Radio Free Albemuth

By: Philip K. Dick

Narrated by: Jeff Cummings, Patrick Lawlor

In Radio Free Albemuth, his last novel, Philip K. Dick morphed and recombined themes that had informed his fiction from A Scanner Darkly to VALIS and produced a wild, impassioned work that sounds like a visionary alternate history of the United States. Agonizingly suspenseful, darkly hilarious, and filled with enough conspiracy theories to thrill the most hardened paranoid, Radio Free Albemuth is proof of Dick's stature as our century's greatest science fiction writer.

©1985 The estate of Philip K. Dick. (P)2016 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.

Book 1, VALIS canon...

Written in 1976, still relevant...PKD !
Thank you Phillip, still very much alive...one with our lord and savior...see you soon.

Hauntingly contemporary politics

Can P.K. Dick please stop being so damn ahead of his time?! I promised myself I wouldn't read any more books about the current depraved political landscape, and I just wanted some nice trippy escapism. Somehow I forgot how poignant this 1976 book would be...

Get this: In Radio Free Albemuth (the sort of 4th book post-script of the VALIS trilogy), there is a dystopian present in which the president is below average right-wing idiot who has used the lowest common denominator of paranoia to claw his way to the top. He's actually a secret Russian agent though, and has a lame son named Don!

Somehow Dick was able to predict that the worst America could offer wasn't some highly intelligent dictatorship, but a pathetic state where misinformation and fear would dumb down the public enough that the most cynical fascists could easily take over. It all comes across as very familiar, sigh~

Ostensibly, Ferris F. Fremont is an analogue of Nixon. Although the 666 aspect seems like Ronald Wilson Reagan as well. The politics of Radio Free Albemuth are all over the place, in excellent P.K. Dick schizo fashion, with satires of Berkeley radicals. And the take on how intelligence agencies actually prefer corrupt politicians as easier to exploit is extremely fascinating. It's about sci-fi Gnosticism as much as anything else, with "God" as a pink light feeding information in order to save the world, and all the mindfucks therein contemplating such.

I happen prefer the first half of the book, which is pseudo-autobiographical in which Phil narrates and talks about his crazed friend Nick. Then it gets into Nick's point of view which has far more theological ranting. And, being that this is Dick, the writing isn't always polished but it does have a certain brilliant energy so don't overly nitpick.

Essential reading for latter-Dick cannon, but do ignore if you are in the mood to ignore the daily onslaught of Prez T****.

Alternate US history, uber-Nixon

Philip K Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth is an exhilarating ride inside his mind. Dick places himself as one of the main characters in the story, along with his friend, a record company executive. His friend claims to hear voices in his head from an alien intelligence beaming from a satellite. At the same time, the US evolves into a fascist state after President Johnson obsessed with conspiracy theories about Aramchek. Dick and his friend are pursued by government goons, while his friend tries to insert subliminal lyrics into a record. Dick is eventually imprisoned, while the government ghostwrites his future books.

Dick displays quite a degree of prescience in terms of political evolution. He also discusses religious perspectives suggesting alien intervention. Given the timeframe, there is drug usage. Finally, the ending suggests that Dick views himself as a peripheral player who role is to distract.

The narration is well done with two narrators providing the viewpoints of the two main characters. Pacing is smooth a bit brisk.

The Pistol to the Head

"This, I realized, is how a man becomes what he is not: by doing what he could never do"
- Philip K Dick, Radio Free Albemuth

My brother and I were discussing how PKD would absolutely lose his shit to see how much the world has become what he wrote. I think he would AND wouldn't be surprised by Facebook, the NSA, the surveillance state, cellphones, robots, talking refrigerators, fake news, pharmaceuticals, Trump, perpetual war, fake news, virtual reality, corporatism, etc.

For me this book was a bit of post-Trump-election therapy. Well not therapy. No. Perhaps, acquiescence? Resignation? The resemblance between Ferris Fremont seemed uncanny. Even the relationship between the election of Ferris Fremont and the Russians seemed a bit too close to reality:

"Why should disparate groups such as the Soviet Union and the U.S. intelligence community back the same man? I am a political theoretician, but Nicolas one time said, 'The both like figureheads who are corrupt. So they can govern from behind. The Soviets and the fuzz, they're all for shadow governments. They always will be, because each of them is the man with the gun. The pistol to the head."

The second part of this book that was fascinating was the semi-autobiographical presentations of Dick's own 2-3-74 experience with the "vesicle pisces" and the "pink beam". This experience in February - March of 1974 lead to PKD's gnostic trilogy (VALIS, The Divine Invasion, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer) and his later assembled The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. This novel was the first he wrote AFTER his visionary experiences of 1974, and every work after seemed impacted by this experience. There is a part of me that thinks the probability of a PKD religion coming into existence is fairly high. Hell, if Hubbard's Scientology can exist, why not one that worships a Vast Active Living Intelligence System?

A presentation of VALIS

Here Horselover Fat continues his journey into VALIS. Really enjoyed it, if you like PKD you'll like this!

Bummer of a book

A personal dystopian nightmare written shortly before Dick's own unfortunate end. Do not listen to this if you are prone to depressive moods. The abrupt change of narrator in Part 2 was very jarring. The second narrator even read the Chapter numbers with exaggerated intensity and loudnesss. The "bad guys" are fronted by a 19-year-old female agent, which would be highly unlikely in any serious organization. "Voices in the head" are once again interpreted as extraterrestrial assistance with hidden but presumably (God knows why) benign agenda.

Dont be too disappointed.

If you read this as a "remedy" for Donald Trump you might find that this is another case where the side-effects of the "cure" are just as bad as the disease.

This is not for me

This book is not for me. It is a professional work, but, it is an exploration of PDKs claimed experiences. I think the book is an over the top waste of my time.

Posthumous and Unfinished, but still worthwhile

I am about to embark on the Valis trilogy, and so when I discovered there was an earlier exploration of the concept I decided to start here first.

Radio Free Albemuth is not a finished book. In fact, there is hardly a plot to speak of. Instead, it is an exploration of an idea. And boy, what an idea. As an appetizer it is enticing.