Radio Free Albemuth

by Dick, Philip K.
ISBN: 9780679781370
4.5 (2)
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Used - Trade Paperback - 9780679781370

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Overview

  • Format: TradePaperback
  • Author: Dick, Philip K.
  • ISBN: 9780679781370
  • Condition: Used
  • Dimensions: 0.50 x 8.25
  • Publication Year: 1998

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  • A lesser known PKD classic

    Justin C. - 5 years 10 months ago

    Radio Free Albemuth by Philip K. Dick is his last published novel but written before his iconic VALIS trilogy. With that in mind, this novel reads like a preamble to those books, exploring many of the themes, concepts, and plot ideas that Dick expounded on to understand his “religious experience” of 1974. The book jumps between two narrators, a fictionalized version of Dick and his friend, Nicholas Brady, who in reality is just another facet of Dick’s real-life experiences. Brady has a series of quasi-religious experiences through an inter-dimensional entity or god-like being known as VALIS, or Vast Active Living Intelligence System. He learns through them that the president Ferris Fremont (a Nixonesque character) is a secret agent of a secret society known as Aramchek and is using his power to solidify the group’s power over humanity. The novel is filled with elaborate alternative histories of the 1960s and 1970s, conspiracy theories, and alien speculations, constant fodder for Dick and his novels. I loved reading this book, especially the interactions between Dick and Brady, which read like a conversation the author is having with himself. Dick is the skeptic, always asking Brady to look more critically at his experiences while Brady is the true believer. It’s also one of the few Dick novels I know of that has a somewhat happy ending. This isn’t the best book for readers getting into his work, but for PKD veterans like myself, it was a mind-bendingly fun read from beginning to end. #summerreading

  • A Loss of Forgetfulness

    Ray L. - 5 years 10 months ago

    In 1974, science fiction writer Philip K. Dick had what he would come to understand as a religious experience, or more specifically, a Platonic anamnesis—a loss of forgetfulness. Triggered by exposure to an ichthys, what is commonly known as a “Jesus fish,” he had a flash of the continued existence of Rome circa 70 AD and felt the certainty of the early Christians that their messiah had just left and would be right back. This experience was followed by several nighttime visions where a beam of pink light beamed information into his head from an alien satellite. Dick struggled to understand what had happened to him and wrestled with these themes, most comprehensively in the writing of his exegesis, the VALIS trilogy, and, in 1976, the creation of Radio Free Ablemuth. Those that have read VALIS will recognize this novel as a tentative first crack at the material that would define and consume Dick until his death in 1982. This is not to say that this book doesn’t stand on its own, in many ways it is the more down-to-earth take on a very complex and singular cosmology, however, the VALIS mythos did become richer as a result of the extra effort. Too much of the underlying schema in this early draft is pitched in the form of manic exposition. Dick would later recast himself as Horselover Fat/Phil and kept the gist of Radio Free Ablemuth intact as the experimental film that forms the centerpiece of VALIS. Some characters, however, lose something in the translation. Cancer survivor Sadassa Silvia Aramchek comes across as a better-realized and motivated person than her later incarnation, Sherri Solvig. The thinly disguised Richard M. Nixon stand-in, Ferris F. Fremont, is a delightfully evil antagonist, doubly chilling as the portrait rings true in hindsight. All in all, Ablemuth is not the place to start exploring later-period PKD, but it is a worthwhile read as well as a fascinating example of what a rewrite/re-imagining can do. #summerreading