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The Broken Bubble Paperback – June 12, 2014

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Philip K Dick (Author)
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Philip K Dick (Author)
3.8 out of 5 stars 9 customer reviews
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Product Details

  • Paperback
  • Publisher: Gollancz (June 12, 2014)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0575133082
  • ISBN-13: 978-0575133082
  • Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.8 x 7.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,203,514 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Tra La, Tra La
By Worldreels on March 19, 2003
Format: Hardcover
This Phil K. Dick novel illustrates why he was driven to sci-fi, much to the world's benefit. This is not great literature, scripts such as his sci-fi, that lifts the reader out of their everyday, boring, mundane lives. One of his themes - that the world's fate rests in the hands of the young, the innocent and the honest is underlined here. He shows how kids make glaring mistakes in their personal lives but somehow pull it out of the fire. One of his quirky sci-fi characters is here in Rachel, but alas, the plot, that of a double triangle of romance, is only a recommendation for universal marriage counseling. All this story can be said to do is provide the reader a good look into a cracked mirror. On the plus side it is a well crafted melodramaï - an autopsy of the human facade which all too often passes off as modern life. But now we have reality TV and a camcorder in every bedroom.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
How do you mend a broken relationship
By benshlomo on June 6, 2009
Format: Paperback
There's nothing like adultery to get a reader's attention and build a story around. In most such books, such as "Madame Bovary", "Lady Chatterley's Lover" or "Fanny Hill", the adultery is the main issue; it moves the plot forward and leads to a climax in which the couple in question either stays together or doesn't. You get the idea; adultery is what the story is about, such a big deal that just about any novel with adultery has to spend the remainder of its running time resolving the issue. "The Broken Bubble" is a novel of adultery in which the sexual shenanigans are sort of beside the point. Now, that may be new.

Okay, so if the cheating isn't the main idea, what might the main idea be? As usual with Philip K. Dick, "The Broken Bubble" seems to be about love. In this case, the characters start out with little idea of what loving is. By the time the story is over, they haven't exactly become experts, but they are a little wiser. Adultery doesn't usually work that way in real life, of course, but it works that way here, and as usual PKD makes you believe it.

Although the emphasis of "The Broken Bubble" strikes one as unexpected, the structure is pretty standard stuff. It's about two couples, one divorced and one married. Since the ex-spouses both work at the same San Francisco radio station, their relationship gets complicated fast. Jim Briskin spins records and Patricia Gray works the front office. Jim still loves Patricia, and she may love him too, but she has no confidence in her ability to love. It's hard to imagine many worse feelings.Read more ›
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Not really sci-fi, but not Anna Karenina, either
By Dave Deubler on December 19, 2002
Format: Hardcover
Clearly, this is not really a science fiction novel. Oh, yes, well maybe it is. No. No, it definitely isn't. These were this reviewer's reactions while reading this sometimes too prosaic novel by science fiction legend Philip K. Dick. Set in the late 1950's, the story focuses on Jim Briskin, a DJ at San Francisco's KOIF radio station, his ex-wife Pat, and an impoverished young couple, fans of his program, whom he befriends. He finds these young people strangely alien in attitude and beliefs, and strange they are indeed. Art is a shy, stammering young man with zero social skills. He works as a helper at a used car lot, but doesn't seem too concerned that Rachael is expecting their first child, and when she stops working they'll lose two-thirds of their income. Rachael herself has a strangely stoic quality, and while her social skills are also limited, she has a unique self-confidence based on the knowledge that she's always right. Sci-fi buffs will surely expect a denouement in which this couple is revealed to be from some faraway planet, but the truth of the matter is that they are not so much from another world as simply from another generation, yet are still just as distant from Jim and his world as if they really were aliens. The plot thickens when Art leaves his pregnant wife to pursue a torrid affair with Pat, but it quickly becomes apparent who among these all-too-familiar characters really needs help.
If subverting reader expectations were a goal in itself, this would surely be a very successful novel.Read more ›
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Psychological exploration of 1950s relationships
By Doug Mackey on June 2, 2004
Format: Hardcover
This realist novel, completed in 1956 but not published until 1988, is an effective exploration of the psychological subtleties of a four-way relationship. Jim Briskin, a classical music radio announcer, still in love with his ex-wife Pat, introduces her to a teenage couple, Art and Rachael. Pat becomes involved with the violent and possessive Art. Meanwhile, in her curious, willful way, Rachael falls in love with Jim. The "broken bubble" of the title refers to a minor incident in which one Thisbe Holt rolls around naked inside a plastic bubble at a convention of optometrists, who end up filling it with junk and smashing it. The broken-bubble image is suggestive of the egoic bubbles that Jim, Pat, Art, and Rachael all float in, that separate them in their relationships. During the course of the novel these bubbles are broken.
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