The Game Players of Titan by Philip K Dick (1963)

“The Game Players of Titan” is what “Casino Royale” would have been had it been written by Philip K Dick rather than Ian Fleming. There are secret organizations, a murder mystery, battles between opposing ideologies, torture, and above all a game played for huge stakes: the ownership of Berkeley, New York City, and ultimately the Earth itself. But, since it's PKD we also find post-apocalyptic societies, aliens, people with telepathic and telekinetic abilities, and mounds of psychological intrigue and paranoia. Oh, and drugs.

After the war against the vugs, aliens from Saturn’s moon Titan, ends in an uneasy truce Earth is left underpopulated, and the humans are having problems procreating. As part of the treaty some vugs are left on Earth, either as observers, or perhaps in penance, it’s not clear. The vugs are avid gamblers and help organize Bluff, a sociopolitical game designed pair up lucky couples in hopes of repopulating the human race, which is waning due to radiation poisoning. While many people hope to “get lucky” and have children, the game also has incentives in terms of land and power. Pete Garden, Bindman of Berkeley and Marin County participates in the game with his local group Pretty Blue Fox.

As the story begins Pete has just lost the Bind of Berkeley, leaving their group open to an outsider, a big operator from the East Coast called Lucky Luckman who has been trying to get a toehold on the West Coast real estate. Only problem is, someone murders Luckman on the night of the first big game, and Pete not only doesn’t have an alibi, he can't even remember what he did on the day Luckman was killed. The authorities assign two detectives, a human called Hawthorne partnered with a vug named E.B. Black, to investigate the case. There’s plenty of intrigue, with vugs psionically posing as humans, pre-cog special agents, and ultimately the high-stakes game. At the finale the Pretty Blue Fox group is whisked off to Titan to play the vugs in their own game of Bluff, with Earth as the stake.


During the course of the story Dick plays with variations on telepathy and precognition. When we first meet Luckman there’s this short interaction:

“I have Dave Mutreaux on the vid,” his secretary said. “He’s standing by. Do you want to speak to him personally?”
“If he’s a genuine pre-cog,” Luckman said, “he already know what I want, so there’s no need for me or anyone else to speak to the zwepp.” The paradoxes of pre-cognition always amused and irked him. “Cut the circuit, Sid, and if he never shows up here it proves he’s no good.”
Sid, obediently, cut the circuit; the screen died. “But let me point out,” Sid said, “you never spoke to him, so there never was anything for him to preview. Isn’t that right?”

Most authors would be content to spice up the story with one or two psionic abilities, but Dick adds pscyho-kinesis, psionic brainwashing, and the ability to toss people through matter itself. One of my favorite twists is where a telepath scans a precog, giving her his future peering ability.

Dick also delves into the possibility that drugs can bring latent psi abilities into action. As the one vug says to Pete, “you were an involuntary telepath; you were psychotic, because of those pills and the drinking, and you picked up my marginal thoughts, all my anxieties. What they used to call the subconscious.” While characters in earlier novels used drugs, “Game Players” is the first Dick book where drugs give characters exceptional abilities that affect the external world. He would continue to explore this theme through the rest of the sixties and seventies, most notably in “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.” It’s one of the aspects of Dick’s stories that hasn’t truly been integrated into the movie versions of his work.

Speaking of drugs, according to an interview in Rolling Stone magazine, Dick said that most of his books from before 1970 were written on speed. At times this book feels like that. It’s sprinkled with interesting bits, tossed out almost at random and without the benefit of an editor. The names of the game groups, Pretty Blue Fox and Straw Man Special for example, sound like they came from Dick tossing the I Ching. Also, for some reason all the vugs have initials for first names: E.B. Black, E.G. Philipson, U.S. Cummings. He also gives most cars and appliances built-in AIs, which are based on something called the Rushmore Effect. The end result is a very chatty environment in a sparsely populated world. It also provides a way for the car to disclose Pete Garden’s whereabouts even though he himself can’t remember what happened. Dick also includes the detail that most humans have had their Hynes Gland removed, which extends their lifespan to several hundred years.

In all, “The Game Players of Titan” is a packed book that heralds the beginning of the themes Dick would write about for the rest of his life.


The back cover of “The Game Players of Titan”

The strange creatures from this satellite could appear human or inhuman, at will. And the elaborate contest they set up with the remnants of Earth’s humanity was just as treacherous.
For though the war had been fought to a stalemate, the unending series of gambles could upset that truce -- and end the world.

