“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.

"The Man Who Japed" by Philip K Dick (1956)

"The Man Who Japed" is set in a world similar to "The World Jones Made." Philip K Dick has imagined a world after the apocalypse of the 1970's, where society was rebuilt based on a philosophy of MoRec, which made peace and prosperity compulsory, promoted by an early leader named Major Streiter. MoRec stands for Moral Reclamation, an ultra-conservative and puritanical process of limiting cultural expansion and only providing new ideas through carefully groomed channels. Now, in the early 22nd century, Alan Purcell runs an agency that provides MoRec campaigns to the Telemedia, the government-run television network. Unfortunately, one day Purcell wakes to find that he may have japed the statue honoring Major Streiter by cutting off its head, and repositioning the body so it appears to be playing football with itself.

While authorities search to discover who japed the statue, Purcell is approached to be the new head of Telemedia. Confused by his actions, and by the opportunity, he visits the Resort, a shadowy part of society that provides psychiatric care. When he tries to fire his doctor, they kidnap him and take him to another planet. He escapes, returns to his job, but is ultimately undone by his failure to follow MorRec.

The central question for Allen to grapple with is: Why did he jape the statue of Major Streiter?

“Japed” introduces one of Dick’s favorite secondary themes: that of the oppressive apartment building. In the first chapter we meet the Purcells in their little apartment that reconfigures itself based on the time of day and programming on the tapes. Space is at a premium in greater New York, and their apartment has been handed down from Purcell's father to Allen, so even though it’s small, it’s a treasure.

Unfortunately, the residents also have to deal with the prying eyes of the MoRec busybodies who police behavior in the building. Mrs. Birmingham, is the building warden, and she also employs juveniles - robotic earwig-like sleuths, about a foot and a half long, that slide along floors and walls and record incidents of anti-social behavior. Several times in the book Purcell attends one of the weekly block meetings where Mrs. Birmingham and other officials confront malcontents with their misdeeds and either issue warnings or fines, or evict the tenants from the building. The way Dick develops this threat in this and other books, I don’t have to wonder about his feelings toward landlords.

Since this is science fiction, Dick adds in some flying cars. Like in "The World Jones Made," and many of the PKD novels that follow, transportation technology allows people to travel across the world in an hour or so. Purcell visits his friends in Hokkaido, which is sort of a sleazy area beyond the reach of MoRec due to the residual radiation there. His friends Gates & Sugarmann aren't precisely described, but their lifestyle sounds like it could be either bohemian, or intellectual, or maybe they’re just beatniks from the 50's. Purcell says he finds their ideas stimulating, full of Goethe and jazz and prisms, which provides new themes for Moral Reclamation.

Psychology is another common theme in Dick’s work. In “Japed” it manifests as The Health Resort, a less-than respectable place to get psychoanalysis. Psychiatry of any kind is looked down upon in MoRec, but the government permits some licensed individuals to practice, mostly as a way to weed out the psychotic individuals from MoRec society. Purcell approaches the Resort in an attempt to discover why he japed the statue, and meets Gretchen Malparto and her brother Dr. Malparto. For vague reasons the two Malpartos drug Purcell and ship him off to the Resort planet called Other World.

The interlude on the Resort planet seems a lot more interesting than most of the talky parts. It's during this section that Purcell sees his imagined perfect world disappear, and his house dissolves, foreshadowing a similar scene in “Time Out of Joint.” I have to laugh when I read the section where Dr. Malparto gives Purcell the battery of Psi tests. This is so funny, I can almost picture it as a cartoon. He starts by determining whether Purcell may have precognition, telekinesis, telepathy, or other unnatural abilities. Soon the list is veering toward the absurd: Ability to contact spirits of the dea. Capacity to transmute lead into gold. Ability to create rain of vermin and/or filth.

Gretchen asked: “Can you kindle fire? Can you slay seven with one blow? Can your father lick my father?”

