VALIS was actually the beginning of a trilogy, the second part being THE DIVINE INVASION. The third book, THE OWL IN DAYLIGHT, was never written. {Letter to PKDS from Tessa Dick}
(Andy Watson:) To me that seems the truly profound and criminal element in there not
having been time for him to at least write THE OWL IN DAYLIGHT. I'm suspecting that
it would have been a breakaway from that set, the so-called trilogy.
(K.W.Jeter:)Possibly. the only thing I know about (THE OWL IN DAYLIGHT) was that it
was supposedly based on Beethoven's life.
(AW:)Was it going to be science fiction?
(KW:)Supposedly
(AW:)But based on Beethoven's life?
(KW:)In some way. It would have references to Beethoven's life. After Phil died, I was
contacted by his daughter's lawyers, asking what I knew about it and if I had any ideas
about whether the book could be successfully completed based upon the outline Phil wrote
to get the contract. I wrote back to them saying that from my conversations with Phil, it
was my understanding that the outline was very incomplete, no more than a few pages long.
(AW:)Perhaps they were concerned with the legal obligation of the contract and whether the
money had to be returned?
(KW:)Yeah, something like that. Or whether they could find somebody who'd be able to write
the book. And I said no. Seeing as Phil would deviate or diverge so much from his outlines
anyway, there wasn't much of a chance.
(P:)God knows what THE OWL IN DAYLIGHT would have been. He was firing on all cylinders like he'd never done before. So he really had a very nice last 5 years.
A review by Andy Watson of the LP album "The Owl In Daylight" by the band Pink Litmus Paper Suit .
Starlog #165, April 1991, p53:
(PKD:) This is the book I'm allegedly writing, THE OWL IN DAYLIGHT. Its a folk expression from the South -- an owl being blind in the daylight. It simply means a person whose judgement is clouded over. The book is about the inability to understand. I can't even put it into words.
{...}
(Starlog): And you have a new outline for this novel?
(PKD:)Within a short period of time. It has jelled quite a bit. I talked to my agent. He said, "Are you sure you can do it?" Because the novel would be from the viewpoint of an entity that was not human but from presumably another star system. Its view of us and our culture. It would begin on another star system on a planet with a civilization quite different from ours -- a civilization where there's no atmosphere such as we have and as a result, speech is never developed; they're mute and deaf. And because of the failure to utilize sound, they have no art predicated on sound. Now, our art predicated on sound is, of course, music, and we take music for granted. But for them, since they do not employ sound, there is no analog that will correlate in their world for music. And what I want to do is, you know, the way we have in our world mystical visions of heaven, like at the end of Dante's Divine Comedy, and these visions are generally that heaven is light -- the concept of light is almost always associated with the next world to us. Now, this planet, not having sound, utilizes colour for language. Just as we use different audio frequencies, they use different colour frequencies. Their world is one that employs vision and visual things entirely and no sound whatsoever. Their normal world would be the way we envision the next world to be.{...} {See Starlog #165, p54 for continuation}{Interview with PKD conducted in 1982 by Gwen Lee and Doris E. Sauter}
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