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• The Solar Lottery by Philip K Dick (1954)

The Unteleported Man by Philip K Dick (1964)

“The Unteleported Man” is a quick read - barely 100 pages. It has the best mix of Philip Dick’s science fiction ideas balanced against his paranoid visions of the future. Set in 2014, Dick’s estimate of a world crowded with 7 billion people is surprisingly accurate. In the story, Rachmael ben Appelbaum is the heir of the Appelbaum corporation, a multi-million dollar space ship line that went broke almost overnight on the day that Dr. Sepp von Einem invented teleportation. Quickly, the Trails of Hoffman Limited company discovers a planet around a distant star and starts providing services for people who want to emigrate to this new garden of Eden. Unfortunately, due to the way the universe works, teleportation is one way - people can emigrate but they can’t return. Under the stress of this new competitor, Appelbaum is forced to liquidate his father’s company, except for the flagship of their fleet, the Omphalos. This ship could make the trip to Formalhaut IX in eighteen years, and Appelbaum plans to become the “unteleported man” of the title, except he can’t get some parts for the life support system. They are only manufactured by his nemesis Trails of Hoffman Limited. Luckily, he gains support from Earth’s largest private security service, LIES, Incorporated, and he tries to get the parts through subterfuge.

The “one way” teleportation idea is interesting. Dick seems to have a fascination with this theme, and he plays with it in various ways in his books. In “The Crack in Space” he also uses teleportation, but the return trip is guaranteed. But in “A Maze of Death” all the characters travel by disposable “nosers” - rockets that only travel one way and then are useless. In other books, like “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” and “Now Wait For Last Year,” it’s a drug trip. Once the person has taken the drug they are addicted, and possibly still undergoing the experiences of the drug at all times, so there’s no return from this trip. Of course, death is the ultimate trip, that “undiscovered country,” which Dick also plays with in “Counter-Clock World” where the old-birth revive in their graves, live life, and then return to the womb.

Dick also uses this one-way trip to explore people’s faith. Would you step into a chamber based on the faith that there’s an Eden waiting for you on the other side? How bad would this world have to be before you considered the trip? The correlations to the Nazi concentration camp showers / gas chambers are chilling. Yet, he manages to create a story where this is plausible.


I have to wonder how well Dick’s references to Nazi Germany work in the 21st century? When he was writing “Unteleported Man” World War II was only 19 years in the past, whereas we are now almost 50 years from when the novel was written. We have the benefit of seeing his future, so it’s hard to reconcile the belief that German culture would exist in 2014 much the same way it existed when the book was first written in 1964.

Despite its shorter length, the story is packed with fun sci-fi details. For example, the creditor balloon that annoys Appelbaum at the beginning (similar to the Theodorous Nitz advertising fly in “The Simulacra.”), literally hanging over his head in an attempt to shame him into paying his debts. There are several action scenes, so laser cannon, bone marrow melting guns, and time-warping weapons all get a chance to be described and then used against someone. Speaking of action, one passage particularly interested me: an agent of LIES, Inc. named Al Dosker is helping Rachmael ben Appelbaum transmit the secret of what they found out about the secret of the the Telpor planet. They are in a tense situation where another spaceship is trying to destroy them, yet Dick pauses the action to explain how the secret message is encoded.

“We started out by flipping a coin for each letter of the alphabet. Tails made it zero or gate-shut; heads means one or gate-open. It’s either zero or one; that’s the binary computer’s modus operandi. Then we invented fifty message-units which describe possible conditions on the other side; the messages were constructed in such a way that each consisted of a unique sequence of ones and zeroes...there is nothing intrinsic in this binary sequence that can be decoded, because it simply acts as one of the fifty unique signals known to our box...”

This passage reminds of the scene in “A Scanner Darkly” where they describe how to make cocaine from Solarcaine. It’s probably not likely to work, but it sounds really plausible and I’m captured by the idea that it might work. I guess that sums up most of what I like of the books of PKD: they’re not likely, but I like the idea.

In 1984, after Dick's death, an expanded version of this story was published as "Lies, Inc."

