[This is one of P.K. Dick's last works, published in 1985 (three years after Dick's death) from a manuscript in the care of fellow author Tim Powers. It is one of at least four novels concerned with the intervention in the affairs of a politically corrupt alternate history Earth (set in the late 60s and the 70s) by the extraterrestrial being / divinity Valis. While the spiritual revelations of protagonist Nicholas Brady are painted in images drawn from early Christianity, Dick's theological conceptions do not stop there. See the excerpt below.
   While this story stops short of anything like a real conclusion, it is a remarkable relating of one man's spiritual awakening, in a most idiosyncratic and perilous manner, told in Dick's characteristic funky and sympathetic style.
   Among other important characters in the story is one Philip K. Dick, described as "chunky, bearded, middle-aged SF writer; suffers from paranoid fantasies."
   The other related books are Valis, 1981, The Divine Invasion, 1981, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, 1982. - WA, 29 Aug 97 ]

   I saw James-James the creator as master of all prior or efficient causes, of the deterministic process moving forward up the manifold of linear time, from the first nanosecond of the universe to its last; but I also saw another creative being at the far end of the universe, at its point of completion, directing, accepting, shaping, and guiding the flow of change, so that it reached the proper conclusion. This creative entity, possessing absolute wisdom, guided rather than coerced, arranged rather than created; she or it was the architect of the plan and the controller of final teleological causes. It was as if the original creator of the universe lobbed it like a great softball on a long blind trajectory, whereupon the receiving entity corrected its course and led it right into her glove. Without her, I realized, the great softball which was the universe -- however well and hard it had been thrown -- would have wandered out into left field somewhere and come to rest at some random, unpremeditated spot.

   This dialectic structure of the change process of the universe was something I had never glimpsed before. We had an active creator and a wise receiver of what he created; this did not fit any cosmology or theology I had ever heard of. The creator, standing before the creation, his creation, had absolute power, but from my James-James dream I could see that in a very real sense he lacked a kind of knowledge, a certain vital foresight. This was supplied by his weak but absolutely wise counterplayer at the far end; together they performed in tandem, a god, perhaps, divided into two portions, split off from himself, so as to set up the dynamics of a kind of two-person game. Their goal was the same, however; no matter how much they might seem to conflict or work against each other, they commonly desired the successful outcome of their joint enterprise. I had no doubt, therefore, that these twin entities were manifestations of a single substance, projected to different points in time, with different attributes predominating. The first creator predominated in power, the final one in wisdom. And in addition there was the rightful King, who at any time could breach the temporal process at some point of his selection and, with his hosts, enter creation.

   Like cancer cells, the original constituents of the universe proliferated without direction, a total panoply of newness. Allowed to escape, they went wherever causal chains drove them. The architect who imposed form and order and deliberate shape was, in the cancer process, somehow missing. I had learned a great deal from my James-James dream; I could see that blind creation, not subjected to pattern, could destroy; it could be a steamroller that crushed the small and helpless in its eagerness to grow. More accurately, it was like one immense living organism which spread out into all the space available to it, without regard for the consequences; it was only impelled by the drive to expand and increase. What became of it largely depended on the wise receiver, who pruned and trimmed it as each step of the growth took place.

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