This chapter looks at Valis (1981), the best-known of Dick's late novels, relating this controversial novel to his mature works, both in terms of themes (the question of Dick's abandonment of politics for theology) and in terms of formal qualities. Here, if anywhere in Dick's work, we have a postmodernist text: not a text that treats postmodernity in a fashion that is realist and fantastic in varying—sometimes extreme—measures, but one whose form is postmodernist.

Valis concerns the activities of a group of friends in contemporary Orange County, California: they meet, banter, philosophize, engage with others. It appears that there enters into their lives a series of manifestations— messages, cures, signs. These manifestations they set themselves to explain and follow up, led by one of their number, Horselover Fat, the most credulous and ingenuous as a believer. Fat, and to a lesser degree the others, come to see the manifestations as emanating from a kind of extraterrestrial agency with powers like those of a god: VALIS (‘Vast Active Living Intelligence System’). It looks as if this entity will not only declare its own existence, and help them in their daily lives, but also reveal the oppressiveness and unreality of the fabric of their daily lives, now to be seen as something like the prison of this world, so that this novel gives a theological, and broadly speaking a Christian, form to Dick's characteristic sense of social reality as simulacrum. (And, in Dick's usual fashion, it is a simulacrum, a film, that confirms the friends’ theorizing and provides them with the name Valis.) The turn to theology does give Dick the opportunity to investigate, question and above all to disseminate the simulacral in new ways. In Valis it is less a phenomenon to be experienced and coped with, and more a concept to be defined and speculated about. In this respect Valis is a more extreme departure from his earlier fiction than other late novels with similar interests, such as The Divine Invasion (1981) and Radio Free Albemuth (1985): both of these, especially the first, include a lot of theological speculation, but in both cases the SF settings also open the way to a rich experience of the simulacral.