Frankenstein - Chapter 7

TW for discussion of murder
Okay so we get some big news in this chapter

Vic’s youngest brother was murdered!

In a letter Vic receives from his father (whose name is Alphonse, it turns out!), he learns that while out on the town one day, Vic’s two younger brothers wandered off, and while Ernest returned in the afternoon, William never did. After papa Frank goes off and searches for him, he finds William’s body splayed out and apparently strangled to death.

Elizabeth is pretty wracked with guilt over this, considering that William was carrying around a picture of his mother that day which Elizabeth had given him, and when they found the body the picture had gone missing. This makes Liz think that the murderer must’ve wanted it. (I think it was in some kind of locket).

Upon receiving this news, Vic becomes distraught and sets to travel to Geneva right away. For a moment it seemed like Clerval would be coming with, which, while it would continue his characterization of being literally the too-perfect friend, would also have been sort of hilarious with its continuation of the idea that he’ll just kind of throw away everything for Vic at a moment’s notice. But no, Vic makes this journey alone.

On the road to Geneva, Vic has several really great melodramatic moments. Several times in particular he screams at nature. “Dear mountains! my own beautiful lake! how do you welcome your wanderer? Your summits are clear; the sky and lake are blue and placid. Is this to prognosticate peace, or to mock at my unhappiness?” and later he shouts that at an absent William that a storm is his funeral dirge. It reminds me a lot of this list I found online a while back called “how to tell if you’re in a Dostoevsky novel” where one of the entries is “At least once each day you stop in a stairwell to clutch the banister and yell out ‘My God, how loathsome it all is!’”

While at an inn one night in the mountains, Vic thinks he sees his creation in the shadows. The figure quickly disappears but Vic is convinced not only that it was the skaab that he saw, but that his creation is in fact the real murderer of his brother… like, okay? Vic just kinda ignores any and all logistics of this and is like “Yeah, my monster traveled 700 km over mountains, made it to my hometown, murdered my brother and took a picture of my mother away, then traipsed back to around Mont Blanc so that I could see it in the shadows… sounds about right.”

It’s not just that Vic thinks this to himself either. When he gets home he starts telling everyone that he knows who the real murderer is. When his family tells him that Justine has been arrested for it and is being tried that day, he’s distressed that there’s such an apparent miscarriage of justice. “no your honor, my monster from Ingolstadt killed my brother!” Vic is convinced that, because the courts are just, and because Justine is totes innocent, that she’ll get off and then they can set about doing some monster hunting. Of course, I will say that it’s kinda suspicious that some other member of the household staff just happened to find the photo in Justine’s room. Currently I’m suspicious of Justine and this other staff member, but we’ll see where this goes. I don’t think this book will linger here long, as I don’t believe it’s a murder mystery novel.

Frankenstein - Chapter 6

Dang, Vic’s good at remembering what letters say.

Elizabeth writes to Victor and… I’ve gotta confess, the letter was kind of boring to me. Elizabeth basically writes that not much has changed back home, except that one of Victor’s little brothers, Ernest, wants to pursue a job with the Swiss military; and one of their servants, Justine, has returned to their house after some time away at her home visiting her mother.

After the letter is finished, Vic decides he’ll (finally) write back. He then starts showing Clerval around Ingolstadt, but hates any mention of his old studies in natural philosophy. I’m honestly not sure why Vic “had to” go visit Waldman and Krempe. He does though, and Waldman and Krempe both are their usual selves: complimentary of Vic and pleasant/irritating respectfully.

After this, Vic spends some time studying literature with Clerval, trying to get out of the funk caused by this whole reanimating the dead business. In particular, the two are interested in literature from Persian and Arabic literature. It’s very steeped in orientalism, but hey, at least Shelley seems rather fond of the aesthetic she ascribes to that literature (which, I know, is part of the point of orientalism). Throughout all of this, Clerval still remains too good for everyone around him. He’s constantly trying to make Vic feel better, to tell him stories and jokes and go on hikes. The two of them return one day from some sojourn and Vic is finally really happy again.

Which, I think, is surprising given that there’s still a giant skaab on the loose (I’m going to use the term that Magic: the Gathering uses for a stitched together, animated corpse-beast in addition to “the creature” or “the monster” from now on, just for specificity sake).

Frankenstein - Chapter 5

TW for brief mention of oedipal horror dream.

Well alright then

So Vic’s gone and done it.. He brought his monster to life. It’s actually surprisingly unceremonious. He just kinda says, in as laconic a manner as I think we’ll get out of Vic, that one night he just up and animated this patchwork of dead bodies.

This said, I think Vic’s behavior here is actually really bizarre. So let me see if I can run myself through this.

1)Vic is displeased with the fact that he couldn’t stitch together body parts well and his monster doesn’t look like Adonis

2)Vic awakens the monster. Rather than being happy about literally defying all the laws of nature, he’s pissed off that the monster looks ugly

3)Rather than deal with the thing he’s just made, even if it is in a negative fashion, his inclination is to just call it a night, just kinda… leaving the monster there, I guess?

During the night, Vic has a disturbing dream in which he kisses Elizabeth, who then turns into his mother’s corpse. It’s almost like Vic’s got issues surrounding the thought of other people dying.

He wakes up and finds his creation at the foot of his bed. Freaking out, Vic runs out of his house and into the courtyard, where he waits all night. That morning, he walks into town and runs into Henry Clerval of all people! The two agree to go catch up, but Vic’s really on edge. At first, he’s afraid of going back to his house and facing his creation. Then when he arrives and finds that Adam is nowhere to be found, he becomes jittery thinking that he’s going to pop out at any moment. Again, I think this actually shows that Victor’s become very selfish in this. He sees that his creature isn’t around and his first thought isn’t “OH MY GOD THAT THING COULD BE OUT AMONG PEOPLE!” instead it’s “that thing must be lurking around here somewhere!”

Amidst this rambling talk, Vic faints and finds himself in bed with Clerval tending to him. Apparently Vic spends the next several MONTHS in bed with Clerval helping him out. Jeez, Clerval’s kinda... more than just friendly to Vic, no? I mean, I know that my read on this is influenced by my more modern readers lens (I’ve learned that homosocial relationships were considered much more acceptable back then) but nursing a guy to health for MONTHS is really quite much. I also wonder if Captain Walton is realizing that hanging around this dude may be toxic at this point… Like, Vic seems like he’s the sort that charges himself into the ground and then just hopes others will help him back up, but he doesn’t really seem like he’d offer the same support to them.

Clerval is really kind of a saint, it feels like. After all of this care, Vic asks him if he can do anything to repay him. Clerval just asks Vic to write to his family. Like… wow Vic must feel like an ass now.

Frankenstein - Chapter 4

And here’s where Vic’s starting to lose me.

