seeking explanation. One reads less for the book itself (which is alright as a standalone read, not really worth recommending) but because one is interested in understanding the effort and pain that those two months’ events of Exegesis (link) put PKD through. His novels become another way to almost see a person at work unravelling, shuffling, mixing things, trying to find a solution to this cosmic puzzle which he feels he has been exposed to, and which commands all his remaining life, because, really, once faced with something like that, how can anything else in this world ever match?
The book seems to take place in an alternate reality, which is around 2,000 years from the time of Jesus. Alternate because the world is different, quite at an advanced level of tech from our current world - with space travel, domes in space, colonies on other planets, cryonic suspension which kept dead/ almost dead people suspended to be revived as if in pause.
The novel circles around God seeking birth in the in an echo of the Virgin birth, and the people thus drawn in the story - Rybys (the mother), Herb (the father), and then the God-child's pursuit to remember himself (since in human form he seems to have forgotten) so that he can rid the world of the effects of the original fall. He is helped by divine characters in human form –Elias (prophet Elijah), and Zina. The assumption here is that everything has already happened, all future is history, just being lived through, contained in this specific bubble of a space-time which the beings and God in being form need to live through, and rediscover himself. There are many allusions throughout the book to different religious texts and strictures, and I’m glad that I was reading Paradise Lost around the same time and could gather some common allusions.
Partway through the book, reality changes to a completely different version at behest of one of the divine beings living as human. The characters are the same but their life’s background becomes completely different. Quite interesting this treatment of reality and time and space, as if a ‘reality’ were an outfit to wear, easily modifiable by those who can, and the people living through whichever version not realising that the reality they observe didn’t really exist even a minute before. All their memories and whatever calls itself ‘past’ replaced say the very moment we encounter them in the book and unsuspecting, they seem to live through it as if that was all they have known forever, as if human beings were a computer program, operating against changing backgrounds and treating every background as the true reality in the moment of operation. (Many thorny issues with the way it is dealt, and linking it with the all future is past concept, but it keeps you occupied and is fun to keep daydreaming about.)
Overall though the book doesn’t really resolve itself well. And that’s the trouble with most sci-fi, and more so with sci-fi which attempt an understanding to the grandest puzzle that ever is. One is bound to be disappointed.
In this case, I feel some of the dissatisfaction might have something to do with storytelling and characters. The reader’s imagination needs characters through which they can live in the world of the book. They should provide enough space for the reader to fit in and project and make the novel come alive. Sometimes it is a little thread that can bind the reader’s imagination and the character together – a little identifiable vulnerability, sometimes just the basic human traits. But when you have characters who talk like the way the ten-year old supposed God talks in pompous-sounding statements (“You would lead the Lord your God?”), there is little space for a reader in that book’s world. Add to it changing realities and histories, and such stories can become quite impersonal and drifty, and a work to read through. The reader observes and reads because that is what a reader does, but with little heart.
One can hold on to the clueless Herb here. And one does.
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One of the other thoughts it lets you ponder on is the nature of God. The story takes you through different ideas in an alternate world. And reimagines and reconsiders some of the existing religious scriptures and strictures in new light. Different religions regard their gods differently. But if the religion is too stricture heavy, where it seems as if they treat people as little children, instructing them on every little thing, even though evolved over ages and must have ancient wisdom, hence worth following, even though all that, it begins to feel constricting, this instructing higher power. Such instructing higher power starts to seem like a bureaucratic thing, a push to the middling areas, rather than a nurturing, trying to let people explore the infinities within or without kind of God one would like or even an indifferent absolute.
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Another tangential thought is around prison of perception. PKD refers to prison of light, and he talks about memory. Thinking on those lines leads to some fun new ways of appreciating reality.
We do understand now that the way the light falls is what all reality is. (Read light as waves of all frequencies). We perceive this light with our limited bands of reception which our limited equipment can handle – waves we see, hear or feel. A very narrow band in all that really is out there which just misses us by because we don’t have the equipment to receive it. As if, walking blind and deaf in a rich, rippling, wavy universe and we can sense little of because that is the prison – the barred ranges of allowed perception. A little tweak, and who knows what we can see and perceive.
Add to it the way our minds perceive time. All the past and future seems to already exist out there, and we, with our limited understanding and vision of time, and a limited focus/spotlighting function, seem to be locked in a perpetual now, future invisible to us, and past as receding memories, the current moment always the biggest and most real, short sighted us. A little tweak here too, and who knows what we can fathom.
Barred from perceiving space (if space is just waves), barred from perceiving time (if time is past and future). A subtle prison. And the thing is we don’t ever feel like we are in prison, we feel blessed to be living and experiencing what we are, because really, what else do we even know. We do sense that there is more to be known and what we do know is almost nothing, but we are defined by what we know and we build ladders to the unknown through known materials, so beyond feeling good about wherever we are, what else is to be done?