VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM (21)

By: Nicholas Rombes
September 14, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of science fiction novels and comics from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

RADIO FREE ALBEMUTH | PHILIP K. DICK | 1985

Radio Free Albemuth’s composition and publication history is as tangled as one of Philip K. Dick’s plots, although you don’t need to know this to savor the novel’s strange and fragile beauty. I say fragile because — as in the best of Dick’s fiction — the center always threatens not to hold, in this case because Philip K. Dick himself is a character here (Phil) coming to terms not only with the plot (in both senses of the word) he finds himself enmeshed in but also with the fact of his own writing. This is as metafictional a novel as any as practiced by Dick’s postmodern contemporaries, although because of enduring genre policing his work remains outside the canon of so-called literary fiction. T

Rather than being too paranoid for its own good — as many reviews of this posthumous novel have suggested — Radio Free Albemuth, it turns out, might not have been paranoid enough. Yes, its elements involving the strategic assassination of political figures beginning with Kennedy to make way for the presidency of a thinly disguised Richard M. Nixon (Ferris F. Fremont — 666?) feel too patly conspiratorial, but other facets that seemed far-fetched prior to 2016 are weirdly resonant now, as in how the novel imagines “President Ferris Fremont and the New American Way” and how “the darkness closed over us completely.” There are other eerie parallels as well to the Make America Great Again person, as in how Ferris was initially mistaken as a mere figurehead when, “on the contrary, when he departed from his prepared script the real savagery in him came out. He liked to depart when matters concerning America and its honor and destiny were mentioned.”

A fascinating dimension of the novel lies in its evocation not of samizdat writing, but samizdat music as embodied in Progressive Records, whose roster of groups make songs whose lyrics — knowingly to the band or inserted without their knowledge — contain subtle dissident political messages. “Press a million of the damn things,” Phil says. “Two million. Mail a copy to every radio station in America, AM and FM…. Sell them for eighty-five cents. Give them away at supermarkets. Start a mail order record club with it as a freebie. Leave them on doorsteps.” In the pre-internet, pre-dark web era of the novel’s writing and publication all these methods of distribution are physical, embodied in what we could metaphorically describe as an analog fashion. From our current perspective (depending on how old you are!) there’s a nostalgic element of this, a kind of secrecy and subterfuge and danger that evokes a world akin to Václav Havel’s Czechoslovakia.

Radio Free Albemuth is in conversation with so many other cultural touchstones that it becomes something akin to a vast filter, like a fishing trawling net, capturing bits and pieces of the flotsam of the post-World War II U.S. media landscape, as in its evocation of Peter Watkins’s remarkable 1971 faux-documentary Punishment Park: “In the flatlands of the Midwest,” Phil says, “the government had begun to build large detention facilities, for the restriction and housing of those brought in by the FAPers and other para-police agencies.” In my copy of the novel — bought used at the Dawn Treader Book Shop in Ann Arbor — one of the pages has been torn out, not carefully but as if in warning. Someone wanted me (how did they know I’d purchase it?) to know they knew I’d be reading it and, in a short essay about the novel someday, I’d mention this and that some reader, somewhere, sometime, would understand the minacious significance of that missing page.

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MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

VURT YOUR ENTHUSIASM (21)

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