I’m actually surprised that we’re getting into the “horror” stuff this quickly. Victor basically decides that it’s about time for him to drop out of college after two years, thinking he’s learned everything he can from the institution. Okay, this right here is problem number one. Now, the problem here isn’t Victor dropping out of the university. I’m one of those people who, aside from the unfortunate financial environment in which universities have been placed all but necessitating bachelor’s degrees (and accompanying debt), thinks that college is necessary. (<-that sentence is a mouthful). I know plenty of people who get along perfectly well without college. My brother is perfectly content doing work as a carpenter. I think there’s definitely something to be said for gaining knowledge outside of academia. No, the problem here isn’t Victor dropping out, it’s that he’s dropping out because he holds a lot of contempt for the people around him. While M. Krempe wasn’t exactly friendly, Victor seems to regard him as entirely unfit to be in an institution at all.

I mean, I’ve been frustrated at times with what I see as the niche focus of certain academic fields. However, it’s important to remember, I think, that academics are more than the papers they write. Victor starts to see those around him as being lesser than him in terms of ambition, and begins to pursue his interests less out of a fondness for knowledge so that others might benefit, and more out of a personal wish for fame and power to come from his experiments. It’s then that he comes upon the question of “what causes life” and decides that he’s going to figure this out by examining the dead. (ASOIAF spoilers up through book five: V nyjnlf gubhtug gung gur pbzcnevfbaf orgjrra Dlohea naq Senaxrafgrva jrer znvayl qhr gb gur rkcrevzragf jvgu Tertbe. Ubjrire, abj V'z frrvat gung Dlohea ernyyl qbrf frrz gb whfg or Ivpgbe Senaxrafgrva chg vagb gur jbeyq bs Jrfgrebf. Tenagrq, Ivp unfa'g fgnegrq gbeghevat crbcyr lrg.)

Victor learns how to animate dead bodies, at least physically, using electricity I’m going to assume, given the mention of galvanism a few chapters back, and because the pop culture image of the lightning storm is so ingrained. He then decides he’s going to go about making a creation. I mean, dude, you could’ve done any of this experiment with single-celled organisms, or even animals, and gotten essentially the same results. He decides that he’s going to create a fully-formed person out of body parts from dead people. I like that the reason the monster is going to be eight-feet tall is only just because Vic noticed that the pieces were too small to work with easily at a more standard size.

Vic also notes that during this time his father tried contacting him and Vic repeatedly shunned any contact from him. Aww, poor papa Frank. Though I will say the standard he sets for his son is pretty passive aggressive, “You must pardon me if I regard any interruption in your correspondence as a proof that your other duties are equally neglected”.

Also, I’m just realizing now that Victor is doing this at the age of nineteen. Someone really needs to put this kid in an ethics class. Like, Vic what’s your plan here? Even if you do create a functional person are you just going to go parent it? Will it have the same rights as you? There’s a lot of thought surrounding this, even in your time (read some Spinoza). I’m wondering if we’ll meet our creation soon, and if so, how much more there is in the book. I always kind of figured that the events after the monster is born are kind of in rapid succession.

Frankenstein - Chapter 3

Well Vic’s life became awful pretty quickly. As he turns seventeen, Elizabeth comes down with a case of scarlet fever and, ignoring the advice of the doctors, Caroline tends to her daughter which causes her to get sick. Elizabeth gets better but Caroline passes away from her illness. Elizabeth in particular is apparently pretty shaken up over this. Which I mean, I totally understand! Even if I knew that it was Caroline’s decision to be around me when I was sick, I’d still feel all sorts of guilty if she got sick as a result of my sickness. Victor tries to console Elizabeth, but she’s trying to “be strong” and hide her grief (though I will say, we don’t really know much about Elizabeth other than what Victor’s projecting onto her).

Victor departs for university, saying goodbye to his family and his best friend Cherval, who had appeared last chapter but I didn’t mention because I can never be sure in these older books which characters will come back and be important and which ones act more as window dressing for other characters. So, because it seems we may see more of him—Cherval is Vic and Elizabeth’s friend who, growing up, was fascinated with knights, chivalry, and adventure. He comes from a merchant family and while he seems like he may be interested in going to university (again, could be Vic’s projection) his father sees the life of an academic as one of idleness that isn’t worth living. So Cherval, Elizabeth, and Vic’s father (still unnamed) bid him farewell.

Vic arrives at Ingolstoldt and immediately meets M. Krempe who…. Wow I didn’t think this book would speak to me on so many levels. So let’s talk about mentorship. I think toxic mentorship is probably one of those unspoken topics in academia that deserves a lot more attention than it gets. Here in the US, there are certainly more pressing issues attached to the academy that may warrant more immediate attention, especially relating to the political sphere (here in Illinois, particularly, we’ve been faced with financial concerns beyond the national as our state governor is…not helping, let’s say); but, I think that as far as promoting the spirit of the academy, and of knowledge promotion in general, we need to have a bit of a look at how we approach alternative knowledge, and specifically that sort of new fervor brought in by upcoming students.

I know this is getting a bit side-tracked from the book but I feel it’s appropriate given that I know where this story’s going, and Shelley’s taking the time to give us all of this background. I’ve been in toxic mentorships like the one Vic runs into with M. Krempe here. Ones where a mentor tells you that whatever you know is basically worthless to what you’ll be pursuing. When Krempe tells Vic that everything he’s ever learned is basically garbage, I had some serious rememberances of the times when I tell people one of my biggest influences in research is Carl Jung. Now, if I were studying research psychology, I would understand the objection probably (though I’d still maybe wonder about the usefulness of the rejection), but even in a more qualitative field like communication studies, I’m told by certain mentors that Jung is essentially worthless, and that, by extension, everything that could be gleaned from him is worthless.

I’m getting way too off track, so I’m going to return to the chapter. I really could go on about this all day. My point is that I’m in major disagreement with M. Krempe here about outright rejecting a student’s knowledge coming in, and that this stuff still happens in academic settings.

I’m lucky that my own advisor is more akin to M. Waldman, who Vic attends a lecture from. Waldman, while still practicing the more “modern” sciences, holds a respect for the alchemists and occultists who Vic read, saying that even if they were wrong, they laid the groundwork for later researchers, and should not be thought of as a waste. Waldman encourages Victor to go into chemistry, though I love the way he frames it. Saying that while chemistry is currently the most useful of the sciences, Vic would do best to learn from a number of different fields. I wholeheartedly agree with Waldman’s suggestion; and I realize some of this may just be because it affirms my own academic tendencies. I may be a communication studies student, but I also try to read from political science, artists, philosophers, mathematicians, psychologists, physicists and others. It’s all worthwhile to me, as long as the aim remains toward an advancement of knowledge, the method—qualitative or quantitative—doesn’t seem to particularly be of much import to me, as long as it’s rigorous.

[so I realize looking back over this review that it’s pretty me-centric rather than focusing on the book. I may go into these sorts of tangents if I feel my interests or areas are touched upon. I hope that it doesn’t alienate too many of you fine readers. I realize that there may be a lot of different opinions about the academy, and some of you may disagree with my assessments, or my interpretation of Vic, and I’m willing to continue having that discussion, certainly. However, I hope that whatever may come of it that the ideas presented therein will be respectful.]

