Customer Reviews

The Cosmic Puppets

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Cosmic Puppets is a very interesting Philip K. Dick (most are), in some ways because it doesn't feel quite like most of his other work. This one felt more like an episode of The Twilight Zone than the heady science fiction he is known for. Children with strange powers, things not being as they seem (a frequent Dick theme), and a strange mystery that unfolds into something large beyond scope (again, a frequent theme), as god clashes against god.

The story opens with the main character, Ted Barton, visiting the town he grew up in. Only now ... it's different. Something is wrong. He finds that he NEVER EXISTED in this town's history. Things only get stranger from there.

The Cosmic Puppets leaves you with as many questions as it does answers, but was a very satisfying read. The situation Dick creates is engrossing and fascinating, and the pacing is lightning quick. Probably among the most accessible PKDick books I've read to date, perfect for a casual fan or someone new to this man's startling body of work, The Cosmic Puppets comes highly recommended.

THE COSMIC PUPPETS originally appeared as half of an Ace Double Novel -- those 35¢ paperbacks that contained two complete stories back-to-back. The publisher considered it mere pulp.

But it continued the ironic comment-on-the-genre style that Dick was developing in his early work and that reached maturity by 1962 in what was up to that time Dick's favorite book (he told me so himself in a letter in 1966), THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE.

Dick's work has to be taken as a whole. Irony is the theme. If you're looking for witless kicks, avoid Dick and bore yourself with those god-awful space operas that presume to pass for serious sci-fi these days.

Dick is a genius with a highly original voice, one whose evolution can be traced back to Hammett, Hemingway, and Chandler, up through Van Vogt and Heinlein. THE COSMIC PUPPETS, while admittedly not his most fulfilling work, contains many of those fascinating elements that make up his unique signature.

Frankly, I found it hard to put down.

Anybody who knows Philip K. Dick knows that most of his writing constitutes something of a quest to probe the nature of reality. 'The Cosmic Puppets' is where it all began.

Ted Barton is the seminal Dick protagonist, drifting cynically between earth-shattering events, estranged wives and dark-haired girls, with only slightly more than a casual regard for anything secondary to his central motivation - truth.

Unfortunately it took PKD twenty years (and quite a few short stories and minor novels) before he finally reached his epiphany with 'A Scanner Darkly'. 'The Cosmic Puppets' lacks the literary impact, depth of character and cohesion (Dick did have his own peculiar sense of cohesion)that would later convey Dick's real ambition. However, this book remains a useful starting point for anyone captivated by this brilliant man's unique imagination.

The Cosmic Puppets can't really be classed as science fiction, it would be more supernatural/fantasy. The story wouldn't look out of place in a Stephen King short story collection. I think it's slightly unfair to charge full price for a half-length novel, I'd recommend borrowing it from a library if it's available. The Cosmic Puppets is more a 'disposable' novel but if you're a PKD fan I'd recommend reading it.

This is the only full-lenth fantasy that Dick wrote; the rest are either science fiction or mainstream. But this present-day small-town setting in which magic works has much in common with his many future worlds in which the magic is supplied by altered states of consciousness, time paradoxes, and alien gods. Here a man named Ted Barton returns to his hometown of Millgate, Virginia, for the first time since he was a child, and finds that the streets, landmarks, stores, and people are all different. Although all small American towns are interchangeable to some extent, this goes too far, particularly when he finds an old newspaper record of his death at age nine. Somehow Barton has entered an alternate universe, one in which he is no longer supposed to exist. He becomes obsessed with the need to verify his own existence, and soon discovers himself in the middle of a sort of Armageddon, where the cosmic forces of darkness and light are fighting it out. This is an early Dick novel that prefigures many of the themes of his later fiction, and is consistently entertaining.

Of course, we have to be generous in our thinking. "Cosmic Puppets" was only PKD's second completed novel, and he was still feeling his way. Not unlike his main character here, Ted Barton.

Here comes Ted, on vacation with his terrifically annoyed wife Peg, driving from New York to the little valley town of Millgate, Virginia, where he was born and raised to the age of nine. He's got this unexplainable urge to visit, although he hasn't been there in 20-odd years, but when he shows up everything has changed. And not in the usual "You Can't Go Home Again" way, either - the names of the streets are different, absolutely none of the people he knew are there anymore, the buildings look like they've been rotting in place for at least a half century or so. What's more, according to the files of the local newspaper, he himself died of scarlet fever in his childhood.

Not a bad setup, all told, but somewhere along the line PKD forgot to include anything like a reason why we should care about Ted Barton or Millgate. You get the reason later - much later - but why on Earth should you sympathize with a man who drags his wife down south in the summer heat just to see some little town in a Virginia valley, when she has made it perfectly clear that she's bored out of her mind? She's not a very nice person, but then again, neither is he. And how pleasant would you be after hours and hours on the road in a non-air-conditioned car with nothing to see but mile after mile of mile after mile, nothing to drink but warm beer, and a husband who keeps yammering about his hometown and doesn't pay the slightest attention to anything you say?

Well, as the title implies, Ted Barton is under the influence of some pretty powerful forces, so he's got some excuse. Unfortunately, you don't learn what that excuse might be until long after it would make any difference. This is one of those puzzle novels; mysterious things happen for pages and pages, and when you find out what's behind the mystery, the story is over. Which is all very well if the characters are sympathetic, or the issues at hand bear some personal weight, or the writing style fascinates, or your favorite celebrity turns up and gives you a million dollars, or something. Having said that, I don't think I need to tell you that none of those things are present here. There is a rather clever, though sexist, joke in the novel's last line, but you'll have to decide for yourself if that laugh is worth the previous 140-odd pages.

