Any PKD fan worth his salt knows that the character Horselover Fat in PKD's VALIS is a transposition of Philip Dick, as Philip means 'lover of horses' in Greek, and the word 'dick' means 'fat' in German. But did you catch this one:
Scholar Robert Galbreath suggested in a 1982 essay in Science-Fiction Dialogues edited by Gary K. Wolfe that the characters Kevin and David (commonly thought of as pseudonyms for PKD's real-life friends KW Jeter and Tim Powers), may represent other aspects of Horselover's fragmented personality. After all, taken together, the first initial of characters Phil, Kevin, and David, create the acronym PKD.
Interesting to note that there seems to be some sense of reintegration of the Horselover personality into Phil's at the end of VALIS, but if this naming convention is indeed intentional (it certainly explains changing Tim's first name but not Jeter's) then PKD (as the author) may be suggesting that the faithful and the skeptic are not intergrated as one.
I stumbled onto this discovery during an email exchange between PKD scholars Umberto Rossi and Andrew Butler - Thanks guys! I never would have thought of that - and it's so damn obvious!