Frankenstein - Chapter 2

So I’ve gotta say, though I’m realizing this is kind of ironic given how I’ve spoken of him so far…I kind of identify with kid Vic. I’m so at odds with myself over saying that. Like, on the one hand I feel like maybe this was Shelley kind of intentionally making Vic have a background that maybe a lot of bookish kids had (I have no idea what childhood was like back in Shelley’s time… it’s actually kind of an overlooked portion of history, the lives of children throughout history). But there are some parallels there. So, I guess a bit of personal info may be of use here.

I was always one of the more bookish kids when I was young. I usually had a book out from the library more times than not, and I would read secretly at night past my curfew, and sometimes my mom would catch me and tell me to go to sleep. I got really adept at listening for them and pretending to be asleep when I heard her door open. This said, the kind of books I read weren’t what other children who read a lot were often absorbed with. I mostly checked out reference books and encyclopedias. I think around the time I had seen a few episodes of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and that got me interested in Greek mythology. My elementary school had this encyclopedia of greek myths with wonderful illustrations of all of the different monsters and I loved it. From there I developed an interest in monsters generally. I’d look through drawing books on them, I had a lot of reference books about folkore and mythical creatures. Eventually, this led to a broader interest in the supernatural and paranormal, as I was fascinated particularly with the chupacabra. Fascinated and kind of afraid/excited all at once. I remember I’d started to read books that dealt more and more with the paranormal and I explicitly remember that for several school career days I stated that I wanted to be a cryptozoologist. It all seemed really fascinating to me, and I think that interest in the ethereal/occult has kind of stuck with me as I’m now working on my MA thesis in performance studies exploring ideas of spirituality, ritual, and archetypal dreaming.

For this reason, I guess, I’m kind of able to easily imagine being a kid (though I was a good deal younger than Vic is here) and finding a strange book and becoming really fascinated with the unique ideas in it. Victor, on a trip with some of his friends when he’s thirteen, finds a book by Cornelius Agrippa. He becomes fascinated with these books on occultism and esotericism. He’s very quick to give an interesting moment of reflexivity here, saying that he figures if his dad had said why he believed Agrippa to be not worth reading, than Victor probably would’ve put the book down and not looked back. I find it funny that of the hard sciences, the only one he seems interested in is mathematics. Again, this is something I can relate to. I’m terrible at mathematics, though I try to read the analytic philosophers when I’m able to because I think it’s really fascinating stuff.

Victor becomes a bit of a starry-eyed occult-enthusiast. He’s interested by a lightning storm, and theories of galvanism (I know where this is going) which sort of overtake his fondness for the Agrippa, Magnus, and Paracelsus. Although he’s still mournful about ever having gotten involved in any of this.

I will say, as I’m writing this out I’m wondering why I was originally so mistrustful of Victor. I guess there’s still definite room for this to change. My initial image of him was as a wholly abusive and cackling m** scientist, who shouts at Igor and does… I’m not exactly sure… with Adam. This is actually pretty refreshing. Yeah, he’s overdramatic at times, but he’s also rather pensive, thinks fondly of his friends and family, and in particular I note that he’s rather aware of his privilege all things considered. He’s aware that, at least among his peers, his parents are particularly loving and supportive and he recognizes that this has had an impact on his ability to even pursue intellectual goals.

Interested in where this is going. The chapters are much less plot driven than modern books and are centered around particular themes instead, it seems.

Frankenstein - Chapter 1

Well, Victor really knows how to start off a story doesn’t he? This chapter is spent with the stranger recounting his parentage. Particularly, of how his father and mother met and started their family. So, who are Vic’s parents?

Well, his father is… unnamed. Apparently his father was some sort of public official in Geneva (this is before it was a part of Switzerland) and had a friend by the name of Beaufort who fell upon hard times. Papa Frank at one point visited his friend, who he hadn’t heard from in some time, and finds that the situation that he and his daughter Caroline are in is dire. Caroline is keeping herself and her father afloat, as he’s sick with what I can only suspect is depression. Eventually, Beaufort dies and Vic Sr. marries Caroline. It’s noted that the two have quite an age difference between them, which is kinda squicky to me, but the book doesn’t linger on it too long.

The two of them had baby Victor and by all accounts it seems that Victor was raised in a loving household with kind parents. The family traveled a lot, and at one point Caroline travels to a part of the poorer district near Lake Como. Evidently, this was something that the two regularly did. By all accounts they were charitable, as Caroline always tried to keep in mind that she had once been poor.

It’s kind of strange discussing books that were written in a different time. At once I feel called on to address some of the strange social habits of characters in the books, but I feel like if I were to call out every instance of a problematic occurrence in 18^th-19^th century Europe, there’d be much less review of the book. As such, I’ll probably keep the commentary on the society which the characters inhabit to a minimum in these reviews, unless I feel it’s particularly rearing its head as a thematic element.

The point of this venture, though, is that Caroline adopts a young girl named Elizabeth from a poor family who had been taking care of her. Elizabeth is described as being a particularly adorable child, and all of the people back home seem to love her. Caroline presents the two kids to one another and they become more than siblings, they are great friends who are calling one another “cousin”. Vic displays a particularly possessive tone toward Elizabeth, and implies that, at some point in the past, she died.

Frankenstein - Letters

Alright, it’s about time I sat down and actually read this thing. Frankenstein’s one of those books that some classes were assigned in high school, but it sort of varied from teacher to teacher whether you read it or not. As such, I never have. I do know some things about the novel just based on cultural osmosis and from knowing about the movie, which I also haven’t seen. So here’s what I do know about it.

-The general plot? That Dr. Victor Frankenstein makes a monster and it’s just kind of exploring the ramifications of that? I think he escapes. I’m pretty sure he meets a blind man at one point and maybe kills a child accidentally?

-The monster can speak in the book.

-The monster, though unnamed in the movie and book proper, was referred to as Adam by Mary Shelley.

-I’ve heard that the character of Victor Frankenstein was sort of Shelley giving a light ribbing to Lord Byron.

Other than that, I don’t really know much about it. I know it’s considered the first sci-fi book by many, and it straddles the line between that genre and horror. I also know that it’s subtitled “The Modern Prometheus” so I imagine that there’ll be more mythological/religious parallels made surrounding the monster as a sort of transhuman entity.

That all said, let’s start this:

An interesting way to set up the story. We’ve got a series of letters from a man named Robert Walton to his sister Margaret Saville back in England. I notice that the letters are all dated “17—“, a deliberately non-specified date I guess. I’ve never been sure what non-specific past dates really add to a story. I always sort of figure that they’re there to set a scene and give a general feel to a piece, but it sometimes seems to me like that should be able to come across without a vague time period laid out. I think it’s different than guessing into the future as well, since that is necessarily guesswork anyways. Anyways, just a brief thought.

