Thoughts on "The Cosmic Puppets"

"The Cosmic Puppets," by Philip K. Dick

Spoilers...

I liked the earliest parts of the story when Ted Barton comes into Millgate and he's been telling his wife all these stories on the way there and probably boring her half to death. Then he gets there and he knows something isn't right. My memory has never been as good as Barton's seems to be in this novel, but there are definitely certain towns that I knew as a child that I'd still know quite well today.

After he is confronted with this differentness, he leaves the town and drops his wife off somewhere. I thought this was really interesting because especially in such a short novel it kind of broke the building of tension. The story might have been more effective if he had tried to leave the town with his wife and found that he couldn't. However, I was just as happy to see the wife character go, because she would have been annoying, since she was written without any redeeming qualities. I also thought it was significant that he dropped her off, because he knew on some level that he was going on some kind of "spiritual" or "hero's" journey and that's a journey a man must go on alone. My wife and I often take separate weekend trips. It always feels like I'm reconnecting with myself, like I forget what it was like to be on my own.

I really enjoyed the first interaction between Peter and Barton. Barton plays it cool and Peter ends up giving away more of his secrets than he probably intended to.

The next scene that stuck with me was the moment the Wanderers first appear and Barton says, “Did you see them?" and Doctor Meade says, "It’s perfectly natural. What’s so strange about that?” That was the first place in the book where I really began to wonder what the heck was going on.

I really liked the scene where Barton tries to get past the barrier. Someone should make it into a short film, Barton jumping from log to log while time and space changes all around him.

The scene with Christopher and his spell remover was memorable. I liked the detail that the device itself did nothing, the real power was in Barton and Christopher's minds. However, it was at this point in the novel when I began to question how much one could rely on their memories from 18 years ago and/or childhood memories.

My memory for everyday things has always been pretty poor. I can sing every song I used to sing at summer camp when I was a kid, but my memories of my friends or camp counselors at that time is almost nonexistent. I could tell you about some of the cartoons I used to watch as a kid, but I doubt I could tell you much about my neighborhood or the park near my house.

So anyway, I was more than a little bit skeptical that Barton's memory could be as accurate as he thought he needed it to be. Though the scene when Mary comes upon Barton and Christopher in the park and they are "yelling and gesturing" like mad men is priceless.

When the novel reaches it's climax and the two Zoroastrianism Gods take their true form and start to duke it out in the spatial or spiritual realm is where I got kind of lost. First off, I don't know if my education is just lacking, but I'd never even heard of Ahriman or Ormazd let alone understand their significance in a cultural context. Maybe all we needed to understand was that Ormazd was good and Ahriman was bad?

One odd part of the novel was p. 86 when pre-pubescent Mary takes all her clothes off and rubs oil all over her body to appease a golem she had captured. Then when you get to the ending and Mary turns out to be a God, Barton suddenly has the hots for her. Before she even takes an adult human form he's asking her if she can stay on Earth. I'd understand these kinds of feeling after he'd seen her as a woman, but at that point she'd only been a pre-teen girl and a golem. Was Dick trying to put uncomfortable subject matter in the novel or did he do so unconsciously? I don’t know which answer is worse.

It wasn't fantastic, but it wasn't bad either, I'd have to give it some sort of neutral score like 6 or 7 out of 10.

Notes:

On p 102. Meade mentions the bible verse from 1 Corinthians 13 "Through a glass darkly." That same verse would inspire the title of Dick's 1977 novel "A Scanner Darkly." I guess it was a concept that stuck with him for a while huh?

I read a copy from the library; it was the Vintage Books, November 2003 paperback. One of the earlier editions of Cosmic Puppets was a sewn edition. I know this because this edition used the original typeset which included gathering markers or signatures. They were labeled C.P.-B through C.P.-F and they appear approximately every 25 pages. When books were sewn together the pages were first formed into gatherings and those gatherings where sewn together to form the text block.

"The Cosmic Puppets" art work is by Chris Moore.