Obviously, this book comes from a younger Philip Dick, having fun while writing. The book is funny, with the title word, "japed" itself being funny. The word “jape” means to jest or to joke.

The ending is interesting, but so very frustrating. Contrast the monolithic events of MorRec vs the million feeds of the Internet. Dick is looking at culture from the point of view of 1955, which had a top-down method of disseminating news and fashions. How could he have imagined that only 50 years later nearly everyone would be able to write articles or create videos that would be accessible anywhere on the planet? The Man Who Japed is set in the year is 2114 AD -- will there ever come a cataclysm to bring back the monolithic cultures?


Here's the description of the book from the inside flap of the 1956 Ace Double edition:

War and famine on earth had been abolished by Moral Reclamation, and now peace and prosperity were compulsory. And the Morec block committees, robots peeping-Toms, and youthful goon squads made sure everybody “enjoyed” it.
It was allen Purcell’s job as the new Director of Entertainment and Propaganda to keep the people in sober thought channels. Only someone was playing pranks -- publicly, secretly. Such humor was dangerous -- and the heretic had to be stopped at all costs! And then Purcell realized that the mad japer was familiar to him - as familiar as his own face in the morning shave-mirror!
As frightening as Orwell’s 1984, “The Man Who Japed” is a social satire on the world of tomorrow that is as timely as today.

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• The World Jones Made - Philip K Dick (1956)

The World Jones Made - Philip K Dick (1956)

Philip K Dick's “The World Jones Made” (1956) is an odd book.  Taken simply, it tells the story of a man who is born with the special ability to see exactly one year into the future.  This means that Floyd Jones knew of life before he was born, even before he was conceived.  He also sees his death, and the year of decay that comes after his death.  Normally this would be a sufficient one-trick pony for any sci-fi writer of the 50’s to hammer out a quick book, but Dick seems to want to do more.

In the novel Jones becomes leader of a semi-patriotic group who is literally trying to keep the aliens out of the US.  The aliens, called drifters, aren’t exactly invading, more like dropping in, but the followers of Jones take it upon themselves to form vigilante squads to burn and destroy them.  The story is mostly told from the viewpoint of Doug Cussick, an agent of Fedgov charged with maintaining the principles of relativism, “a moral and ethical philosophy that states everyone is free to believe what they wish, as long as they don't make anyone else try to follow that principle.”  Of course, Jones clashes with Fedgov because he knows the future, and is trying to convince others of his ability.  Jones becomes a Hitler-like figure, leading crowds of gray shirts in riots against Fedgov. The story is also book-ended with scenes of a small group of genetically engineered humans.  These humans think they are mutants, and ostensible Fedgov is protecting them against people like Jones who want to destroy outsiders, but it turns out in the end they have a much stranger destiny.

This is Dick’s second published novel, and like many of the books to follow, taking drugs plays a large part in the book, although I’m not sure it affects the plot much.  Like most of Dick's stories, the characters take away from the technology, but he still manages to fill the edges with lots of understated technology.  In "Jones" the futuristic cars help the characters jump from continent to continent, making the entire world their playground.  In one night Cussick and his wife see an opera in their hometown of Vienna, then fly to San Francisco to watch a hermaphroditic sex show and heroin and other drugs.

I'm not quite sure of Dick's ideology in this story.  He contrasts Jones' certain vision of the future and his fanatic vigilante followers with a government that wants to enforce equality and diversity at all costs, even at the risk of stifling individuality. Maybe he was making a statement about Fascism vs Communism, but then Dick adds the drifters and the manufactured mutants, and the allegory seems to shift and fall apart like so much wet paper mache.

The end result isn’t one of Dick’s best books.  The dialog is more stilted than in “The Solar Lottery”, and apparently Anthony Boucher called it “hasty and disappointing."  The parts that are most vivid are the visions that Jones has, first of the atomic attacks when he’s a boy, then of his death.  Personally, I enjoyed the cover art on the Ace reprint from 1980 -- I’d like to see more work by that artist.