Walton writes to his sister that he’s exploring the North Pole, and I do like that he outright states that Robert is writing to Margaret per her request. It lends some character to a relationship which I doubt we’ll ever see both sides of. Robert’s up in the Arctic for fairly vague reasons. Seems like he’s mostly just interested in exploring it and learning about it so that he’ll become famous. While he’s up there though, he sees a giant man on a dogsled moving across a giant field of ice his ship is stuck in.

The next day, a second man appears next to the ship, him and his dogsled both in shambles. Walton’s crew takes the man aboard and finds him to be a melancholic sort of person who’s here chasing down the giant sledman. Walton and the man strike up a friendship and begin to talk. Maybe this is just a historical data thing: but how is Walton getting these letters to his sister? The first few he states that he’s sending with various merchants he finds, but the final few once he and his crew are stuck in the ice? I’m left wondering.

I’m going to assume that the man they picked up is Victor F. and the figure he was chasing was Adam. I know that most depictions of the book’s Frankenstein look different, but I’m having a lot of fun imagining Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein on a dogsled in the Arctic. Also, is Vic always going to be this.. dramatic? I kind of want him to just be like this all of the time. He’s kind of (really) a showboat and I get the feeling that Walton is puffing the image of him up a bit because he identifies similarly to him as some lost hopeless romantic/knowledge seeker.

The book’s taking a Heart of Darkness turn by the end, with the stranger saying he’ll tell his story to Walton, so that he might get the moral which the stranger himself has learned the hard way. To be wary of the pursuit for more knowledge.

Cosmic Puppets, final thoughts and future of the blog

This book was certainly not what I was expecting. Certain aspects of it (the reality questions and interest in religious themes) are pretty standard Dick stuff, but the way that the book was marketed as “Galactic Invaders have taken over a small town!” is incredibly misleading. The book feels more like a Neil Gaiman fantasy novel than a sci-fi piece. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and I wonder as I read more in this genre if I’ll find more instances where the two (sci-fi and fantasy) blend together.

Speaking of reading more sci-fi! I enjoyed doing this enough that I’m going to hope to make a project out of it! I realized about midway through that not only have I not read much of Philip K. Dick, but I haven’t read much of sci-fi at all. I’ll be reading more sci-fi from here on, and potentially watching some as well.

Some projects that I’ve listed for my reading:
The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury
Herland – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Dune – Frank Herbert
The Foundation Trilogy – Isaac Asimov
Solaris – Stanislav Lem
Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
A Wrinkle in Time – Madeline L’engle
2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur Clarke
The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula LeGuin
Neuromancer – William Gibson
Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler
American Gods – Neil Gaiman (I know it’s more fantasy, but I like Gaiman and haven’t read it)
Y: The Last Man – Brian K. Vaughan
Ghost in the Shell, 2nd gig
Ergo Proxy
AND MUCH MORE

Truly I just went to various blogs where people made lists of “notable or required sci-fi” and picked the ones that I’d heard about before. I’m always willing to take suggestions, especially if people want to point me in the direction of sci-fi authors who aren’t white cis dudes, I’d appreciate it. All suggestions are welcome, however!

I do think I’m mostly going to do this in chronological order. It seems that a lot of these sci-fi authors knew each other and some of their pieces were written almost in conversation with one another. So to that end, I want to start far back and move forward. I know that theoretically I could really stretch the bounds of sci-fi, but I want to get to some of those big names sooner rather than later, so there are a few books that might be considered parts of the genre that I won't be including.

Cosmic Puppets, Chapter 15

Chapter 15
A pretty slow closing chapter to the book. Ted packs up his things and bids the town farewell as the old town slowly returns to its normal state. Some funny descriptions in here, like how in certain stores, pockets of the illusionary town still exist, so a person can literally walk into the other dimension, although when they do they transform into whatever they were over there.

Christopher bids Ted farewell before shifting back into his original, unchanged state. This version only has a vague impression that he knows Ted at all, being only somewhat aware of the whole battle for the town.
As Ted drives off, he thinks to his wife, who he basically accepts is going to divorce him (apparently this is a bit of a theme in Dick’s work), and he seems to be okay with that; rather dismissive of Peg in fact. He looks out the window and is generally left in awe of Armaiti in a pseudo-religious type of worship.

A few closing thoughts next post, and also talking more generally about sci-fi stuff in general, as I want to continue doing this.

Cosmic Puppets, Chapter 14

Chapter 14: TW for talk of misogyny and brief mention of drugs

Well, that’s one way to solve a cosmological battle of deities that’s taking place over a small Virginia town.

Turns out the last chapter ended with a fakeout. A happy one at least! The golem on Ted’s shoulder turns out to be the one which Mary had controlled, and is now fully inhabiting. The rest of the battle feels very grey goo-ish, with Ahriman taking a pretty passive role in the whole “consuming everything” business. Most of the work is done by the rats, golems, snakes and spiders. However, Mary has a plan, and begins guiding Ted along, fighting off rats with her tiny spear (made of a needle stuck to a twig). I love the image of guy just running through a horde of rats with a tiny person on his shoulder fighting off the horde with essentially a nail. It’s pretty comical.

Eventually, Ted figures out what he needs to do. Or rather, Mary tells him. He needs to wake up Ohrmazd. Making his way through the crowd, Ted realizes who it is. Doc Meade. Ted drags the doctor out of his car and reminds him who he is in a very Spirited Away manner.

Suddenly the book takes a turn that is really hard to describe. I have a bit of an issue with sci-fi writing generally, and PKD in particular that shows up here. The reality breaks, while certainly impressive, are usually handled in a fashion that’s a bit over-the-top. I know that might seem unintuitive, of course a reality break should be over the top. It’s a break in reality. However, I feel like Eye in the Sky did it well with the subtle implications that something was just “off”, and the much more delicate understanding of “reality” as a philosophical construct rather than a purely ontic experience. There are passages in here that describe like, the entire unmaking of a star cluster and the pulsing feeling of Ted’s body floating outside of the whole of the known universe and it’s all a bit too much.

My problem, I guess, is that it’s hard to visualize the gravity of the situation. I can imagine a star exploding in my head, as though it were on a film. However, it seems like in the imaging of that occurrence, the magnitude of the event is undone somewhat. Similarly, when I attempt to imagine the magnitude of such a fundamental shift in reality as the universe being potentially unmade, it’s impossible to visualize. Any image doesn’t seem to quite capture the sheer awesomeness of the event being described. Honestly, I think I’d need to be tripping to really get into the headspace where I could both visualize the happenings and imagine their impact.




Anyways, the long and short of this sequence is that Ohrmazd and Ahriman just kinda… leave. I realize how ridiculous it is, but that’s what happens! They just start fighting and go carry on their fight somewhere else, and thus Millgate returns to normal! I feel like we’re less in sci-fi and more in weird fiction at this point. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just kind of ludicrous how rather mundane the actual events that solve the conflict end up being.

