Hacker Cinema
Radio Free Albemuth
2010 · Film · 110 min
Directed by John Alan Simon
Record store clerk Nick Brady begins to experience strange visions from an entity he calls VALIS that cause him to uproot his family and move to Los Angeles where he becomes a successful music company executive. Nick finds himself drawn into a dangerous political-mystical conspiracy of cosmic proportions.
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4 comments on Hacker News
From Wikipedia…
> Popular films based on his works include Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (adapted twice: in 1990 and in 2012), Screamers (1995), Minority Report (2002), A Scanner Darkly (2006), The Adjustment Bureau (2011), and Radio Free Albemuth (2010).
If you’ve not heard of P.K. Dick before it’s kind of weird to be worried about “is this a talented artist”… you really need to push your boundaries in any way possible.
There's a film version of Radio Free Albemuth https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1129396/
It's watchable, but my experience is soured by the terrible experience of contributing to the KickStarter and then not being able to get my reward for years due to living in the UK rather than the US (licensing issues).
As a long-time reader and fan I broadly agree with the highlighting choices. My only further suggestion would be, maybe for the final "body and soul" category or maybe for those who already have some familiarity with the author, Radio Free Albemuth.
This has an interesting history: PKD declined to make changes requested by the publishers who appeared unhappy with the novel's political content - it is in part a biting satire on Nixon era politics - and it languished until Dick's friend Tim Powers made a MS available which was published posthumously in 1985.
The novel itself was written in 1976 and was PKD's first attempt to process the unusual experiences which inspired his later "VALIS" fiction. As such it contains autobiographical elements: some of Dick's real-life experiences happen to protagonist Nick Brady, who swaps theories about them with his scifi author friend "Phil".
Because of this, apart from its value as a novel, there's lots to interest those curious about the author himself. For example, one episode in particular puts the existence of PKD's letters to the FBI condemning Stanislav Lem as a commie agent of some kind, which I read somewhere were retrieved by the FBI from his garbage, in an entirely new light!
Thank you, I will, downloaded it already. I've not read much PKD at all, but read some of his VALIS writings after seeing A Scanner Darkly and Radio Free Albemuth, which both seem about 80-90% autobiographical. Radio Free Albemuth strongly reminded me of the amazing movie Equus (1977), also (you could say) about the founder of a religion.