Here's the text from the back cover of that 1980's edition:

"Jones was cursed. He could see one year into the future -- one year exactly -- but he wasn’t able to change or affect the course of events in any way... he could only watched them unfold. Jones would see the arrival of the alien organisms called drifters, and watch the waves of fear that would sweep the Earth. Then he would see himself become the leader of this movement, gathering power until he became the supreme dictator of the planet.
But would he see the true nature of the drifters and the terrible extent of their powers in time? And when he had his final visions, would Jones be able to find any chance, any way to cheat Fate?"

In an excerpt of  a review by Damon Knight in Infinity S-F, he wrote “The World Jones Made is a spectacular, brim-full grab bag of ideas. The central story concerns a new and fascinating style of conquering villain, but Dick has skillfully woven in such diverse and unlikely elements as (1) a race of artificial mutants; (2) the ‘Drifters’ -- mindless blobs of protoplasm that float in from space; (3) world peace enforced by ‘Relativism’... Uniting all this is the central idea, the tyrant who can see the future.
His name is Floyd J. Jones...To Jones, the future, one year ahead, is always more vivid than the present. The real horror of this peculiar kind of limited precognition does not appear till the end of the book...”

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The Solar Lottery by Philip K Dick (1954)

"The Solar Lottery" (1954) is Philip K. Dick's first novel, and although it has his voice, it's less like his later work, tending more toward mainstream science fiction of the fifties.  In a distant future, society is structured so that people become serfs to corporations or government offices.  An elaborate mechanism, based on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, randomly assigns the leader of the government, the Quizmaster, by selecting a citizen’s card.  If your number is chosen, then whoever owns your power card becomes president. If you happen to own your own card, then you become Quizmaster.  After the selection the former president has a chance to assassinate the new Quizmaster, and if it's successful then old president stays in power.  During this time, the new Quizmaster must learn to use the resources of the government and their corps of telepathic secret service agents, or else die.


The novel is set just as a "twitch of the bottle" chooses a new Quizmaster-- Leon Cartwright -- who belongs to a fringe organization that believes in a tenth planet - the Flame Disk.  The sitting Quizmaster, Reese Verrick initiates an assassination, only this time he has constructed the perfect assassin: an android, remotely driven by multiple people working for Reese.  

Much is made in the foreword and the blurbs on the cover about Dick’s interest in game theory, but not much information regarding game theory comes through in the book.  In the context of Dick’s other books, this is an outlier. Some elements, such as the colony on the moon, and the promised colony on the Flame Disk, foreshadow Dick’s later obsession with satellites and colonies.  Also, he obviously uses androids again in works like “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” (aka "Blade Runner").  But, for the most part, the focus is on action, and I could see this book adapted to a modern sci-fi thriller starring Matt Damon without a lot of editing.

The back of the Ace 1967 edition has an excerpt from a review from the New York Herald Tribune. I like the reference to "vintage Van Vogt", which is especially dated nowadays.

"Solar Lottery,” a first novel by one of the most striking young magazine writers, creates a strange and fascinating civilization for the year 2203, a culture based upon Heisenberg’s ideas of randomness and Von Neumann’s Games Theory, with such logical developments as public office by lottery and formal overt assassination.
Against this background two plots develop, one of intricately deadly and suspenseful palace politics, one of an ambitious effort to rediscover our sun’s once-glimpsed tenth planet...The body of the book is as elaborately exciting as vintage Van Vogt -- with an added touch of C. M. Kornbluth’s social satire.

 
 

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The Floppy End

I've used and abused my share of removable media for computers. I don't remember whether this dependency started with the cassette tape drive for my Vic-20, or the punch cards and paper tape used by the occasional mainframes or Telex from my past, but those were passing fads compared to the floppy disk which has endured lo these many years.

I recall the Frisbee-sized 8 inch floppy disks in my assembly language class in college, and only a year later those seemed archaic next to the 5 1/4" disks used by PCs.

