Radio Free Albemuth (1976)

So far I have not been able to make it through even the first novel in Philip K. Dick’s VALIS trilogy. It’s partly that it’s not an easy read and partly my own bad attitude about the Christian-ness of it all and of Dick’s life in about the last 10 years of it. Radio Free Albemuth is Dick’s first cut at what would become VALIS, prompted by an event he took as a religious experience in March 1974. The manuscript was rejected by publishers without substantial revisions. It’s interesting to me that a writer of his stature—Dick was a pretty big deal in SF circles in 1976—would still face such editorial rejection and impositions. I agree Radio Free Albemuth is weak, or parts of it feel undeveloped, but the concepts, as always, can be heady. Nicholas Brady and his close friend Philip K. Dick are the two main characters. Brady is receiving messages from an entity or civilization that hails from the star Albemuth and has placed a satellite circling Earth, blending in with other satellites. It is beaming messages and instructions to people like Brady. They are sleeper agents, I think, though their mission is not malicious but supporting resistance to a fascist regime in the US. VALIS stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Reading this novel at this moment inevitably brings Donald Trump to mind as the fascist US president but Dick’s intended target in 1976 was, of course, Richard Nixon. Pray for us now and at the hour of our death, as Dick might put it. That may not be fair, but there is an unmistakable religious vibe wrapped into this. VALIS feels like God by another name, indeed the more Jesus-oriented Holy Trinity God of the Bible’s New Testament. The fascist regime is notably terrible, not just with violence and imprisonment, but with the kind of reality distortion capabilities seen in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (and the Trump regime, e.g., loudly braying there is less right-wing violence than so-called left-wing, or consistently arguing climate change is a hoax). It’s fair to call Radio Free Albemuth dystopic and it makes me curious to see how it works with the trilogy. As a first draft, this one lives in a gray zone between finished and unfinished. It probably does need more work—which it basically got with VALIS a couple of years later.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.