From inside flap of “The Unteleported Man”

Nobody would go to the stars the long way when you could travel to your new planetary Utopia the instant-teleportation way. That is, nobody reasonable would want to spend eighteen long years in a spaceship just to be stubborn about electronic transit.
Which is what made Rachmael ben Applebaum such a thorn in the side of the giant industrial combines that had made the Telpor what it was. Because Rachmael was all set to head for Newcolonizedland by his own starship -- alone.
But just being eccentric and a doubter would hardly justify the incredible concentration of effort to prevent his trip. The Unteleported Man suspected he was on the track of a secret too dangerous to get out -- even after an eighteen year journey.
Yet even he did not guess him terrifyingly right he was!

"Clans of the Alphane Moon" by Philip K Dick (1964)

In “Clans of the Alphane Moon” Philip Dick lets loose his penchant for psychology. A planet, really little more than a moon, was once a sanitarium for mental patients. During the war between the Alphans and Earth this moon was left in a no-man’s land and the patients were abandoned to fend for themselves. Now, thirty years later, the population on the moon has self-selected by mental affliction into seven towns: Adolfville for the Pares (paranoiacs), Ghanditown for the Hebes (hebephrenics), Da Vinci Heights for the Manses (manics), the Skitzes (schizophrenics) live in Joan d’Arc, the Ob-coms (obsessive-compulsives), the Polys in Hamlet Hamlet, and finally the Deps (depression) in Cotton Mather Estates. The moon has a council of seven leaders, one from each community, that meet to direct the government functions as much as possible.

Meanwhile, the humans on Earth are at peace with the bug-like Alphans, but both militaries are interested in reclaiming the Alphan moon. The Counter Intelligence Agency of Earth, in particular, is interested in finding out whether the mental patients have evolved any weapons that could give Earth an advantage in a space war.

“Clans” is Dick’s version of a screwball romantic comedy. The plot centers around the divorce of Mary and Chuck Rittersdorf. Chuck does “programming” for simulacrums. That is, he writes pro-government propaganda scripts for the simulacra, and then the androids are released out into the world to promote the USA and capitalism in an effort to combat the Communists. Mary, who’s a psychiatrist for the government wants Chuck to better himself, maybe writing comedy routines for TV stars. Chuck cites that conflict, among others as the reason for their divorce.

As the story begins, Mary has just taken the job with the government to make initial contact with the patients on the Alphane moon, but first she calls in some favors to get Chuck a job writing for Bunny Hentmann, a sort of Henny Youngman / Milton Berle / Jerry Seinfeld comedian. Reluctantly, he accepts, but he keeps his job with the government because it’s a chance to drive the simulacrum that will accompany Mary to the moon. Chuck plans to use the android remotely murder his wife, making it look like an accident.

Of course, since this is a screwball comedy, things get more complicated. Chuck loses his apartment, moves into a dive where the neighbor Lord Running Clam is a telepathic Ganymedean slime mold and meets a pretty girl who can roll back time by ten minutes. Hentmann puts pressure on Chuck to provide a script, so he comes up with a comedy pilot based on a guy who’s getting divorced and planning to kill his wife using a remote control simulacra that dresses as a female marriage counselor. It also turns out that Hentmann is friends with one of the top Alphan generals from during the war. Meanwhile, Mary has landed on the Alphane moon and meets some of the clinically crazy inhabitants.

When I was a teenager the descriptions of each tribe on the moon seemed eye-opening and accurate. Here was Dick elucidating all the psychiatric disorders known to man. As an adult, and from distance of 50 years, the psychoanalysis is pretty superficial. In fact, even though this is a comedy, some of the descriptions of the patients could be offensive to some.

Dick does a good job in this story of integrating even the minor characters. Lord Running Clam, Bunny Hentmann, the pretty neighbor Joan Trieste, all have distinct personalities, which is better than in some of Dick’s works. In his later novels the characters have a tendency to be chatty, especially about psychiatric disorders. “Clans” balances out this chattiness by adding more characters, which also helps with the screwball nature of the story.

The ending is oddly structured. There’s a night-time shoot out and battle which Dick describes with cinematic aplomb, but then there are some extra bounces as various plot points are resolved, or not. Dick seems to have this problem in various stories: he resolves the plot line, but then feels compelled to continue writing. You can see it in “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” and also at the end of “We Can Build You.” Luckily, this ending is relatively short, about fifteen pages.