The 5 1/4" disks could store a whole 360KB, or 720KB if you paid for the double-sided disks. "Double sided" meant removing the disk from the drive and flipping it over so you could write to the backside.  At the time it cost extra to for double-sided, until I learned you could use a fingernail clipper to chip out a hole on the disk, making a single-sided disk writable on both sides. During CS classes at Oregon State I'd fill a whole floppy disk carrying case with class projects -- nearly 1 MB of programs on 10 disks!

True to their name those disks were floppy, both the casing and the disk inside, so it was a bit of a digression when the 3.5" high-density disks arrived on the scene and they harder and more compact. The benefits, however, of storing over a megabyte of data on a single disk overcame any disappointment I may have had.  I think I remember installing Microsoft Windows 3.1 from 13 floppy disks, oblivious to the pregnant pauses as I swapped from disk to disk.

Later I had the Bernoulli Box, the iOmega Zip drive, and other obscure storage devices, but they were passing fancies. Data stored on them was ephemeral, lost with each iteration of dead media, but the floppy drive reliably appeared in each new computer I bought. Today, even with the advent of USB flash drives, most desktop computers often come with a floppy drive. I take it for granted it will be there, like the cigarette lighter in a car, or the coin pocket on a pair of Levi blue jeans.

That assumption changed recently. I've been coaching a First Lego League team, and the kids didn't seem to understand when I said "Click on the floppy disk to save your program."  They looked at my blankly, and I found myself explaining the [Save] icon to the kids.

Me: "It's a floppy drive, like you're saving to a disk."
Kids: "What's a floppy drive?

Now, I've seen hundreds of software vendors, from Microsoft on down, use an image of the 3.5" floppy drive to signify saving your work.  The floppy disk drive has become an icon, right? Both literally and figuratively.  But these kids taught me that the icon is fading.  The upcoming generation of computer users doesn't even know what it means to have to save.  My son often reminds me that in google docs your work is always saved automatically.

I read this article where Apple has dropped the CD disk drive from their latest iMac.  The first iMac in 1998 was one of the first computers to forgo the floppy.  Rather than sympathy, they practically exude scorn for the fading technology:

"Over time, an optical disc will be as much of an historical curiosity as a floppy disk," said Michael Gartenberg, a tech-industry analyst with research firm Gartner Inc.

"These old technologies are holding us back," says Phil Schiller, a marketer at Apple. "They're anchors on where we want to go. We find the things that have outlived their useful purpose."

I appreciate the goal of these marketeers, striving for a better product, a new shiny thing that grabs your eye, but I can't help but feel like we're losing something.

Maybe you can tell I'm old by my hardware, but we still need a save point.  In this era of "always on" internet, instant entertainment, live streaming and toss-away digital images, we need something that anchors to a page, holds the moment for more than a moment.  Before personal computers, I remember reading my dad's paperback books and finding notations in the margin. This was both his way of making a save point, as well pointing it out to someone else.  It was a blog that was even more personal than most, shared only with the few people who read the book.

I mean, the whole point of all this saved data is to use computers to share it with people.  A spreadsheet, an address book, a photo, a video, a blog, they are all ways to leverage the digital might of the computer and pass information along to others.  Sometimes it takes an icon to remind us to save.  Recently I had one of those moments.

A couple weeks ago I was exploring the basement with my son. He had told me that he wanted to put together his own computer, and I was pulling out old hardware to see if anything was still useful.  He got into one box and found my old orange floppy disk carrying case, one with a lever that, when turned, could splay out the ten disks in a fan so you could read their labels.

"That's pretty cool," he said.  "I wish we still used floppies like this."

I looked at at him, admiring my old disk carrier in the same way I used to browse through my dad's bookshelf, and made that one of my save points.

