ORP: PKD again: LOA releases 3rd vol. in PKD series

I just finished reading the first of four novels in volume three of Library of America's edition of the definitive Philip K. Dick novels. This story was entitled "Maze of Death". The novel (really a novella by some standards) is a nice yarn about the dwindling crew of a colonizing starship marooned in a dead star system. With his insight into human psyche, PKD shows through the device of a virtual reality machine used on this starship originally for recreation and now used by the crew to escape from the reality of coming doom, how lost humanity turns in on themselves. We get this psychological exploration in many (if not all) of PKD's stories, but it is in sharp focus here in the final four novels by this writer. In this novel and the coming three of this volume we also get some interesting explorations of philosophy and religion. From what I have read so far of this author's novels, especially at the end of his works, I mourn the writer. To quote Maxwell Smart without the irony, he "missed it by that much," that is eternity. Man, I want to explore the multiverse, but I sure don't want to have lost heaven!

Though PKD lived completely within the drug culture of the 1960s and 1970s, he was quick to point out the lies told about where excessive use and abuse could lead you. This the overt message of his novel, "A Scanner Darkly".
But his analysis of madness is the best. Check out this passage from "V.A.L.I.S." (the second of the four novels in the LoA volume):

(p.190)...a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the inscrutable. Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensible events occur; your life becomes a bin for hoax-like fluctuations of what used to be reality. And not only that--as if that weren't enough--but you, like Fat, ponder forever over these fluctuations in an effort to order them into a coherency, when in fact the only sense they make is the sense you impose on them, out of the necessity to restore everything into shapes and processes you can recognize. The first thing to depart in mental illness is the familiar. And what takes its place is bad news because not only can you not understand it, you also cannot communicate it to other people. The madman experiences something, but what it is or where it comes from he does not know.