From the back cover of “Clans of the Alphane Moon”:

Holding a precarious liberty as the result of an interstellar stalemate, the human survivors of Alpha Centauri’s hospital moon readied themselves for their war of independence.
Naturally the Pares, always suspicious and cunning, assumed the leadership, leaving it to the Manses to provide the super weapons out of their sheer love of violence. Propaganda and other details would have to be left to the Skitzes, the Heebs, the Polys, and the Ob-Coms.
But when the Earth expedition arrived, everything turned out to be different... because they too were divided among themselves, and some of them weren’t really human at all.
It’s a Philip K. Dick tour-de-force of the far future.

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• We Can Build You by Philip K Dick (1972)
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick

Dr. Futurity by Philip K Dick (1960)

In “Dr. Futurity”, Dr. Jim Parsons is pulled from his time in the early 21st century into a future society where strict laws govern birth and death. In the future races have been eradicated, but people are grouped into arbitrary tribes by birth, and hardly anyone survives past their thirties. People willingly die if they are even slightly imperfect, and groups of teens, a sort of Hitler youth called stupos, regularly eradicate political or social dissidents. Parsons, it turns out, has been brought to this time by a group of people who hope to use their time travel technology to remove the 500 year rule of European whites by returning to 1579 and assassinate Sir Francis Drake.


After the shifting worlds of “Eye in the Sky,” the plot of Dr. Futurity” feels like a step back for Dick, and that’s because it is. While it was published in 1960, Dick wrote it seven years earlier. Still it’s cleverly plotted, especially the twists in time. Dick’s books after the late 60’s seem to relax and leave the plotting to the characters, but even these earlier, more heavily plotted books show that he had a knack for storytelling. In this one Dick has enough knots that Parsons ends up occasionally becoming his own antagonist.

In particular, I liked the descriptions of the lost places to which Parsons’ accidental journey take him. After he arrives in the future, he is banished to the labor colonies on Mars, but escapes due to a mysterious time-traveling rocket, which takes him to a dying planet. On it he finds a plaque with his name, and then he recognizes the planet:

“Gazing up at the sky he saw a shape half-lost in the haze. A gray disc sailed beyond the clouds...He studied the face of this moon. The worn surface. The moon was Luna...That had not changed; the patter on its visible side remained the same. This was not Mars. It was Earth."
“Here he stood on his own planet, on the dying, ancient Earth. The waterless last age. It had, like Mars before it, ended in drought and weariness. With only black sand-flies and lichens...His name, the final written words. To survive man, when everything else had gone.”

A similar passage occurs when he’s marooned in North America 1579 near Tomales Bay, California. Dick seems to both fear and idealize what it would be like to be alone in the world.

“Dr. Futurity” also has the one of my favorite PKD names: Al Stenog. While the group who brought Parsons from the past is lead by a matriarch called Loris, Al Stenog is the government office whom we discover is opposing her. Often times Dick’s names are fairly transparent: Dr. Bloodmoney, Dr. Todt (German for death). Horselover Fat is a character whose name is a tranliteration of “Philip Dick”. But, Al Stenog? I guess Dick though that a court stenographer was a petty official, and made that a name.

The inside flap of the 1960 Ace Double edition:

He has a moment of shattering, blinging terror...Where was he? Why was he here? Had somebody brought him here, dumped him off at this spot for a reason?
Suddenly Dr. Jim Parsons realized that he had not been dumped on a new world -- but into a new time. In seconds he had traversed centuries...but why?
How could he escape the time he was in? How could he avoid the terrible role that the Wolves of the future had chosen him to execute? There was no way out, for even death was humbled before the inexorable web of destiny.

"Time Out of Joint" by Philip K Dick (1959)

In the movie The Truman Show there's a scene where Truman, the unsuspecting subject of a living TV show, witnesses a Klieg light falling from the "sky", smashing onto the street. It's a surprising scene, even for someone who has seen the movie. That scene, however, also has to pay its respects to Philip Dick's "Time Out of Joint," a book that was written nearly forty years earlier with a scene even more chilling and amusing.

It's a beautiful day in 1957. Ragle Gumm is having a picnic beside the public swimming pool at the park with his neighbor's wife, a "trollopy, giggly ex-highschool girl who's married to an eager-beaver type." They hang out at the pool and talk, then Ragle decides to trudge up the hill to the soft drink stand to get a Coke. He waits in line while some kids get their ice cream, and then steps up to order.

