The Cosmic Puppets

Rating:
Summary: First incarnation of the grand theme
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Early PKD
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Short and Sweet
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: early reality vs. illusion
Review: The Cosmic Puppets starts with a promising idea, that of a man returning to his town of birth to find that in this world he died in infancy. All right. The novel (if it indeed qualifies length-wise) is a mystery/thriller in the first half. The 'Wanderers' turn out to be the real people, and this is a good interpretation of the common plot device, ie. ghosts. When the protag. and his friend (I forget their names) try to turn things back to normal, Cosmic Puppets seems a little like a precursor to Ubik, what with the layers of reality visible in a physical sense. At this stage, Cosmic Puppets is quite tolerable.

But then the ending! It's awful. Terrible. Enought to stop you from reading. It all falls apart. Cosmic Puppets is an early PKD novel, and it shows. But it also shows in simple form the themes that PKD would pursue later.

Only a PKD fan would find anything of interest, however.

Rating:
Summary: Cosmic entertainment
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: 2 stars but read it anyway
Review: This was the first science fiction I ever read: many, many books ago! It is probably only interesting to the fan of Philip K. Dick. Having said that, it really is fun, in its own way. All the Dickian issues are there: What is the nature of reality; do we really know what is going on; the man caught in the middle of realities in flux; the wife/girlfriend as super unsupporting person, etc. If you want to read all of PKD's stuff, find this and read it. Otherwise, it is only marginally interesting.

Rating:
Summary: 2 stars but read it anyway
Review: This was the first science fiction I ever read: many, many books ago! It is probably only interesting to the fan of Philip K. Dick. Having said that, it really is fun, in its own way. All the Dickian issues are there: What is the nature of reality; do we really know what is going on; the man caught in the middle of realities in flux; the wife/girlfriend as super unsupporting person, etc. If you want to read all of PKD's stuff, find this and read it. Otherwise, it is only marginally interesting.

Rating:
Summary: 3 stars but read it anyway
Review: With due deference to the other reviewers (who have read more Philip Dick than I have) I still must say that, one third into this novel, I fell asleep. Which I generally due, to the best of books. And my sleep involved a dream in which I returned to the town I grew up in, a now vastly changed northern NJ town a few miles from NYC. Nothing was as I remembered it. And this is something of the plot of Cosmic Puppets. Whether it is written to evoke such dreams or mine happened by coincidence, who knows. I only know I never want to go back, in dreams or otherwise, but I definitely do want to go forward reading more of Philip Dick.