Radio Free Albemuth
First edition, 1985
Radio Free Albemuth is a posthumously published science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick, written in 1976 as his first attempt to process the visionary experiences of "2-3-74," in which Dick himself appears as a character narrating his friend's contact with an alien intelligence under a paranoid American surveillance state. First edition, published in hardcover by Arbor House in 1985, three years after Dick's death.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, dark blue quarter cloth and boards with powder blue writing on spine. New York: Arbor House, 1985. Wintz & Hyde SF16.1. ISBN: 0877957622. #10126.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, dark blue quarter cloth and boards with powder blue writing on spine. New York: Arbor House, 1985. Wintz & Hyde SF16.1. ISBN: 0877957622. #10126.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Additional Details
Radio Free Albemuth was written in 1976 as Dick's first attempt to process his experiences of February and March 1974, the period he called "2-3-74," when a series of visions convinced him he was receiving transmissions from a divine or extraterrestrial intelligence. His publisher rejected the manuscript, and Dick set it aside and eventually wrote VALIS instead, drawing on the same material. Radio Free Albemuth was published posthumously in 1985, three years after his death, and the two novels are best understood together.
The novel opens with a prologue set in 1932 on an Oakland pier, where a small boy gives a nickel to a blind beggar who turns out to be a supernatural entity. The boy is Philip Dick. The prologue establishes that a cosmic force has been watching and occasionally intervening in human affairs, and that its operations are invisible to nearly everyone except a few sensitized individuals.
The story is narrated by "Phil," a character who is clearly Philip K. Dick, describing the experiences of his friend Nicholas Brady. The two live in an alternate United States governed by Ferris F. Fremont, a corrupt and paranoid president whose initials appear everywhere as "FFF," a deliberate echo of a triple mark of evil. Fremont's America is a surveillance state in which citizens are encouraged to inform on one another and the government maintains files on anyone with subversive associations. The atmosphere is a direct extrapolation of the McCarthy era and the Nixon administration, filtered through Dick's conviction that the United States had never really escaped either.
Nicholas begins receiving transmissions from a satellite he calls VALIS, an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, which beams information directly into his mind. The transmissions are practical as well as cosmic, helping him locate a lump on his son's neck that proves to be malignant. They also appear to carry encoded subversive content, smuggled past government censors in the lyrics of popular music. Nicholas comes to believe the satellite is operated by early Christians, that the Roman Empire never ended, and that the contemporary United States is simply its most recent manifestation.
Dick's own appearance as a character in the novel, observing and narrating his friend's transformation from the outside, gives the book an unusual doubled quality. "Phil" is both the author and a figure of deliberate ironic distance, someone who takes Nicholas's experiences seriously without being entirely certain what to make of them, which was Dick's own position. First published posthumously in hardcover by Arbor House in 1985. The novel was adapted into a film of the same title in 2010, directed by John Alan Simon and featuring Shea Whigham as Philip K. Dick.
The novel opens with a prologue set in 1932 on an Oakland pier, where a small boy gives a nickel to a blind beggar who turns out to be a supernatural entity. The boy is Philip Dick. The prologue establishes that a cosmic force has been watching and occasionally intervening in human affairs, and that its operations are invisible to nearly everyone except a few sensitized individuals.
The story is narrated by "Phil," a character who is clearly Philip K. Dick, describing the experiences of his friend Nicholas Brady. The two live in an alternate United States governed by Ferris F. Fremont, a corrupt and paranoid president whose initials appear everywhere as "FFF," a deliberate echo of a triple mark of evil. Fremont's America is a surveillance state in which citizens are encouraged to inform on one another and the government maintains files on anyone with subversive associations. The atmosphere is a direct extrapolation of the McCarthy era and the Nixon administration, filtered through Dick's conviction that the United States had never really escaped either.
Nicholas begins receiving transmissions from a satellite he calls VALIS, an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, which beams information directly into his mind. The transmissions are practical as well as cosmic, helping him locate a lump on his son's neck that proves to be malignant. They also appear to carry encoded subversive content, smuggled past government censors in the lyrics of popular music. Nicholas comes to believe the satellite is operated by early Christians, that the Roman Empire never ended, and that the contemporary United States is simply its most recent manifestation.
Dick's own appearance as a character in the novel, observing and narrating his friend's transformation from the outside, gives the book an unusual doubled quality. "Phil" is both the author and a figure of deliberate ironic distance, someone who takes Nicholas's experiences seriously without being entirely certain what to make of them, which was Dick's own position. First published posthumously in hardcover by Arbor House in 1985. The novel was adapted into a film of the same title in 2010, directed by John Alan Simon and featuring Shea Whigham as Philip K. Dick.
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