Ragle laid down his fifty-cent piece on the counter.
"Got any beer? He said. His voice sounded funny. Thin and remote. The counter man in white apron and cap stared at him, stared and did not move..The fifty-cent piece fell away, down through the wood, sinking. It vanished...The soft-drink stand fell into bits...In its place was a slip of paper. He reached out his hand and took hold of the slip of paper. On it was printing, block letters. "Soft-Drink Stand."

It turns out that this isn't Ragle's first experience with this problem. He has a collection of other scraps of paper, "Factory Building", "Bowl of Flowers." These slips of reality are so valuable to Ragle that when his nephew finds a couple more in a hole in a vacant lot, he offers to buy them from the boy. He has also been hearing the engines of distant jet planes when there aren't any, and the little crystal radio in the fort in the back yard picks up people talking about him, Ragle Gumm.

One possible reason people might be talking about his is his modest level of fame. On a daily basis Ragle submits his entry for the game in the newspaper called Where-Will-The-Little-Green-Man-Be-Next? He's succesful enough that he's the Grand All-Time Winner, national champion for two straight years.

"For each day's contest the newspaper presented a series of clues, and these always got read by him as a preliminary to the task of solving the problem itself. The problem, of course, was to select the proper square from the 1,208 in the form. The clues did not give any help, but he assumed that in some peripheral fashion they contained data, and he memorized them as a matter of habit, hoping that their message would reach him subliminally -- since it never did literally."

But the episodes with physical objects suddenly dissolving into words can't be explained by his celebrity.

Instead, slowly, Ragle Gumm learns that many people around him in the world know something that he doesn't. Like in the Truman Show, it's the opposite of secret knowledge - - a vast conspiracy to keep him uninformed. Instead of living in 1957, he finds artifacts, strange magazines from 1997. Once Ragle is convinced that there's something wrong with the world, he and his brother-in-law attempt to leave town, but just like in "The Cosmic Puppets," a series of everyday, but strangely sinister events conspire to keep the two men from escaping.

"Time Out of Joint" is one of my favorite PKD novels. Written within the first decade of Dick's career, it has all the elements you'll find revisited in later novels: paranoia, apocalyptic worlds, shifting realities, false leaders and even time travel. The time travel is more metaphoric than actual, but the novel does an excellent job easing you into a comfortable suburb of the 1950s and then slowly tearing away the wallpaper to discover a disturbing reality. The characters seem more natural than in some of Dick's other books (where they tend to lecture or jump to odd conclusions).

At this point, I'll disclose a major plot point, so this is a logical place to stop if you haven't yet read the book.

Ragle eventually escapes, only to learn that the year is 1998 and he has been living in a manufactured environment called "One Happy World." He is a world-famous weapons tycoon, but he has become psychotic under the strain of a solar civil war. Colonists on the Moon want to become independent from Earth, and although Earth has all the resources, the colonists have the advantage when sending down the bombs. Ragle was helping to defend the Earth, but in his insanity he retreated to the safer world of his childhood. The other townspeople were either hypnotized into believing the delusion, or were willing agents of the government. The fictional newspaper game was really a construct provided by the Terran government to engage Ragle in defending against the bombs. The book ends with Ragle Gumm resolving to support the separatists, while his fictional brother-in-law sides with the Terrans.

The paranoia in the game "Find the Little Green Man" still translates to today. I could easily see someone thinking that "Angry Birds" is a secret attempt to crowdsource prediction of the next terrorist attack.

In later books Dick often mentions the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, a sort of oracle for answers and introspection.  In this case, I have to wonder if some of the names and phrases for the newspaper game were chosen by Dick using the I Ching. For example, one clue is "A swallow is as great as a mile." Also the names, "Lucky Penny Grocery," "One Happy World."

If you've never read PKD, then start with "Time Out of Joint"

From the back cover of the Dell 1979 edition:

The Bum. Ragle Gumm had it easy, living with relatives and making enough to get by on just by doing newspaper puzzles -- and winning all the time. He had to admit he was essentially a bum...but a happy one.
But then...a refreshment stand disappeared in front of his eyes and a slip of paper inscribed SOFT DRINK STAND fluttered down...messages about him came in on his nephew’s crystal set...and a tattered old magazine he found featured things he knew had never existed -- such as a supposedly famous actress named Marilyn Monroe...
Ragle Gumm knew that either he was going mad... or the universe was.

