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 reads 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.
From Publishers Weekly
Here is another of the unpublished novels science-fiction writer Dick left when he died in 1982. It recounts the friendship of two California men, Nicholas Brady, a record store clerk and later a record company executive, and Philip K. Dick, a writer. During the several decades spanned by the novel, America slides into fascism, particularly under the presidency of Ferris F. Fremont, who comes into office in 1969. Once entrenched, Fremont begins tossing dissidents into camps and in some cases executing them. Brady, meanwhile, has been receiving communications from a Godlike intelligence which he dubs Valis (an idea the author utilized previously in Valis). Valis guides Brady in the secrets of the universe, in the conduct of his life, and in a plot to bring down the monstrous Fremont, a cause to which Brady is finally martyred. This bleak political vision is given extra force by its autobiographical tone. Though not one of Dick's best novels, it is an engrossing, non-stop excursion into a believable vision of Hell.
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.