Ted and the Wanderers quickly gain the upper hand in the fight and drive away the rest of Ahriman’s horde. The town and the people in it are slowly returning back to the way they were before The Change occurred.

Which just leaves Mary. Ted talks with her, and it’s… I don’t know. It hits a bit of a mixed feeling with me. So basically, what happens is Ted asks Mary who/what she really is. She replies that she is Armaiti, daughter of Ohrmazd. Mary was the form she took during the eighteen years since The Change. She was the one who engineered events so that Ted would leave town before Ahriman arrived, so that some years later she could bring him back and awaken her father to go fight Ahriman once more. Ted and Christopher then set about returning her to her original form, and it’s described as being this rather tall and inhumanly beautiful woman before she then dissolves back into the Earth. On the surface level, I’m fine with all of this. It’s a pretty satisfying conclusion to the chapter. However, Dick inserts this weird conversation between Ted and Armaiti in which he kind of objectifies her body while in golem form, talking about how “she sure doesn’t look thirteen anymore”. It’s a really strange juxtaposition and I’m a bit put off by it. I guess on the one hand I understand the urge to position and describe deities as being human-like but epitomes of human beauty in some ways. However, the beauty described here (apart from the final line “she was the essence of generation, the bursting power of woman, of all life.”) is rather cis-het male oriented in what it lingers on (hair, breasts, eyes, sleek body). I’m not sure exactly what would have made this better. Like I said, at one level I understand the tendency in writing to make gods “beautiful” but on the other it certainly seems rather normative. Ahriman is a grey-goo blob, Ohrmazd is a giant radiating glow of night sky with stars in place of a head, Armaiti is a really pretty woman?

All this said, the chapter ends with a nice sentiment by Armaiti to Ted. Ted kind of feels like I do about the absurdity and randomness of Millgate being selected as the site for this battle to take place, and how ultimately the decision was fairly arbitrary and that Millgate didn’t really have any sort of significance. I think the solace she gives Ted is pretty helpful with regard to this:

“It was small compared to the greater picture. But it’s a part of the greater picture. The struggle is vast; much bigger than anything you can experience. I’ve never seen the real extent, myself, the final regions it’s entered. Only the two of them see it as it’s really waged. But Millgate is important. It was never forgotten.”

[since writing this review, and finishing the book, I’ve found a comparison online that likens the whole sequence with Ohrmazd awakening to the intro of Katamari Damacy, and I think the comparison is actually pretty spot on to my problems with the way it’s written. It’s kind of campy in its execution of this great mystical event].

Cosmic Puppets, Chapter 13

Chapter 13

I’m hoping the book will get better at this point. I’ve heard that PKD sometimes has endings that are not the best, and as this book heads toward its ending, I’m getting the sense that this may end up being one of those cases.

The Wanderers’ headquarters comes under attack by Peter… or, more appropriately now, Ahriman. Seems Peter was somehow able to transform into Ahriman, or perhaps Ahriman was sealed inside of the body of Peter.

That said, the descriptions of Ahriman are pretty generic. It reminds me vaguely of a being from Digimon Tamers. Most of the rest of the chapter is just pretty mindless action. Ahriman’s creatures attack and the Wanderers are pretty thoroughly trounced. The chapter leaves off with a golem about to thrust a spear into Ted’s eyes. I’m hoping the book goes back to some of the big questions it was toying with. There’s a brief mention in this chapter as Doc Meade is afraid of the town changing back, fearing that he’ll no longer be human or will somehow “die” in the shift. This is good stuff! It’s just kind of sad it’s got this mediocre action plot around it.

Cosmic Puppets, Chapter 12

Chapter 12

Honestly this chapter was kinda boring… despite a lot of things “happening” in it. Ted, Christopher, and Meade meet up with the Wanderers in a nearby cave and they just lay out their plan. The chapter details that the Wanderers have been keeping up with this battle for a long time, trying to bring back Millgate through a painstaking reconstruction of it. Also, it seems like in this space the Wanderers are a bit more corporeal.

This said, the whole chapter kind of falls apart because so much of it is dedicated to the Wanderers, and specifically the lead Wanderer Hilda’s, plans that the end of the chapter kind of just undoes. It seemed like Ted’s restoration of the park was causing more Wanderers to remember aspects of the town and The Haze began to peel away from around the park. However, then at the end we’re told that the new park is shrinking, which… okay? I mean, it’s not good but it just feels so much like setup for a final confrontation with Peter or with Ahriman that I'm not sure what more there is to say about it…

Umm.. oh I did think it was pretty cool when we found out that the Wanderers make use of animals as spies and that Peter’s animals are almost explicitly engineered to fight against them. So like, the Wanderers make use of moths at night, and Peter makes use of spiders who catch the moths, disrupting the flow of information back to the Wanderers. Also, apparently, the source of Peter and Mary’s power is basically unknown, or more specifically, it’s unknown why exactly Peter and Mary have these powers that set them apart from the Wanderers or the other citizens of Millgate.

Cosmic Puppets, Chapter 11

Chapter 11

This book took SUCH a hard left turn, y’all. Like, I’m kind of amazed that this book was marketed with the whole “cosmic invaders from beyond the stars!” type of marketing. It’s so clearly not, and I’m actually seeing a lot of things that I know Dick explored later (namely Gnosticism) emerging here pretty readily.

So Ted and Christopher arrive at the hospital where Doc Meade is wondering where Mary is (oh please no). Then things almost immediately start becoming strange when Ted tells Meade about the whole park-changing fiasco and Meade’s reaction is so muted that it becomes immediately apparent that he knew more than he was letting on. Suddenly, a Wanderer appears and speaks with Doc Meade, informing him that Mary has died, and Doc Meade just launches into a complete recontextualization of the book.

It turns out that The Change which came through eighteen years ago was, as the characters have suspected, a sort of glamer or illusion that has been placed over the true town (DEMIURRRRGGEEE…..) and the Wanderers are the original inhabitants of the town. The Wanderers go around with their eyes (I’m assuming figuratively) closed, which allows them to maintain their transient forms. When they open their eyes, they are transported into the same illusion world that the characters are inhabiting. Ted then gets the idea to go find wherever the headquarters is and team up with them in order to bring back the town that they all must collectively remember.

Then Doc Meade throws out a gigantic load of a topic for Ted and Christopher to consider (though notably, Christopher is still really muted in his own reaction to Doc Meade’s words). It seems that Doc Meade came into existence after The Change, as did Mary and a number of other people in the illusion-Millgate. He begins to wonder aloud whether many people will help Ted, as it’s possible that they won’t exist after the change occurs, and they want to keep on existing.

This actually really gets into one of the big points of argument that I’ve talked about with The Matrix. Ted, and the heroes/directors of that movie both seem to hold a sort of unwarranted veneration for the “real” world. Ted’s whole argument of why they should want to get rid of the illusion-Millgate is because it isn’t real, as though that would matter at all to the beings whose existence is entirely predicated upon the continuation of this illusionary town.