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• "The Cosmic Puppets" by Philip K Dick (1957)

“Eye in the Sky” by Philip K Dick (1957)

“Eye in the Sky” is Philip K. Dick’s first novel to really express the reality-bending genre that he eventually comes to command.

Eight visitors to a Bevatron site in Belmont, California have an accident when a scaffolding collapses, and they fall sixty feet to the floor below, passing through the beam of the particle accelerator on the way to the ground. One of those visitors, Jack Hamilton, has just been fired from his job at the guided missile plant because the military staff fear his wife Marsha may have Communist sympathies.

When he awakes he finds himself in the hospital along with the other victims of the accident: Marsha, McFeyffe the head of security at the missile plant, Bill Laws, the Negro tour guide, Mr. and Mrs. Pritchet and their son, and Miss Joan Reiss. Luckily no one is hurt badly so they return to their homes, only to discover that the world has strangely changed.

They slowly discover that the world is now directed by a deeply involved god. Physics, electronics, even economics work based on the grace of the One True God of (Tetragrammaton). More grace means your car works. Loss of grace means that boils are visited upon your person. The ruler of this world is Horace Clamp, prophet of the One True God in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

After some adventures, and a face-to-eye encounter with (Tetragrammaton), Hamilton learns that this world is the creation of Arthur Silvester, one of the other people involved in the accident. Together with the other members of the group they render Silvester unconcious in the (Tetragrammaton) world, and awake in a new world, which is again a shared hallucination, or perhaps truly another dimension.

The new world is created by Mrs. Edith Pritchet, who is willing to banish from existence anything that offends or causes problems, starting with sex and ending with Helium, Neon, Nitrogen, and air. Naturally, after that everyone dies and they pass on to the next world, a place brimming with menace, rigid and harsh, that of the paranoid Miss Joan Reiss.

An especially memorable scene is when the cheerful prostitute/waitress Silky from previous worlds has been transformed into an ominous spider-like thing lurking in her den in the basement of the Hamilton's ranch house. Of course everyone is armed in this world, so they try discuss killing Miss Reiss, fulfilling her paranoia. There's an eerie scene where the group turns into blood-sucking aliens under the paranoid gaze of Reiss, just before she dies.

The final world is a police state, clamping down on the unruly masses of looters and rioters who prowl the streets. As Bill Laws says, it's "the Communist idea of America - gangster cities, full of vice and crime." McFeyffe, the security officer,, claims that this world is Marsha Hamilton's vision and it was only through the accident with the bevatron that Jack Hamilton learns about his wife's true beliefs. But, when Jack knocks her unconscious they learn the world comes from McFeyffe's mind. He is the true Communist sympathizer.

After finishing the book, it’s interesting to re-read the beginning and realize that it’s an inherent problem not being able to fully understand what someone else is thinking. This is what gets Jack fired -- because they can’t tell what Marsha is thinking. Yet, once we start living within people’s minds, we realize the restrictions, the horror, the fascism that could be in any one of us. The idea for “Eye” probably came from an event that occurred in Dick’s life. According to Wikipedia, “in 1955, he and his second wife, Kleo Apostolides, received a visit from the FBI, which they believed to be the result of Kleo's socialist views and left-wing activities. The couple briefly befriended one of the FBI agents.[24]”

Dick didn’t invent shared alternate realities. According to a biography of Dick called “To The High Castle” by Gregg Rickman:

“The roots of [“Eye in the Sky”] are in the "group mind" of such stories as Damon Knight's "Four In One" (1953), a story Dick is on record as admiring; and Fredric Brown's "What Mad Universe" (1949), a tale of bizarre realities alternate to our own, figments of one man's imagination... Ever the craftsman, Dick told Ed Meskys in the early 60s "how it was important to maintain the pace of the book by making each adventure shorter than the one before it."

But it’s easy to see how he took to this idea. Subsequent novels of his often involved groups of people sharing a hallucination, sometimes by accident as in “Eye”, and sometimes on purpose, as in the Perky Pat layouts of “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.”

Surprisingly, the moment that Dick started to find his own genre was when he decided to give up writing science fiction. The biography “Divine Invasions” by Lawrence Sutin has this passage:

"Eye" established Phil, at age 28, as one of the very best young sf writers. As a practical matter, however, ACE paid only a flat rate of one thousand dollars for Phil's SF novels -- with future royalties very much in doubt. There were other avenues to bolster his SF income. Phil recalled being offered, around 1957, a job writing radio scripts for the Captain Video program... But beyond economics, Phil wanted to break through into the mainstream so badly he could taste it.And so, in 1957, just as the glowing reviews of EYE were pouring in, Phil informed Wollheim and Boucher --...--- that he was giving the field up to devote himself full time to mainstream novels.