Given the fact that you don't learn the big secret until the novel is at least two-thirds over, it scarcely matters what that secret is. To be sure, it's fairly impressive that PKD decided to explain Ted Barton's predicament by reference to the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism. I can't say much more without giving the game away, but clearly PKD's interest in religion bore some fruit even this early in his career. On the other hand, again given the fact that you don't learn the big secret until pretty late, the religious elements strike one as little more than a gimmick. Whereas science fiction is the literary exploration of the plausible, fantasy like this is the literary exploration of the possible, and with that enormous freedom comes an equally enormous responsibility for the fantasy author to control his or her elements such that they don't just land on the reader out of a clear blue sky. Alas, "Cosmic Puppets" is an object lesson in just that sort of error. Zoroastrianism or no Zoroastrianism (try saying that three times fast), "Cosmic Puppets" contains an explanation because there has to be an explanation. Any other would have done as well. Sorry, that's just not good enough.

And I've got a couple of other questions, too. For one thing, the Millgate Ted Barton remembers is a bustling, morally upright business center straight out of Disney's Carousel of Progress, where all the shops are on the main thoroughfare to take advantage of the tourist traffic, whereas the Millgate Barton finds himself in is sleepy, rundown and relaxed. The message is clear - it's better to conform to the capitalist idea and grow, grow, grow than leave things to their natural course, mostly because it means no one's picking up the trash. Would someone please explain to me why the first should automatically be the better course? Especially in a novel by Philip K. Dick?

For another thing, I can tolerate a certain amount of boilerplate fictional language from a developing author, such as PKD was here, but was it absolutely necessary for his characters to ask all those rhetorical questions in italics, so we know just how serious the whole thing is??

And finally, is it obvious that this review comes from a disappointed fan? I've said it before, like many more credible readers, and I'll say it again; PKD was among the most imaginative, lunatic, fascinating authors that America produced in any genre of fiction, and when he was bad he was horrid.

But at least you get one of PKD's favorite themes - the unreliability of our perceptions when it comes to reality. He even put in scenes of a kind that we can see in his later work, such as the one where a man watches an entire building disappear before his very eyes. There's a scene just like that in "Time Out of Joint". So go read that one.

Benshlomo says, There are some things that even youth does not excuse.

I am not a big PKD fan but I picked this one up at the library on a whim. It is a very quick read at less than 150 pages. I enjoyed it. It is very much in the vein of a dark fantasy Twilight Zone episode. A classic it is not, but I enjoyed it.

One of the earlier PKD novels, which initially reads like an original episode of the Twilight Zone (in fact I can think of an episode with a cameo from a young James Doohan which was very like the first half of the book). As usual the tale has a little PKD twist, to help things along.

This final plot-turn was definately an issue he came back to in later novels, possibly most noteably The Divine Invasion, and Valis to a lesser degree.

It is an early PKD, so a lot of the complexity and depth is not so well formed, but it is no less enjoyable for that. An easy one to get into PKD for those not so familiar, and a genesis of ideas for later works for the seasoned fans.

We tend to place Philip K Dick books into two categories - early and late. Early Philip K Dick tends to be pot boilers that go quickly and leave the reader with the feeling of having consumed junk food. Later Philip K Dick is all deep and gnostic and confusing. Of course, that's not entirely true. Early Philip K Dick has the kind of philosophical musings that would overwhelm later Philip K Dick material.

This book is 90% early Dick and 10% philosophical later Dick. It has an ending. Even if the ending feels a little tired, it's still a place where the book was leading. The main character is a PKD shlub with an angry wife. He comes to his home town, only to discover that everything is different. There are run down buildings where once stood a park. His obituary is in the newspaper, claiming that he died at age 10.

The evil kids are fun but most of the book is just Ted trying to figure out what's going on and only finding a few people to confirm that the town isn't right. A battle between ancient gods takes up the last third of the book and this part isn't really much that you weren't expecting.

Fun book but not terribly memorable.

PKD wrote very little pure fantasy, but when he did, he tapped into something raw & primal. (See his short story "Upon the Dull Earth" for an especially powerful example.) This early work is considered lesser PKD, a first & tentative exploration of themes he would develop more fully in subsequent novels. Previous reviewers rightly compare it to the Twilight Zone in its basic plot.

But it has a genuinely eerie tone & intensity to it, as if the contents of his troubled & brilliant psyche are unmediated by the more rational structure of science-fiction. The imagery verges on the Bosch-like in places, and the reader can feel the overwhelming power of the unconscious ready to erupt in full force at any moment. PKD's fascination with Jung is clear to see in these pages. No wonder he stepped back a bit & took a more controlled approach to such material in his prolific science-fiction work!

Yes -- it's short, its basic themes are more roughly hewn than in his later novels, and there's a definite sense of a writer still not entirely sure of himself. But there's also a glimpse of something so powerful that it almost blinds the conscious, logical eye, leaving an afterimage that lingers for a long while. Most of his work provides much food for thought; this slim work goes directly to the core of the Collective Unconscious. Most highly recommended!