I just finished reading Philip K. Dick’s, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. I liked it a lot, although it’s not quite as good as say, A Scanner Darkly, or as completely out there as VALIS. I think this book is probably a good intro to Dick for anybody who’s not read anything by him. This or Scanner - at least out of all the ones I’ve read. There’s something about this book that is different from the other 5 or 6 of his which I have now read. I’ve been trying to figure out what makes it different, what makes it feel different, but I can’t pinpoint it. Maybe it has to do with where he was in his life when he wrote it. There is an elaborate dedication to one of his wives (possibly ex-wife at the time), which leads me to believe this difference, whatever it is, is due to that. But who knows…

I was looking over the reader reviews on Amazon for this and other of his works, and I’m always surprised when people say that PKD’s ideas are really good, but that his writing is lacking. I have found that to be the case exactly zero times. I think both are very good. I think the trick to his writing is that it’s mostly very ordinary, and very easy. Flow My Tears, I think, is especially well written. At least certain passages of it are just beautiful (like the one I posted below), but he never gets really flowery. There’s almost a homespun elegance, I might venture to say.

Anyway, Flow My Tears is the novel which he says, in my all-time favorite essay, he found out years later closely mirrored several events in the Book of Acts. I tried reading Acts & was immediately bored, so I’m just gonna take his word for it. Also, this is the novel which features the two-word cipher signal, “King Felix,” (p. 220, I believe) which is mentioned later on in VALIS. Check out this other person’s comments about it:

On p151 0f VALIS, Fat tells his friends “The two-word cypher signal KING FELIX” was sent out in Feb ‘74, and that “the united States Army cryptographers studied it, but couldn’t discern who it was intended for or what it meant.” Fat’s friends ask him how he knows that, but he won’t say; nor does he explain in what form it appeared.

Phil himself, though, was less reticent, and once pointed out that on p218 of the first edition of FLOW MY TEARS the last paragraph break juxtaposes the word “king” directly over the name “Felix”. The novel was published in Feb 1974, and Phil said Doubleday told him that the Army did buy — as I recall — more than 400 copies of it

Also, Dick mentions it in his Exegesis (which is his notes, in allspiritual ramblings and complex explanations for the mystic experience he had - an interesting, if difficult read - this link is just a small portion - the full thing is 8,000 pages, supposedly):

18 - Real time ceased in 70 C.E. with the fall of the temple at Jerusalem. It began again in 1974 C.E. The intervening period was a perfect spurious interpolation aping the creation of the Mind. “The Empire never ended,” but in 1974 a cypher was sent out as a signal that the Age of Iron was over; the cypher consisted of two words: KING FELIX, which refers to the Happy (or Rightful) King.

19 - The two-word cypher signal KING FELIX was not intended for human beings but for the descendants of Ikhnaton, the three-eyed race which, in secret, exists with us.

Oh, and in case that whole descendants of Ikhnaton thing throws you for a loop, he elaborates later on:

51 - from the three-eyed invaders who visited long ago. The three-eyed invaders were mute and deaf and telepathic, could not breath our atmosphere, had the elongated misshapen skull of Ikhnaton, and emanated from a planet in the star-system Sirius. Although they had no hands, but had, instead, pincer claws such as a crab has, they were great builders. They covertly influence our history toward a fruitful end.

Oh wow, Wikipedia has a really good resource on PKD. I’m gonna read this…. That site just gets better all the damn time.