At some point in my thirties, I felt the need to learn much more about the nature of the world and universe in which I lived, and about what science reveals about human nature.
 
With Jared Diamond’s book, subtitled “How our animal heritage affects the way we live,” I discovered human science made not just meaningful, but compelling accessible. Here was our anthropologically fascinating human story.
 
It was thanks to this book that I first found out that we humans share 98.4% of our DNA with chimpanzees (even in the differing 1.6%, a proportion is junk DNA).
 
Diamond takes on huge questions that as a non-scientist I was only semi-educated about. Such as why we grow old and die, the development of language, or the psychology of genocide.
 
And: why is it that Europeans came to replace most of the native population of North America and Australia, instead of native Americans and Australians coming to replace most of the original population of Europe? A massive question, one that requires an answer based in historical fact in order to expose the fallacy of bigoted and racist assumptions.
 
The short answer is: geographical accident. The susceptibility of endemic mammals to domestication, in particular the horse for ploughing, transport and warfare, and, also in Eurasia, the cow, pig, goat and sheep for a protein-rich diet. In addition to which, the east-west axis of Eurasia allowed for the exchange and development of agriculture, especially wheat, over thousands of miles of climactic stability at the same latitude, whereas the north-south axis of the Americas meant that a tropical buffer halted the spread between more temperate zones of corn and other crops.
 
Not to mention that the wiping out of native peoples by European colonizers was not the result of better genes, but worse germs.
 
Diamond’s book offers an engaging treasure trove of evidence to illustrate and back up the points he is making. From the animal origins of art and the evolution of human sexuality, to a chapter entitled “Why Do We Smoke, Drink, and Take Dangerous Drugs?”

This book was mailed to me by friends from a Kyiv under Russian bombardment.
 
“We are still here,” is the message that I hear.
 
It is an important and timely book. A war must be fought on the battlefield, but it is won in hearts and minds.
 
For two years, the Ukrainians have been fighting off the Russian invasion, defending not only their own people, land and freedom, but the rest of Europe and US interests, as well, against the Russian war on civilization.
 
The world has seen an outnumbered, outgunned nation standing up to a powerful and brutal aggressor, accomplishing results that few others would have the strength and courage to achieve.
 
Now Putin has gone to great lengths to try to rationalize his crimes, always making reference to historical context. He has sought to justify the war by denying the legitimacy of Ukraine as a state in its own right, along with its people’s right to self-determination.
 
It is necessary for his lies to be defeated together with his killing machine—and to read this history is to realize just how spurious the tyrant’s claim is.
 
I learned a great deal from this book. That the statehood of Ukraine has a history older than that of Russia, for example. For many centuries and until 1861, the Muscovy regime permitted its own people to be bought and sold as slaves at market. Neighbouring peoples, which included the direct ancestors of today’s Ukrainians, surpassed them in social and civil advances and freedoms, and regarded them as backward and barbaric.  
 
The nation that has evolved into modern Ukraine took on a definable identity upon the Antean tribal union between the 4th and 7th century AD. Certain words recorded from that time are still extant in spoken Ukrainian today.
 
The name Russia seems itself to have been purloined. The Rus’ territory was the name given to Ukrainian homeland, the word deriving from the Sarmatian Roxolani tribe. Muscovy, as it was known, wanted to claim to its neighbour’s lands along with its very name. 
 
Putin, like others before him, is trying and will fail to eradicate the Ukrainian identity, language, culture and history.
 
It is intriguing to follow the development of the country through the melding of peoples in different ages. Long before the Cossacks were the Goths, Slavs and Huns. These founded a thriving Kyiv which in the 11th century was second only in Europe to Constantinople. Before them were the redoubtable Scythians and the Sarmatians: Amazon warriors and formidable horsewomen. Earlier still were the Cimmerians, mentioned by Homer.
 
Go back even further nine thousand years to Stone Age times and the people living in what is now Ukraine developed agriculture. The Trypilian culture produced artwork that is simply extraordinary, sophisticated, gentle and sensuous.
 
Palii’s last chapters deal with the hostilities in 2014 and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 by Putin, up to the book’s recent printing. The next chapter is being written, and what it will be depends on us all.

The two narrative voices are of Phil Dick himself as a true-to-life character, and of his fictional friend, Nicholas Brady, who is in fact Dick’s alter ego.
 
