Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Read Online Free Page B

Lethem represents the irrefutable majority opinion. But he also acknowledges that some readers prefer Albemuth and find it to be the superior incarnation, and it’s easy to see why. It’s for the same reason that pencil sketches by a master painter are often more alluring than finished canvases by the same creator. Cleaner lines, less fussing, spontaneous emotions. Albemuth holds the core concepts and plot of Dick’s puzzling brush with divine or alien intelligence without extra literary incrustations.
    The central thesis of the novel is easy to encapsulate: “An extraterrestrial intelligence from another star system had put one of their vehicles into orbit around our planet and was beaming covert information down to us.” But as our hero notes, to state the case in this fashion “reduced something limitless to a finite reality.” Radio Free Albemuth is all about exfoliating the possibilities of this simple thesis rather than pruning them, thereby affirming the supreme ineffability of creation, which remains ultimately unbesmirchable by humanity’s stupidity and vices.
    The first half of the novel is told from the first-person viewpoint of a hack sf writer named Philip K. Dick, who is watching his close friend, Nicholas Brady, undergo the baffling communications from a Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Dick and Brady live in what was already, at the time of Dick’s composition (1976), an alternate timeline. In this continuum, the USA is a dictatorship run by President Ferris F. Fremont—a mélange of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan—who strives to protect the country from a fictional enemy dubbed Aramcheck. Beside the usual government agencies, Fremont employ the Friends of the American People as spies and vigilantes, and a young woman member of FAP seeks to entrap Phil.
    Meanwhile, VALIS, or Radio Free Albemuth (Albemuth being the name of the star system where VALIS originates), is revealing much useful information to Nick, such as how to cure his son’s illness and that time really stopped at AD 70, resulting in “Black Iron Prison” status for a duped planet. At the midpoint of the text, the first-person voice switches seamlessly to Nick’s (thereby cementing the identity of Brady and PKD). The two men, along with a similarly touched woman named Sadassa Silvia, strive to utilize VALIS’s help to set things right. A small, sad coda reverts to Dick’s point of view.
    Dick’s patented blend of paranoia, anti-authoritarianism and droll self-deprecation, his roller-coastering between optimism and despair, and his continuous and continuously frustrated attempts to balance saintliness with the demands of the flesh, achieve a fine expression and balance here. The book is lacking in a heavy-duty plot, without many dramatic set-pieces. It’s a minimalist version of VALIS ’s recomplications, more like the kind of proto-sf “novel of ideas” such as we find in More’s Utopia or Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887 . But that sketchiness just gives more room to the extravagant existential delvings. As the fictional PKD gleefully says, having just discarded willy-nilly another one of his own myriad explanations, “Theories are like planes at LA International: a new one along every minute.”
    But the human dimensions of the quandary—the confusion, oppression and excruciation of Nick Brady/PKD; the damaged, spoiled potential of Fremont; the patient supportiveness of Nick’s wife Rachel; the defiant resilience of Sadassa Silvia—also shine forth beyond the philosophical bloviation, as would be expected from an author who once declared that the entire universe was contained in a dead dog by the side of the road.
    Prophetic of much of our post-911 landscape , Radio Free Albemuth , to employ Wells’s phrase, shows with economy and brilliance what happens to a “mind at the end of its tether,” when the leash snaps and the unchained being goes scarily free for the first time in history.

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    Ursula K. Le