Summary Of A Scanner Darkly And Radio Free Albemuth

In this article, Umberto Rossi examines Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly and Radio Free Albemuth and questions their classification as dystopian literature. According to Rossi, a great deal of Dick’s writing can be categorised as “dystopian”, since they describe “other societies that are worse than ours”, and cites that the most probable depictions of Dick’s dystopian imagination are those mentioned in the title. However, he argues that even they are not examples of definitive “dystopias”. Rather, like Dick himself, they are more complex. The article explains that through Dick’s unique approach to storytelling, these novels instead “reinterpreted” the dystopian tradition.

Rossi earned his PhD in Literary Sciences (Comparative Literature)