We have a US president, supported by Russia, who is dictatorial, ruthless and a threat to his own people and democracy. Freemont embodies authoritarian hostility to freethinking, empathy and charity. “The Soviets backed him, the right-wingers backed him…”
 
President Fremont was modelled on Nixon. I’m not sure that even Philip K. Dick would have dredged up the monstrosity that is Trump from the pit of his imagining.
 
Brady’s experience of receiving extraterrestrial transmissions via condensed information-rich beams of pink, phosphene light is no less than Dick’s in real life: which he knows is a lot to take at face value! And so, by the device of making himself a character in the book, he seeks to take us along with him from scepticism to the realization of belief. The shift in his viewpoint as the story progresses makes it a delightful ploy.
 
“… although I was a professional science fiction writer, I could not really give credence to the idea that an extraterrestrial intelligence from another star system was communicating with him; I never took such notions seriously… Nicholas, I decided, had begun to part company with reality… This was a classic example of how the human mind, lacking real solutions, managed its miseries.”
 
Dick’s, then, is the voice of reason. His fiction is just that, he makes clear. As Brady says, “Your books are so—well, they’re nuts.”
 
Until the denouement, the easy mood and self-deprecatory vein lend the narrative a certain charisma, and that it lacks the madcap scheming and complexity found in other works by Philip K. Dick helps to make Radio Free Albemuth a neatly balanced read. A lightheartedness comes across in such comments as “the US intelligence community, as they like to call themselves.”
 
When the iron hand of the evil empire does strike, its savagery is shockingly efficient and effortless, almost casual.
 
The ease with which the light of civilization can go out is the warning of this novel. Phil’s (the character’s) reasonable take on things, his sensible rationale and healthy scepticism, which the reader naturally goes along with, will be won over by evidence and events and, ultimately, by incontrovertible violence.
 
Along the way, Dick shares deeply personal insights and the story acquires depth in his treatment of VALIS and divinity, perception and illusion, the nature of time, the meaning of the Orphic mysteries—and acquires urgency, since their lives are at stake.
 
Set against Fremont’s tyranny is a force that anyone with an insular view of science fiction may find surprising, because it is love. That is what Brady experienced VALIS to be: the Vast Active Living Intelligence System that for him (and Dick) was synonymous with God.
 
A vital theme in the novel is awakening, or anamnesis. Waking up to our true nature as well as to the baleful threat of the adversary, which all too easily wins out. Its oppressive power is great and, indeed, “the darkness closed over us completely.”
 
It is happening again and always.
 
[The image is a 1985 first edition]

In 1974, after years of writing Science Fiction novels and stories that featured counterfeit and parallel worlds or histories, Philip K. Dick experienced a series of transformative visions that led him to believe that the familiar universe may be one of multiple, alternate versions that overlie each other, and that the one where he was truly himself was still first century Rome, at an imminent second coming of Christ.
 
From this epiphany onwards, his novels would be a working out in fictional form of how such a truth could possibly be and what it might mean.
 
While he was self-aware enough to acknowledge that his visions and impressions could have been hallucinations, following not infrequent drug-taking or anaesthesia, having had an impacted wisdom tooth removed, Dick subjectively felt them to be compellingly real: not delusions mistakenly perceived as mystic happenings, but an authentic “divine invasion.”
 
His treatment of the experiences (which might well be classed among William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience), expanded into his Valis trilogy.
 
The first two books (Valis & The Divine Invasion) maintain an element of SF insofar as a satellite beaming down information is involved, but they are first and foremost profoundly philosophical novels. Dick speculates on a hidden reality that he believes he accessed, the forces of darkness maintaining the fiction of this version of reality, his sense of having been contacted, and a radical reinterpretation of Christ’s teachings. The third novel (The Transmigration of Timothy Archer) is remarkable in laying out all manner of interconnected theological, ontological and scientific ideas in such a way that they move along the plot without ever seeming forced. The story is narrated by Bishop Archer’s daughter-in-law, Angel, who Dick declared was “smarter than me.”
 
The same core elements are all there in an earlier book, Radio Free Albemuth, which Dick didn’t publish himself, possibly because he considered it the shorthand version of a complex truth that only three novels could expound (his notebooks on the subject ran to thousands of pages). However, its very lack of complexity and lighter touch on exegesis make it such a well-balanced read that I prefer it to the trilogy.
 
Radio Free Albemuth will be my next review.