This whole argument is unfortunately not gone into very much, I suppose the novel is still under the auspices of an action plot rather than a philosophical meditation. However, then Meade drops another bomb on Ted (either Christopher isn’t reacting or we just aren’t getting it, so I’m not including him). The giants that comprise the two “sides” of the town are the cause of The Change, and their names are Ohrmazd and Ahriman…..

So here’s what I know about Zoroastrianism. I know I am approaching this from a Western lens and only a casual interest in world religions (though I’m hoping to do more study with them in my career), so if anyone has more familiarity with this religion feel free to chime in.

1)Ohrmazd, or Ahura Mazda, is the sort of supreme deity figure of the religion
2)There’s a sort of dualism, and the opposing figure is Ahriman
3)All sorts of things tend to be ascribed to these two figures, but generally they are large cosmological beings, and, from what I understand, there’s less of a definite winner in their struggle as there is in the two “sides” of Christian theology.
4)The religion is heavily concerned with the four elements
5)It is a very old religion that influenced much of the Abrahamic religions (in particular some of the mystical branches of Judaism and Christianity).
6)Ahriman would later show up as a figure in Rudolf Steiner’s conception of anthroposophy, this time as a dualist force compared to Lucifer. This anthroposophy is still the guiding principle of Waldorf schools.
These two gods, and I’m just going to call them gods now, are doing their battle over Millgate, which is pretty hilarious.

And it seems like things are about to get MASSIVELY out of hand.

Peter is pleased with the fact that Mary has been killed, and begins to walk through the town, noticing that one of the gods, Ahriman, is stirring. Peter is very excited for this, it seems, and as he wanders through the towns he finds that his golems die if they enter into the park which Ted and Christopher reformed. Die seems to be the wrong word, actually. It’s more like they are somehow obliterated.. “ungolemed” is the term the book uses, seeming to convey that this unmakes them in a much more total manner.

Peter is perplexed by this but quickly becomes happy, as he sees a ring of fire morphing around the town (fire, I’m going to assume, is associated with Ahriman). Peter heads into the flame, to what end I am not sure, but I don’t imagine it to be good.

This is so fucked up.

Cosmic Puppets, Chapter 10

Chapter 10

TW for… I don’t even know what? Arachnophobia, death, discussion of pain and vermin-based nastiness

I… I don’t even know what happened at the end here… y’all what the fuck was that? It’s horrifying to think about and kind of ridiculous at the same time….

So Ted and Christopher talk with Mary, who’s impressed that the two are able to disrupt the Haze so effectively. It’s noted here that while Ted is pretty insistent that he couldn’t have done it without Christopher, both Christopher and Mary are quick to shift all of the credit to Ted. Ted is uncomfortable with this, and I kind of am too. Pet theory at the moment is that Ted’s meeting Christopher was no accident, so a lot of what Christopher says is suspect to me at this point.

Mary tells Ted that he should stay at her father’s hospital instead of the boarding house in order to stay away from Peter. Ted acquiesces and heads off, as does Christopher. Mary then goes to the barn (Peter’s workshop) and shifts her consciousness into the golem, guiding it to go meet him..

And then…oh jeez y’all the image is just horrifying. Suddenly spiders (one of Peter’s animals) begin to drop down on Mary and a swarm of rats comes at her. All of these animals start picking away at her as she runs off… but apparently spiders and rats are able to eat through human flesh like a school of piranhas and they chomped through Mary down to her skeleton… like… I don’t even know how to fathom this. Dick says that she was dead before her body stopped running. It’s actually pretty absurd and ludicrous to imagine, but there you go. Jeezum, this Peter kid is so messed up.

Poor Mary, poor Doc Meade… I’m kinda shuddering just remembering.

So fucked up.

Cosmic Puppets, Chapter 9

So now we’re jumping to Mary once again. I’m interested in the game these kids are playing, and I’m also noting that most of the events of this book are taking place over… I think two days? Interesting how much information seems crammed into this short book in such an in-verse short period of time. 

Mary is sitting in her house when suddenly a Wanderer enters. Mary realizes that it’s trying to find her, apparently counting its steps through the house so that it can figure where it is. Apparently this kind of thing has happened before, and Wanderers can materialize into this world by “opening their eyes”. Evidently, one materialized into the wall some time ago, and the smell lingered for a long time….. well that’s horrifying. 

Mary chases down the Wanderer, and then catches it causing it to materialize. She has a cryptic conversation with the Wanderer, here materializing as an older woman, who says that they want to get their hands on Peter. To what end, we are not sure, because Mary springs into action catching a golem. 

It’s further gone into here: Peter and Mary can both manipulate certain beings to act as agents for them. Peter is apparently better than Mary at this, because he’s able to shape golems out of clay, where Mary has to rely on certain animals with predetermined bodies. Mary’s got some kind of recourse though. 

I’ll say, the descriptions here are rather strange. Mary, having caught the golem, puts it in a vase and then fashions her own clay… poultice? And eats it, allowing her to project some of her consciousness into the golem and control it through some sort of psychic connection. She decides she’s going to send this golem back to Peter to spy on him. This in her mind, Mary heads into town. 

However, heading into town she passes by.. well who else but Christopher and Ted? I will say it’s kind of hilarious that it’s just described as her seeing these two drunk guys, who she recognizes, shouting at an abandoned house about a cannon. Soon though, she sees what they are about as they materialize an entire park where this row of abandoned houses had been projected. After they celebrate at their success, Mary decides it’s time for her to go talk to them. 

Cosmic Puppets, Chapter 8

A really short chapter this time (6 pages), but an interesting one all the same. 

Ted and Christopher (I guess I didn’t catch that his first name was Will, the book just keeps calling him Christopher) work on seeing if they can restore the tire iron. Ted tries to use the Spell Remover, and succeeds! The tire iron is restored perfectly, but then Christopher points out that, actually, the Spell Remover failed. Ted was just somehow able to do this on his own. With this in mind, the two set out to see if they can just use whatever ability Ted has to set the town right. 

Okay this is getting really reminiscent to some of the themes brought up in ‘Eye in the Sky’. In that book, there was a pretty persistent issue on how perception shapes reality, and how certain characters (namely those marginalized by 1950’s US society) weren’t quite as gung-ho at the prospect of being able to return to straight-cis-white dude’s “normal” world. I think something similar can be said here. I’m sure Ted “remembers” the town in the same way that I remember my neighborhood from when I was seven (always sunny, houses much bigger and full of kids my age). In either case, though, there’s the problem that still remains over whether what Ted remembers is “real” or not. Also, I find it rather suspicious that Ted’s able to do this in the first place, and that Christopher is so willing to jump on board with this. It all seems a little too suspicious and I don’t think things are going to necessarily end well for Ted here. 