Unluckily for Dick, but luckily for his fans, his next novel “Mary and the Giant” was rejected by publishers so he returned to writing science fiction.

From the back cover:

Here is a heady jest, the first book since Fredric Brown’s “What Mad Universe” in which, within the plot’s legimate framework, anything - but anything can happen.
This glorious jape is, briefly, the story of an accident to a bevatron, in which eight people, in falling a considerable distance, pass through the highly energized beam. They recover and return home, sharing the feeling that something is vaguely amiss; but when an irreverence gets you a mysterious nip in the leg, and a lie brings a plague of locusts, the feeling gets less vague. From there it takes off madly, in wild hyperbolic sweeps of unabashed imagination. Two guys ride to heaven on an umbrella, and there’s a house which eats people. Characters are killed, and restored for the next go-round to try it over. The earth comes to an end more than once.
It’s worth eleven times the price and all your rereading time. I like it. -- Theodore Sturgeon

“The Cosmic Puppets” by Philip K Dick (1957)

In "The Cosmic Puppets" Philip K Dick explores the good and bad things about living in a small town, while telling the story on an epic scale.

While on vacation, Ted Barton decides to visit the small town of Millgate, Virginia where he grew up, and hasn’t seen since he left 18 years ago. When he arrives, to his surprise, the town is not at all as he remembered it. Normally this would be a story about the loss of small-town life due to freeways and modernization in America, but this is PKD writing. Ted discovers that nothing in the town is where he expects it, and even the newspaper office says that he, Ted, died at age 9. Before the story moves into Twilight Zone territory, we meet two children, Mary Meade and Peter Trilling, both of whom have strange powers to communicate with the insects and spiders, and to animate lumps of clay. Ted stays at Peter’s mom’s boarding house, while Mary’s father Dr. Meade treats mysterious patients in the hospital. As the plot evolves larger gaps begin to appear in Millgate’s facade. Ted realizes he’s a pawn in a cosmic battle ground fought in his home town.

Dick seems to have a good tempo in this book. In his later books the dialogue tends to be jumpy, almost manic. This book only has a few sections like that, and that’s toward the end, just before the climax. Instead, the plot evolves languidly, accurately reflecting the pace of life in a small town of the 1950s. Perhaps that’s the most gripping part of the story, the casual way that a normal visit “home” turns into a nightmare, and then a cosmic battle ground.

Dick does a wonderful job of personifying the cosmic forces at work in this book. I put the two children, Mary and Peter, in the same category as the legendary characters in Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods.” But more than just the characters, Dick endows the town itself with cosmic echoes. The barrier at the edge of town is so iconic. You want to leave the small town, but something always seems to stop you. Later, the movie “Tremors” would take this idea and multiply it by five.



Despite the title and the theme, the "Cosmic Puppets" is more about a man who misses his childhood and is trying to reconcile his memories of the past with the present, than about the gods as they fight. Although the book was published in 1957, Dick wrote “Cosmic Puppets” in 1953, when he was only 25, but he’d already graduated from college, been married twice and divorced once. He was born in Chicago, hardly a small town, but left when he was only five. Despite the fact that the small town in the story is most likely imagined, I can see how Dick must have felt old enough to be nostalgic about his youth. I like the way he describes the reconstruction of the city park with the cannon, as Ted tries to remember each aspect of the park back into existence, the greens unfold with the dawn. It’s almost pastoral.

Here is the summary from the back cover of the Mariner, 2012 edition:

“The Cosmic Puppets” begins like an episode of “The Twilight Zone” and then ramps up the strangeness and fantasy to epic levels. Because the mystery is about more than one man or one town -- this is a battle between gods.
Following an inexplicable urge, Ted Barton returns to his idyllic Virginia hometown for a vacation, but when he gets there, he is shocked to discover that it has utterly changed. The stores and houses are all different, and he doesn’t recognize anybody. The mystery deepens when he checks the town’s historical records...and reads that he died nearly twenty years earlier. As he attempts to uncover the secrets of the town, Barton is drawn deeper into the puzzle, and into a supernatural battle that could decide the fate of the universe.