Some time ago, for no readily apparent reason, I decided that I would aim to read at least one Philip K. Dick book each year. As December dawned this year I still hadn't, and with a lot of work going on I'd spent over two months on the last book I was reading, Saturn's Children by Charles Stross. But I am currently (one of the) wardens of the Oxford University Speculative Fiction Group's library, which includes a few Dick books (surprizingly few, to be honest). The first one I grabbed happened to be The Cosmic Puppets, of which I'd never heard (along with 90% of the books Dick oumped out year after year, I suppose). I add this background, because I was surprized to discover that this book began by appealing to all the unfulfilled promises of Saturn's Children, being about a world completely in the grip of its creator's power. Unlike most Dick books the veneer of distortion over a real world is penetrated, although the question "is the real world any better?" is ignored, and the blurb, even more surprizingly, corresponds pretty well to the story which is found within.There are still the Dick tropes one comes to expect: the premise is about perceptions of reality being altered, but this is an early attempt and comes across quite different; the male characters are two-dimensional, and the female characters are only tree-dimensional because it's impossible to render their all-important breasts in two dimensions (between which everything, from sweat to spiders to cars, must travel). On the women, I struggle to understand why Barton even had a wife to begin with, so inconsequental is she to the plot. Some of the reviews below suggest that this book "could have been written today" - I'd bloody well hope not, my capacity for forgiving the sexism of past times is limited and I absolutely think that we have to understand why it's wrong to describe practically everything that happens to a female character in terms of her breasts (including the thirteen-year-old girl...) which pretty much comes down to "we can reflect on how far we've come as a species/society by the fact that male and female characters are now treated basically indistingishably and have equal prominence... oh." Dick is particularly bad at women, although there are some elements of at least accepting that women are people (Mary is genuinely one of the more three-dimensional characters here, despite her undeveloped breasts). Apparently Ursula Le Guin called him out on this late in his life, but I only have her word for that.Anyway, this book. The premice is ultimately very Manichaean (although I suspect Dick's influences were those Asian religions which inspired/were inspired by Manichaeism, but Manichaeism is my favourite so that's why I think of it first). It speculates on the consequences for human beings within a divine struggle, questioning "whence evil?" without much conclusion, but focusing on the role human beings can play in a universe governed by divine beings. Now, I don't believe in divine beings, but I do find speculation on the question "what would the universe be like if there were divine beings?" interesting, and here I think that it is done quite well. There could, perhaps, be more human consequences. But it's quite a short novel.I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to do, and I certainly don't think it should be lost amongst the dross Dick could produce when he wasn't at the top of his game. I think it's more interesting that Time Out of Joint, which deals with many of the same themes, although perhaps I was just more in the mood for it. It's a lot more simple than most Dick novels, and as a consequence is a lot easier to understand. If you were looking to expand you're knowledge of Dick, or looking for novels speculating on the existence of the divine, then this would be a reasonable place to start (although I wouldn't recommend ending here).
Go into an old friend’s house. Look on the walls, in pleasant frames on end tables and on the kitchen counter. You see someone who looks like your friend: younger, taller, more hair, broader of shoulder and smaller of waist. See the younger self, not older nor wiser, but green, full of kinetic energy and verve.This is how I read Philip K. Dick’s 1957 publication, The Cosmic Puppets. Phil was only 29 when this was released by Ace Books as a double, the other novella being Sargasso Of Space by Andre Norton. The reader sees a novelist bursting with energy and with fresh ideas and even the first steps of the deep journeys he would later undertake.Recalling both Ray Bradbury and H.P. Lovecraft, The Cosmic Puppets is about a small, isolated Virginia town that has been collectively caught in a complicated illusion, the townspeople altered to a strange and different reality. Rod Serling needs to step out of the shadows to introduce the story, so reminiscent of Twilight Zone (1959-1964), it could have been used as an episode.“We see as through a glass, darkly” - how many generations, how many hundreds of thousands, of millions, of people over the centuries have read that passage in the Bible (First Corinthians 13:12) and have moved on unaffected. PKD references this line in Cosmic Puppets and then, later, names one of his most popular novels after this, changing the tense slightly, A Scanner Darkly.Also Phil’s use of models and clay golems is an earlier vision of his later work The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.All in all, The Cosmic Puppets is not one of his great works, but it is indicative of his great talent and is a fine story for a PKD fan or for an aficionado of 50s pulp.
What do You think about The Cosmic Puppets (2003)?
The Philip K. Dick Project #4 Originally published as a novelette “Glass of Darkness”, this is basically Dick’s first science fiction or fantasy novel (although this one is pretty firmly in the fantasy camp). Although I enjoyed Voices from the Street, I was excited to get into more genre territory, and this didn’t disappoint. The tone of this novel shares much more in common with Dick’s short stories than Voices. In fact, the economy of the writing and the quick pacing make this feel a lot like a young adult novel. I wish I had come across this when I was a lot younger, because it would undoubtedly be one of those books I would have loved and read repeatedly whenever I needed a dose of some serious weirdness. As it stands now, I can definitely see picking this up on a lazy Sunday. (The book is short enough that it could probably be read in a few hours in one sitting). The opening third of the book is excellent, as Dick keeps piling on the mysteries and strangeness in brisk little chapters that end on cliffhangers. As soon as The Wanderers appeared, I was hooked. And the layering of realities is very intriguing and phildickian. Dick’s gift for atmosphere is great here. The way he nonchalantly writes such surreal scenes really can grab you and put some great images in your mind. Characterization is much thinner here than in Voices, but it doesn’t hurt the story much. We know almost nothing about Ted Barton himself, and the casualness with which his wife is expelled from the story is almost comical. But there’s something so likeable about the kind of decent, simple people Dick writes. We don’t always know them very well, but they seem nice enough. I particularly enjoyed Christopher, the town drunk. Inevitably it is a little disappointing when all of the mysteries get solved and it turns out Millgate is part of an unending cosmic battle. The ending does satisfy, even if it does rely too much on mythological tropes. All in all, I recommend this book highly. It’s gotten me even more excited about things to come.
—Jack Stovold
Although this is one of PKD's earliest novels, I was startled by how much it had in common with his last several novels. The writing style is different, of course, but The Cosmic Puppets features some of the same spiritual themes Dick would later develop in novels like Valis and The Divine Invasion. In The Cosmic Puppets, we have a somewhat hapless and confused protagonist who discovers the universe has split between light and darkness (although here PKD uses Zoroastrian terminology, rather than the Gnostic archetypes he favored later). The dark force has created a false reality on earth, which masks the real forms underneath (The empire never ended). The female embodiment of wisdom, which PKD would later call "Saint Sophia" also appears prominently. I had the impression that these themes had begun appearing in Dick's work only after his mystic experience/mental breakdown of 1974, but clearly these were ideas rattling around in his head as early as the 1950's when he wrote this book. It certainly stands apart from his other early works as it abandons pulp sci-fiction conventions in favor of a plot driven completely by a cosmic struggle based on ancient myth.
—Mike
decently good early period Dick, from 1957. Not really science fiction, or horror, or fantasy... but if I had to chose a genre for this, I'd choose "Cosmic Horror" or perhaps "Weird Science Fiction" as it definitely belongs on the same shelf as HP Lovecraft. A very fun and pulpy novel that you can easily imagine being a Twilight Zone episode, and for those familiar with later Dick, already showing hints of what was to come. However, no huge plot twists like he would later explore. Better than much of his early period pulp work and really sets the stage for the great novels which were to start appearing just a few years later, like The Man in the High Castle or The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Also see http://www.pkdickbooks.com/SFnovels/c... for more info.
—Chris
