SOURCE: DiTommaso, Lorenzo. “Gnosticism and Dualism in the Early Fiction of Philip K. Dick.” Science Fiction Studies 28, no. 1 (March 2001): 49-65.

In the following essay, DiTommaso investigates the dualistic, gnostic Christian themes in Dick's early short fiction and novels.

Introduction

It has been long recognized that gnostic Christianity and other such dualistic philosophies play highly influential roles in the speculative fiction of Philip K. Dick, and particularly so in his later work. To illustrate, even the casual reader cannot help but notice the degree to which explicit gnostic Christian themes and components pervade such works as The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), A Scanner Darkly (1977), VALIS (1981), and The Divine Invasion (1981). In fact, the categories and vocabulary of the various dualistic cosmologies informed not only Dick's own literary encounters with all sorts of religions and philosophies, but also his life experiences, not least of which was the strange and remarkable...