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Accordion Shape - Found Poetry

Here's a found poem from IMDB, ready for adaptation into a romantic comedy with international intrigue.
From the cute meet on the street with the girl playing the accordion, to the cloak & dagger of the Oslo accord, and then to the climax with our heroes smashed into an accordion shape and a happy resolution.

Here are the links to the movies which should be used as references during the writing of this classic.

playing-accordian (5 titles)

accordion (343 titles)

awkward-sex (4 titles)

oslo-accord (2 titles)

jakarta-indonesia (19 titles)

socially-awkward (33 titles)

smashed-into-an-accordion-shape (5 titles)

smashed-into-accordion-shape (16 titles)

awkwardness (113 titles)

awkward-kiss (8 titles)

Election 2012 - A Look Back at

It seems like one of the key strategies for some camps this year is to win by preventing others from voting. I've been saving up these bits of info, but haven't had a chance to post them all together. If there's one day urge people to vote, I guess today's the day.

This bit of news from Reuters from October, 2012 explains that "In Florida, Virginia and Indiana, voters have received phone calls that wrongly told them there was no need to cast a ballot in person on Election Day because they could vote by phone."  It goes on to also mention "In Ohio and Wisconsin, billboards in mostly low-income and minority neighborhoods showed prisoners behind bars and warned of criminal penalties for voter fraud - an effort that voting rights groups say was designed to intimidate minority voters."

Earlier, in September, Politicol News reported that the Romney campaign hired a company called Strategic Allied Consulting which was involved in various voting scams. This article says that the Florida Supervisor of Elections accused the company of shredding Democrat voter registration forms in Florida, North Carolina, Virginia and Colorado.  It also ran a campaign in Florida to diminish democratic votes.  On top of that Election officials are investigating voter registration cards that were shredded or destroyed by the firm, and signatures were altered or changed on others.

A month earlier, in August, The Nation described a plan by Ohio Republicans to limit early voting hours in Democratic counties, while expanding them on nights and weekends in Republican counties.  The Nation implied that these restrictions were racially targeted:

"GOP Chair Doug Preisse gave a surprisingly blunt answer to the Columbus Dispatch on Sunday: “I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban—read African-American—voter-turnout machine.” Preisse is not some rogue operative but the chairman of the Republican Party in Ohio’s second-largest county and a close adviser to Ohio Governor John Kasich."
Luckily, these discrepancies were resolved, as BusinessWeek reported in August. "Ohio’s 88 counties will have uniform early voting hours to ensure residents casting ballots in the presidential election are treated equally, Secretary of State Jon Husted said."

A couple of states, notably Florida and Colorado, attempted to reduce voters by purging supposedly obsolete names.  The News Service of Florida said that initially 2,600 voters would have been removed from the rolls, but after review that list was narrowed to only 207 names.  This whittling away of votes is especially ironic in this state, as Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner mentioned: “We want every Florida voter to be confident that their vote is protected and not hurt in any way by the illegal activity of others...We know that every vote counts, especially here in Florida where only 537 votes decided the presidential election in 2000.”

Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler also planned to try to purge 4,000 voters from his state's list of eligible voters.  As Think Progress reported in September, he mailed letters to 4,000 voters asking them to  prove their citizenship.  After 90% of the first 500 people to respond were verified as US citizens, he gave up his quest.  The bad news, however: "Instead, he is handing over the names to county clerks who may challenge them at the polls or when they receive absentee ballots. "

And, in general, states are trying to erect new barriers to voting. CBS News reports that "As many as 700,000 minority voters under age 30 may be unable to cast a ballot in November because of photo ID laws in certain states, according to a new study. The lower turnout could affect several House races as well as the tight presidential contest."

Even local elections have been affected by these tactics.  In Oregon, Clackamas County Clerk Sherry Hall has been accused of tampering with the ballots to the benefit of Republican candidates. 

So, if you haven't yet voted for the 2012 election, this is your chance to cast a ballot to make your voice heard. Don't let intimidation, marginalization or scare tactics stop you from voting.