Cosmic Puppets, Chapter 7

TW for brief mention of alcoholism 

So, a lot was revealed in this chapter! I guess I’m about halfway into the book so I should expect to know something by now. Ted goes back to Christopher’s house where Christopher confides that he wasn’t always a destitute alcoholic, but was originally a mechanic. Ted is a bit disbelieving until Christopher takes out a bottle of wine and puts it near a machine he created called the Spell Remover (Not a very clever name). Suddenly, the bottle metamorphoses into a coffee grinder that Christopher says he once owned. 

Apparently, the entirety of the original Millgate is still present, but an event (ominously referred to as The Change) occurred and seems to have suddenly altered the town and everything in it about eighteen years prior to the story. Christopher points out that there was some mistake, however, and that The Change didn’t manage to coat his memories, meaning that while he was physically altered by it, his mind remained the same. This has allowed Christopher to secretly work against whatever forces are maintaining this illusion (which Christopher refers to as The Haze) around the town. 

Christopher shows Ted that he owns one of the town’s famous relics (a tire iron used to stop a bank robbery when Ted was a kid), but it’s stuck in the form of a brown piece of string at the moment. Ted becomes emboldened to help reverse The Change and set the town back to normal. 

Maybe it’s just my pessimism here, but this all feels very similar to Winston in 1984 trusting O’Brien. I’m not sure if I trust Christopher, or whether whatever caused The Change intentionally put in an agent (similar to Peter or Mary) that could lead on and neutralize threatening elements like Ted. 

If I wanted to go really mind-bendy, I’d predict that Ted himself, and the idea that he has false memories, may in and of itself be a false memory caused by The Haze.. though to what end I would not be sure. 

Cosmic Puppets, Chapter 6

Well, looks like Ted’s found a friend. Leaving Peter behind on the ledge, Ted decides that he’s going to try to get out of town, despite being warned that he can’t. 

Have to say, it’s pretty cool that the barrier isn’t this entirely supernatural thing. Ted drives to the edge of town and finds an abandoned lumber truck with its logs spilled out across the street around it. Trying to get around it, Ted finds a steep slope that he can’t climb on one side and a pit that, while possible to vault across, doesn’t seem to have a bottom. Ted decides it isn’t worth it to try the pit so he tries to climb over the logs. However…. I don’t even know how to describe this… he gets stuck inside of them? Or under them maybe? The logs seem to be shifting like water around him, rematerializing and trapping him inside.. and then… the barrier gets even weirder, if that was possible. Despite this seeming to only take ten minutes, Ted checks his watch and finds that he’s been at this for seven hours. I have to say, this is probably not the best written description of time dilation I’ve seen (that moniker currently belongs to Huxley or Leary..). 

Suddenly, Peter shows up and lets Ted know that he’s the one who’s been warping time around Ted… and preventing him from crossing the barrier. He helps Ted out of his predicament and lets Ted know that, while he is preventing Ted from leaving, he is not the one who brought Ted to Millgate. Angered by this (like yeah, I would be too), Ted drives off leaving Peter behind. I have to say, it’s pretty hilarious how, apparently, this reality-warping kid can just be easily bested by someone driving off quickly and leaving him up on a mountain road. 

Ted heads into a bar back in town and runs into one of the people who laughed at him during his initial frantic episode in the middle of Millgate. I don’t think Ted quite knows the score here.. if you’re in a situation where you’re in a seemingly reality-warped town, you always have to find the people who apparently seem outcast by the rest of the muggles in the scenario. This old man, Christopher, is apparently the only person aware of the shift, and knows some of the locations which Ted is speaking about that once inhabited the old Millgate. 

Cosmic Puppets, Chapter 5

A bit of a slower paced chapter this time relative to chapter 4. We encounter Mary again (another of the kids from chapter 1) didn’t think we’d be seeing her again. Turns out that the bees which attacked Peter in the last chapter were likely under her… control? Guidance? Authority? It’s not exactly clear. Regardless, it seems that she has an affinity with bees and is able to speak with them, while Peter is able to similarly communicate with spiders. 

Peter reaches out to Ted, asking him to drive him out to a ledge on the valley which overlooks Millgate. 
Ted agrees, and things aren’t going so well for Ted. His wife is sick of being put up in a hotel and says that if Ted stays in Millgate any longer she’s going to leave and divorce him. While I feel like Teds putting her up in a hotel away from town probably wasn’t the best course of action, I do think Peg is being a bit unsympathetic here. Ted is clearly encountering some sort of bizarre experience with this town that is driving him to act in this way. All that said, it’s a complicated scenario and it seems like this is more meant to make Ted a bit more ‘down and out’ than present a point of dramatic tension for the plot to be working against. 

Ted goes to the ledge of the valley with Peter, who points out that the town is in fact... I guess “constructed from” would be the right term… two gigantic figures. Almost like giant apparitions (similar to the Wanderers I guess) whose bodies are made out of the landscape itself. The giant which Ted is able to see has a body composed out of the other side of the valley, its legs are mountains, and its head is the sun itself. As Ted remarks on this to Peter, Peter indicates that if he could figure out the giant’s name, he could control it. I wonder if this is a rule which applies to all of the things that Peter (and I suppose Mary) have governance over.. Peter points out to Ted that the other figure is split off at the valley that they are standing on and then he begins to wake the figure. Ted seems to say that the sensation of being surrounded by this waking landscape giant is similar to the feeling of the Wanderers passing through him the night before. Bewildered, Ted leaves Peter behind, saying he’s going to try to leave the town. 

I’m getting the feeling that perhaps the… cosmology? Of this book might be a bit too unwieldy for its own good. Part of the reason that Eye in the Sky worked so well was that it kept a relatively simple premise (eight people wake up in a world in which one of their group’s perception of reality acts as indisputable law) and played that out to its logical extremes several times over (also worth noting, the book’s advertising wrote that the story is “hilarious”. I could think of a few things that the story is, but hilarious is not a word that springs to mind). The Cosmic Puppets, while it is certainly an interesting mystery on some level, is beginning to feel like it’s just piling on mechanic after mechanic in this world. Perhaps that’s the point, that Ted is bewildered but keeps on striving. However, if that’s the case, then the continued focus on Peter, who seems to know everything but won’t let the reader in on anything, is aggravating. 

Cosmic Puppets, Chapter 4

Okay, so this book is actually getting quite good. Just when I think I’ve got one mystery figured out, another just pops up. 

Peter walks out to the barn in the backyard of his house, and he laments the “mistakes” that he made in the confrontation with Ted, noting that he let on too much information. He then looks over several jars that he’s keeping, feeding “them” expertly. After this, Peter walks out of the barn and is suddenly set upon by….something. A strange buzz that seems to really wound Peter. The narration is rather vague on what exactly just occurred, with phrasing like “Suppose a whole pack had found him, not just two!” or “But thank God they were on their own. Unorganized!” I have to say I’m not as much a fan of his kind of mystery development, where the narration purposefully obscures something that the character is clearly privy too. I suppose it’s similar to a film shot that leaves parts of a scene obscured in darkness, but it’s a bit awkward in text. The narration says it was bees afterward, but the amount of detail spent on this seems disproportionate if it’s really just a bee sting. Then again, a similar incident occurred in Eye in the Sky involving an out-of-the-blue earwig… maybe randomly appearing insects are some kind of staple in Dick’s writing that I wasn’t aware of? 

