Radio Free Albemuth
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- Radio Free Albemuth should not be confused with the album of the same title by Joe Satriani and bassist Stuart Hamm.
 Cover of first edition (hardcover) |
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| Author | Philip K. Dick |
|---|---|
| Country |  United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Dystopian science fiction |
| Publisher | Arbor House |
| Released | 1985 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 224 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-877-95762-2 |
A posthumously published novel by Philip K. Dick, written in 1976, Radio Free Albemuth (originally titled VALISystem A) was his first attempt to deal in fiction with his experiences of early 1974. When the publishers, Bantam, requested extensive rewrites he canned the project, reworking some of the material into his subsequent Valis trilogy. When Arbor House acquired the rights in 1985 they published an edition under the current title (the original was too close to VALIS, already published by then), prepared from the corrected typescript given by PKD to his friend Tim Powers.
[edit] Plot summary
The alternate history plot concerns the corrupt US President Ferris F Fremont (FFF for 666, Number of the Beast, a character that is an amalgam of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon) and the resistance movement to him, which is organised, via the eponymous radio broadcasts from a mysterious satellite, by a superintelligent, extraterrestrial, omnipotent being (or network) named VALIS. Perhaps his most autobiographical novel (Dick himself is a major character, though protagonist Nicholas Brady serves as a vehicle for Dick's weirder real life experiences), the book deals with his highly-personal style of Christianity (or Gnosticism), the moral repercussions of being an informer for the authorities, and his dislike of the Republican Party, satirizing Nixon's America as a Stalinesque police state, in addition to his recurring themes of humanity, identity and reality.
When he rewrote Radio Free Albemuth as Valis beforehand, Dick incorporated the plotline of Radio Free Albemuth as a backdrop film that recapitulated the central theological and existential concerns of his novel as a mise en abyme- that is, a miniature copy of his central preoccupations at this stage of his literary career, common to both works.
[edit] Film version
In February 1, 2004, Variety announced that Utopia Pictures & Television had acquired the rights to produce three of Philip K. Dick's works: Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, VALIS and Radio Free Albemuth.[1]
