Radio Free Albemuth

Fülszöveg

IN PRAISE OF RÁDIÓ FREEALBEMUTH
"Unmistakably Dick tan talizing cosmic vistas—and some-thing new, an unabashed strand of cosmic love. Lovers of Dick must read it." —James Tiptree, Jr.
"It's a fine addition to the Dick canon. It's more lucid and politically alert tban Valis, and more readable too. It's alsó more immediate, scary and believable." —Ian Watson
"The növel has all the virtures, idiosyncracies, and paranoiac invention that a reader automatically expects of a Dick növel, along with the kind of coherent and controlled storyline that ,-often eluded him in his more manic novel-length foraysL.it gives us a chance to reflect on just how gripping a növel by Dick could be and just how much he gave American letters by writing as powerfully as he did." — Michael Bishop
"It seems to me the master volume that established the rela-tionship among Valis, The Divine Invasion, and The Trans-migration of Timothy Archer. Radio Free Albemuth authenti-cates the other three books and... Tovább

Fülszöveg

IN PRAISE OF RÁDIÓ FREEALBEMUTH
"Unmistakably Dick tan talizing cosmic vistas—and some-thing new, an unabashed strand of cosmic love. Lovers of Dick must read it." —James Tiptree, Jr.
"It's a fine addition to the Dick canon. It's more lucid and politically alert tban Valis, and more readable too. It's alsó more immediate, scary and believable." —Ian Watson
"The növel has all the virtures, idiosyncracies, and paranoiac invention that a reader automatically expects of a Dick növel, along with the kind of coherent and controlled storyline that ,-often eluded him in his more manic novel-length foraysL.it gives us a chance to reflect on just how gripping a növel by Dick could be and just how much he gave American letters by writing as powerfully as he did." — Michael Bishop
"It seems to me the master volume that established the rela-tionship among Valis, The Divine Invasion, and The Trans-migration of Timothy Archer. Radio Free Albemuth authenti-cates the other three books and makes a coherent quartet of them and itself. It is definitely a good book and an important oné." —Richárd A. Lupoff
"Dick was probably the best science fiction writer of the past 35 years."
— Publishers Weekly
"In Radio Free Albemuth we have Philip K. Dick's final növel, a story of political repres-sion, reality shifts, theological speculation— all of those elements which he wove so mad-deningly well." — Roger Zelazny
At the time of his death in 1982, at the height of his powers, Philip K. Dick was coming into his own as perhaps the great-est science fiction novelist. The film Bladerunner was about to be released, as was the final növel of the Valis trilogy. He left behind a large amount of unpublished material but not, it was believed, any science fiction.
But recently discovered among his volu-minous papers was a full and completed Valis növel. Radio Free Albemuth is a separate and distinct work, dating from his mature period, circa 1976, a truly sig-nificant addition to the canon, and an im-portant event in SF publishing.
Radio Free Albemuth, set in an alter-nate contemporary U.S.A., an environ-ment of anti-Communist political repres-sion, poses the problem of how to treat a friend whose life is being directed by a being from outer space. Nicholas Brady works in a record store in the San Francisco Bay Area when he gets his big break. He's hired by a record company in L.A., as an A&R man, to screen new talent.
But he has begun to have strange waking dreams that consist of messages from a space satellite, Radio Free Albemuth, on his radio. A benevolent force out there is using existing mechanisms to intervene in his life.
(continued on back flap)
Book Club Edition
(continued from front flap)
Nicholas telis his friend Phil Dick, the SF writer (and a major charaeter in the book), who makes a running commentary. And Nicholas is in a lot of trouble, be-cause U.S. President Fremont, an ultra-conservative anti-Communist, has organ-ized the clean-cut youth of America into a pervasive counterspy organization, to ferret out Communists everywhere and to make everyone, through fear, report on everyone else. They suspect that Nicholas is trying to plánt subliminal anti-American lyrics in his pop records.
Nicholas has to hide the fact of his com-munications from Radio Free Albemuth from them or be ruined—so he must work for them. Trapped either way, the strange dilemma of Nicholas Brady is a typical Phildickian existential situation.
Radio Free Albemuth, in the context of the last great works of Philip K. Dick, can be read as an introduction and key to his magnificent Valis trilogy (Valis, The Divine Invasion, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer). But this book stands alone as an accomplishment in itself, a complete and strueturally contained inves-tigation of the themes that were to occupy Dick in the last years of his career.
"It strikes me as good enough to stand in the top ten or twelve PKD SF novels."
— Michael Bishop
Jacket design by Dorothy Wachtenheim Jacket illustration by Ron Walotsky Vissza