Thoughts on "the Man in the High Castle"

Originally posted September 1, 2009

I'm sorry for contributing to the lull this past month. I read the first half of "The Man in the High Castle" early in the month, but like many of us I found it difficult and so I put it down and read comic books and watched television for most of the month. However, I did pick the book up again a few days ago and finished it.

I read all of the posts about the book and I am generally in agreement with others. I think Bill matched my own feeling about it when he wrote, "Enjoyed might be too strong a word."

I finished the book mainly because it won the Hugo and so I figured it must have a killer ending or something (More on the book's ending later). The only other Hugo nominee I've read from 1963 so far was "A Fall of Moondust" (which we read a few months ago) and I have to grudgingly admit that this is a better novel. It feels less dated and has better character development and story.

I agree with James who said that Dick doesn't write about heroic people, he writes about "little people" or everyday people. I thought this directly related to a quote from the novel, (my p 42) "Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small… and you will escape the jealousy of the great."

This in a nutshell was the major reason why I didn't enjoy the book more. I kept comparing it to other alternate history books specifically Kornbluth's "Not this August" which is still fresh in my mind. In August the American people are conquered too. However, that novel is about hope, it is about how even if America is physically defeated you can't destroy the American spirit. Bill hit
upon this idea when he said that it made sense that, " a defeated people would be influenced by their conquerors. On the other hand, I would expect some of the population to be just the reverse, clinging proudly to their differences."

Another note on Dick's writing I read "A Scanner Darkly" a few months ago, and believe it or not that book was ten times more confusing than this one. Darkly was also more overtly drug induced.

I also agree with Tony who calling the I Ching outdated. I was equally mystified with the idea that the oracle wrote the book within the book. Surely all educated people understand that the I Ching, horoscopes, and fortune tellers all work the same way, the predictions are always vague enough for the client to fill in their own blanks.

Like Ann James, I didn't quite understand what happened to Tagomi in the park with the piece of jewelry. It seems that he somehow traveled to a different reality were the Japanese were not first class citizens. I think it was purposefully left vague, but I came up with all sorts of crazy ideas like the whole novel was a fantasy and Tagomi merely "woke up" or the two realities are closely related and people can wander from one to the other, that's how Abendsen wrote the novel he came from the other world. But my favorite interpretation is that is a metaphor. Dick is trying to tell us that just as easily as Tagomi can come into "our world" we can find ourselves in Tagomi's world or a world like it if we as a world make poor choices and don't learn from past mistakes.

Even the cover of the novel confuses me. I have the same picture that was on this site all month. Does anyone else understand how it relates to the novel?

I don't understand if Baynes/Rudolf Wegener was really Jewish. He seemed to be a heroic character, I loved the scene where he told the anti-Semite that he was Jewish but there was nothing he could do about it. However, the revelation of his true identity at the end of the novel left me confused.

In the passage right before Juliana kills Joe (my p 212) "Blade, she thought. I swallowed it; now it cuts my loins forever." I took this literally and I kept waiting for her to drop dead. But I guess it was just more craziness. I don't understand why these few pages are the only hint of her being mentally unbalanced.

I found Childan a particularly loathsome character, kind of a sniveling rat of a man or a used car salesman. He was so obsessed with Japanese culture I didn't even realize he was American at first. However, he was a sort of interesting character, I enjoyed hearing the machinations forming in his head and knowing that they were all going to go horribly wrong somehow. Also, my favorite of the plotlines was the idea that authentic American cultural artifacts had become so popular that someone had begun mass producing fakes.

Being an archivist this fascinated me, especially the argument that an original and a perfect fake have nothing that separates them, there is no specialness that emanates from a true original. I agree this is true and yet originals will always be worth more than copies.

Thoughts on "A Scanner Darkly"

Spoilers...

I listened to the audio book of "A Scanner Darkly" by Philip K. Dick and as always I wanted to share my thoughts.

First off, I have to tip my hat to Paul Giamatti who narrates the book masterfully. Each character has their own voice in his narration which enhances the experience and makes the whole thing seem more real. My favorite was the gravelly voice of Charles Freck.

