Writing
The book was conceived as a sequel to Dick's VALIS, though it shares no characters and virtually no plot elements with the other book. The Divine Invasion was conceived immediately after the completion of Valis, with the working title VALIS regained. Dick did not begin actually writing the novel until March 1980 (more than a year after VALIS's completion in November 1978), when he wrote it in less than a month. The opening chapters were based on the Dick short story Chains of Air, Web of Aethyr which had been written between VALIS and The Divine Invasion, and published before either in 1980 in Stellar Science-Fiction Stories #5.
Read more about this topic: The Divine Invasion
Famous quotes containing the word writing:
“Hidden away amongst Aschenbach’s writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work.”
—Thomas Mann (18751955)
“In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas ... a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“Such writing is a sort of mental masturbation.... I don’t mean that he is indecent but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state which is neither poetry nor anything else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)