Only read less than half of this- well written, but a little too heady (and maybe sarcastic?) for me right now. May return to read it again later. ( )

First off, I probably should have read this book quicker. I spent a little over two months on it and for the most part only read a little at a time. But the book takes a little more imagination than a lot of other books and requires a more sustained approach to it. Otherwise, it's easy to lose track of what's going on. If I had read it quicker, in a day or a week, which is entirely doable, the whole story would have felt more cohesive. And it is cohesive. There are not many extraneous elements at all. It's a fairly streamlined and straightforward book.

The subject matter of the book is what really drew me to it to begin with. Specifically, the last line in the description drew me in: "This hallucinatory tale through a nuclear wasteland asks what price the artist must pay for art and tries to figure out just what makes a god." As I read it, the major competing ideas were on the duality of an omnipotent god. The story used the backdrop of the nuclear wasteland to flesh out these ideas. There seemed to be more talk about gods than about art, though that piece was there too.

The book centers around two opposing factions: the Servants of Wrath and the Christians. This does, however, take place in a man-made nuclear wasteland. Therefore, the Christians in the book should perhaps not be taken as contemporary Christians but instead a possible derivative given the fictional events that happened before the novel takes place. This derivative of Christianity focuses primarily on the idea that God is good. The Servants of Wrath worship Carlton Lufteufel the Deus Irae (God of Wrath), the man who pushed the button to drop the gob (great objectless bomb) to create the nuclear wasteland that everyone currently lives in.

There is a push and pull within each and between both religions. The Christians have to work through how a good God can allow such devastation and evil to occur. The SOWs have to make a man, an evil man, into a god. And beyond that, he's a god of chaos and destruction. The tension between the two religions, besides the obvious just competing religions aspect, is that the SOWs have commissioned a murch (mural for the church) that is likely to draw more converts from the already struggling Christians.

Ultimately, it's hard to say what the story concludes about what makes a god. At one point, one of the characters mentions that sometimes good begets evil and sometime evil begets good and so a good God must do evil things such that good can occur. It could be said that the gob was a big reset button on humanity: an evil act that allows for a cleansing to occur. This would be similar to the flood story and Noah's Ark. There's another issue with this though. What are we to make of Carlton Lufteufel? He's clearly an evil man, but perhaps a man to be celebrated if the act is indeed cleansing. But it turns out that no one really knows that much about the Deus Irae. Is he an evil and chaotic god that deliberately throws the world into death and destruction or is he just a man who made a decision in unknown circumstances without a full understanding of the consequences?

Perhaps the book is really trying to get at what humanity gets out of religion. It's easier to create an uncontrollable and chaotic god that causes your problems than it is to take responsibility for the actions of your species. The decision to drop the gob on the world wasn't one man's radical thought without any context. This bomb was dropped as part of World War III. It's that humanity is constantly warring with itself that led to its demise. Carlton Lufteufel is just the man to pull the trigger. But would it matter who it is to pull the trigger if anyone else in the same position would also pull the trigger? So maybe the SOWs are just deifying a man to explain the inconceivable notion that humans destroyed themselves.

The Christians and their good God come at the same issue with a different approach. They also shift the blame away from humanity, after all, God is omnipotent and has a plan (this gets into a whole other side thing about free will that isn't in the book and I won't discuss except that the best conclusion I've heard is that God granted us humans free will, but ultimately we always choose what God wants anyway and so we're still aligned together). The Christians, unlike the SOWs, know that God is good and has a plan, so they have faith and, perhaps more importantly, hope that a better future is coming and that the evil that existed was a minor evil leveraging a major good.

The end of the book was a little frustrating for me. It left things more inconclusive than I would have preferred. The implication that I interpreted makes a mockery out of religion though empowers art by doing so. But then, on the other side, seems to support religion too in a different way. Maybe the story is just trying to get at the idea that life is a balance and, if you wait long enough, good will come along to balance out the bad and it doesn't matter what you believe as long as it helps you cope with the bad and enjoy and be grateful for the good. And also that art is awesome! ( )

As good as the other four or five times I've read it! ( )

Deus Irae's plot feels like it was cobbled together over a couple long nights at the pub. It's engaging and weird but also feels loose and strange without much density. What kept me interested was seeing the further menagarie of weird mutated horrors the authors conjured as well as the theological rigor of their thinking.

This was a great Philip K. Dick, and Roger Zelazny. I was a bit skeptical at first, not sure how PKD would manage a transition from being a solo writer to a collaborator (and I had never heard of Zelazny before) but I was pleasantly surprised. This is a metaphysical journey into the psyche of PKD through the creation of his characters as they explore the unknown and, even more, the beyond. The plot is tight and the prose crisp and subtle in the right places. I was amazed at the output here, much of it is quality content with just the right amount of absurdism to keep things creative and flowing. Truly a fine creation and top marks for the ending. This reads like a legend, but in the Sci-Fi universe. I really enjoyed it.

4.5 stars- and all deserved! ( )