The novel itself is not really much of a science fiction novel. Written in 1977, Dick set the story in a sort of dystopian 1994 where America's drug problem, at least in California's Orange County, is at a high level. There are a few new technologies:

Scramble suits- a special clothing that allows the wearer to remain completely anonymous since it masks, features, voice, and even the tone of voice of the wearer. Instead of seeing the the wearer any observer sees hundreds or thousands of different people flashing by faster than the eye can register. This is merely the plot device that allows Bob Arctor's (the protagonist) superiors to not know his identity.

Holo-Scanners- Video recorded in 3 dimensions.

Substance D- a psychotropic drug similar to LSD.

Other than that it's just a straight-up novel about drug use, drug culture and the relationship between drug dealers and narcotics officers.

At one point in the novel Arctor tells a story about how narcotics officers end up dealing drugs as a cover and find out how lucrative it is. Suddenly they are making more money from drug dealing then being a narcotics officer and they begin phasing out their police duties and increasing their drug dealing. Where as on the same side of the coin drug dealers that turn informant start to narc on more and more people until they begin to phase out their drug dealing and end up becoming almost bonafide police officers.

My favorite part of the novel was the random tangents the characters would go into such as when Charles Freck attempts to commit suicide but ends up having a vision of hell in which a demon reads to him out loud every sin he's ever committed in chronological order.

The tangent that really stuck with me and got me thinking was when one of the characters imagined that time was a loop and that Judgement Day and the day of Jesus's crucifixion will turn out to both be the same day. This thought totally blew my mind! Someone needs to write a short story about this one.

At first I didn't really understand what Bob Arctor's attraction to Donna was all about. She never seemed very interesting as a character, except that Ernie Luckman told some increasingly unbelievable stories about her and some friends committing various crimes such as robbing a Coke truck and enjoying months worth of free soda. However, after giving it more and more thought I decided that to Arctor and probably Dick, Donna represents "The one that got away" Dick makes it a point of stating over and over again that Arctor never got the chance to "ball" Donna to use Arctor's own phrasiology. I know that in my own life, though I am recently happily married, there are one or two women from my past that I still think about every once in a while and think to myself I wonder what being with them would have been like. Where as, I don't think about my ex-girlfriends because I had that experience. For some reason it seems to be human nature for things left undone to linger in our mind and become all the more exciting in our imagination.

The other great character in the novel is Jim Barris. Giamatti reads his every line with a sort of stuck-up nasally voice. Barris is one of those guys that talks down to everyone and acts like they are an expert on everything. It is especially satisfying as the novel goes on to realize that Barris isn't nearly as smart as he would have everyone believe.

I haven't seen the 2006 movie adaptation though I want to. I purposefully didn't want to know who played what character in the movie until I had finished reading the book, otherwise I might have fallen into the trap of associating such and such an actor with such and such a character. Now that I have looked up who plays who, I'm not too excited about seeing Keenau Reeves as Bob Arctor, but Robert Downey Jr. will be an interesting choice for Jim Barris.


Edit: (February 12, 2011) About a year and nine months later, I finally saw the movie. Though it wasn’t nearly an equal experience to listening to the audiobook, I did really enjoy it. I mean while many of the scenes in the book were absolutely laugh out loud funny, to see these same scenes acted out are somehow less humorous. The ridiculousness of the characters and the situations that were hysterical in my mind’s eye somehow seemed tragic and pathetic when I saw and heard them.

I liked that for the most part the movie was very faithful to the novel. The one glaring exception is that at the end of the movie Donna turns out to be Bob Arctor’s handler Hank. I felt like this was done just to add another surprise to the ending.

I thought the use of rotoscoping (The actors filmed the movie and then animators painted over the film to make it look like a cartoon) really enhanced the movie visually. It made the idea of the scramble suit work better then CGI would have.

Woody Harrelson (Ernie Luckman) and Robert Downey Jr. both gave really excellent performances.