Later, at dinner, Ted strikes up a conversation with Doctor Meade, the character from the first chapter. Doc apparently is the one who delivered Ted back when he was born, and is the doctor who pronounced Ted dead following the scarlet fever that apparently caused his death. Ted’s evasive about revealing too much of his conversation with Peter to the doctor, and understandably so, he doesn’t know who these people are or what their relation might be to this other-town. Later still, Ted is continuing his talk with Meade and a woman named Miss James on the porch of the boarding house. Ted begins to lose his cool in that manner that I’ve seen sometimes in older works. A character just sort of erupts at people for not comprehending the mystery that the protagonist finds themselves in, even though it is a pretty unreasonable assumption that anyone else would be able to possibly understand the strangeness of the mystery at hand. 

AND THEN ALL OF A SUDDEN TWO GHOSTS JUST SHOW UP ON THE SCENE AND WALK RIGHT ON THROUGH TED, THE DOCTOR, MISS JAMES AND THE WALLS OF THE HOUSE. I honestly admit I had to reread this paragraph to make sure I hadn’t misread, but no the characters confirm it. Ted asks if Miss James or Meade just saw that and they respond, matter-of-factly, that of course they saw it, it’s just the two ‘Wanderers’ who make their way around this time of the evening. Ted asks a bit further and the characters are almost as taken aback by Ted’s confusion as Ted is by the TWO INTANGIBLE PEOPLE. 

I really love how this book just kind of introduces this new element just out of the blue like that. I doubt these two are actual ghosts, but I’m interested in seeing how Dick goes into explaining these ‘Wanderers’. He tends to do rather well writing non-human characters, I’ve found. I’m excited, y’all! 

Cosmic Puppets, Chapter 3

Okay so the kids from chapter one are brought back into the story, and Peter, the focus character among them, knows more than he’s letting on. 

We’re presented with an interesting scene in which two of the clay dolls that Peter is playing with come to life. Later he makes reference to creating golems, so I’m going to assume this is related. 

Also, Ted’s returned to Millgate (after putting his wife up in a nearby town, it sounds like… probably won’t hear from her again…) and is now living in the boarding house which Peter’s mother runs. 

Then Ted has a bizarre conversation with Peter, in which this kid shows he definitely knows more than he’s letting on. He confronts Ted with all sorts of strange statements and questions, like “how did you get past the barrier?” and Ted, quite craftily I’ll say, plays along, trying to give non-answers to the questions in hopes of drawing out more information from Peter. Eventually, Peter seems to realize that Ted doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and discontinues the conversation. As he runs out, he shouts back to Ted “I know who you are. I know who you really are!” 

The mystery being built up seems interesting enough, although the characters are a bit flat. This is often the case, I’ve seen, with this 1950’s pulp sci-fi. Which has unfortunately had far-reaching impacts on the genre even to this day. Even genre novels with really rich characters (ASoIaF, Watchmen/Sandman) are sort of relegated to the side based on their association with older conceptions of these genres. 

By this I don’t mean to suggest that I dislike these novels, certainly they’re interesting, but they are in many ways decidedly pulp, and it seems as though the standards for them are pretty low in terms of writing quality and character depth. 

Cosmic Puppets, Chapter 2

Chapter 2: (TW: For discussion of... gaslighting?) 

Have to say, I’m interested in where this one is going. 

Ted Barton frantically wanders about this town, trying to ask any of the people present if they remember any of the details of the town he remembers. The townsfolk are understandably bewildered by the frantic urgency of his questions, and every detail of the town he brings up is unknown to them, so for example when he’s looking for the grocery store on Poplar St., they aren’t aware of any Poplar St. at all. In fact, there are people in this town who claim to have been there longer than Ted has been alive. Confused by all of this, Ted checks the local newspaper’s records, finding that the records of his birth are still present… along with the records of his death. Ted suspects false memory implantation, and sets out from there. 

I’m impressed with how quickly this story is delivering the stranger elements that Dick is known for. I know the book is not very large, but even so, it feels nice to get the central mystery out in the open so quickly. 

That said, I find it a bit funny how quick Ted is willing to jump to ‘false memory implantation’ to explain the anomalies he’s discovered. I mean, that’s most likely the cause at this point, and it is a really uncanny situation to imagine finding oneself in. I guess a part of me would even go to “I’m in purgatory/the afterlife” before I went to “false memory implantation” is all. Then again, we don’t know much about Ted or what sort of embellishments Dick is putting onto this version of the 1950’s. Perhaps in this version, there’s the technology to work with false memories readily available. 

short review I know, but the chapter is only about five pages, so there isn't much to work with.

Cosmic Puppets, Chapter 1

So not much to go on initially. This chapter opens up with a scene of children playing with clay. One of the children, Peter Trilling, is not so much interested in this activity and seems like he’s pretty regularly not let in on the reindeer games. A doctor named Meade arrives and picks up his child Mary. Suddenly, the chapter shifts to a couple, Peg and Ted Barton, who are on vacation from New York to Ted’s hometown of Millgate, Virginia. Peg is none too happy about this trip, seeming like she’d prefer to stay back in the city.

When the couple arrive in the town, Ted is suddenly struck by an overwhelming sensation that the town they are in is somehow not the Millgate he knows.

So a few notes of analysis on this chapter. First, I notice that this takes place in a “modern day” setting, which was not the case for the other early Dick books I’ve read so far save “Eye in the Sky”. I consider this an improvement over his usual space-opera/pulp scifi settings, as I’ve found Dick’s early futures to be cringe-worthy generally, (I swear, women in these early books sometimes seem as though they may as well have been disembodied sentient breasts for all the lack of attention Dick gives to any other part of their appearance). He seems to excel more in these Twilight Zone type scenarios where something is off-kilter about the normal world. So I’ll just say that the premise of a man returning to his hometown to suddenly be struck by the sensation that it isn’t his town at all hits all the right notes for me. I’m generally a fan of Twilight Zone/Kafkaesque predicaments in which a strange event is thrown into a normally functioning world and the characters just have to accept it. Very Lacanian.

The opening with the group of children playing with clay seems like it’ll be important thematically at the very least. Dick occasionally makes use of multiple viewpoint characters, but I don’t know that that will be the case here. If anything, I feel like the children may play a role similar to the rabbits in Inland Empire, functioning as a sort of silent/thematic greek chorus rather than one which directly parallels the plot. Granted, I’m optimistic that this won’t be the case, as the image of children playing with/shaping clay people seems really blatant and unsubtle in a book called “The Cosmic Puppets”. We will see.