"I've never seen this town before," he muttered huskily, almost inaudibly. "It's completely different." He turned to his wife, bewildered and scared. "This isn't the Millgate I remember. This isn't the town I grew up in!"
The Cosmic Puppets by American science fiction author Philip K. Dick is set in the small town of Millgate, Virginia during the 1950s. Ted Barton spent his boyhood in Millgate but when he returns as a man in his late twenties, the entire town has completely changed - the street names, the buildings and stores, the houses and park - none of what Ted sees around him is familiar. He might as well have returned to another small town. One can almost hear the theme from The Twilight Zone playing in the background.
Ted Barton wants answers. He starts asking the people in Millgate questions and quickly discovers something is terribly wrong – nobody remembers a boy with his name or knows what happened to the old town park or his school or even the street where his parents owned a house. It's as if everything he remembered as a kid never existed. Impossible!
Ted goes to the office of the Millgate Weekly to check the town records. Only it’s the Millgate Times not the Millgate Weekly. Turns out, although the newspaper records his name correctly, his father and mother are listed as Donald and Sarah not their true names - Joe and Ruth - and their street address is all wrong. Checking further produces even more alarming news: during October, 1935, the month and year his parents sold their Millgate house to move to Richmond, there is a report that Theodore Barton died of scarlet fever. Whoa! Is he really who he thinks he is? And if he isn't Ted Barton, then who is he?
Ted Barton, current resident of New York City, gets a room at the local boarding house but when he’s unpacking the landlady’s son enters and asks who he is and how he got through the barrier. Such strange questions from this odd-looking, thin, bony ten-year-old boy with huge brown eyes and an unusually wide forehead. They converse and the strangeness increases: this boy whose name is Peter starts talking about how he can stop time and has power over creatures. Peter goes on to ask Ted if he has seen both of them and then lets Ted know he’d like to trace one of the Wanderers to find out where they come from and how they do it. What the hell is this kid talking about? The strangeness builds until Peter runs away downstairs to the porch and shouts up at Ted: “I know who you are. I know who you really are!”
Shortly thereafter, Ted has other conversations and witnesses even more oddities. Only one thing is certain: nothing is what it appears to be.
With additional probing and discoveries, one possibility looms above all others, a possibility Ted is willing to explore with confidence: the Millgate he knew as a kid, the small town of his boyhood with all its familiar people, streets, buildings and park hasn't disappeared as much as it has been distorted in some mysterious way by an unseen power.
Written in 1953 but not published until 1957, The Cosmic Puppets is a must read for PKD fans and a great read for anybody else. Philip K. Dick wrote this short, gripping novel when age 25 and used its framework to explores a number of themes and questions that would come to haunt and obsess him over the years. Among their number:
Paranoia of being taken over: Back in the 1950s, people who loved Small Town America could see its demise coming. Not only paranoia of being overrun by the Commies (The Red Scare)) but more probably wiped out by city slickers and sharpies with their suburban sprawl and shopping malls. Oh, yes, twenty years later and the unending sprawl covers nearly all the land in its poisonous neon ooze, Phil would write one of his most famous novels addressing precisely this dilemma: A Scanner Darkly.
A forgotten sense of history and identity: The old town park had a civil war cannon and plaque commemorating a war hero. In the author’s concern for a population cut off from its own history, I was reminded of Milan Kundera’’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Closely linked with a loss of history, PKD was also vitally concerned with the country’s drop in the literacy rate: an entire society where people either can’t read or choose not to read but rather are satisfied with being entertained by their TVs featuring advertisement that are nothing more than shiny sewer-bugs that rot the brain. Phil uses this image for TV ads in his The Solar Lottery.
Discrediting tools and craft: Ted Barton comes to know a haggard oldster and town drunk by the name of William Christopher. However, back when Millgate was the true Millgate, William Christopher was his true self, a robust, sober, hard-working electronics expert. Philip K. Dick had great respect for men and women possessing expertise in handling material things – carpenters, masons, potters, auto mechanics – and abhorred the direction American society was headed: an entire population of service workers and telemarketers. This theme is picked up most directly in Galactic Pot-Healer.
Mental Projection and Mind Power: With his special mental powers, the above mentioned ten-year old Peter is able to vitalize and control his small Gumby-like clay creations he calls golems (one of the creepier parts of the tale) along with an entire menagerie of snakes, spiders and large viscous rats with red eyes. And Peter isn’t the only one who has such powers. Such a preoccupation with mental powers of one variety or another is prominent in dozens of the author's novels.
Cosmic forces and underlying divine power: Is all that we see only an illusion? Does our material world weigh us down and occlude our vision, block of perception of an underlying light that is the “true” reality? Or, is there more than one divine force acting in our universe, using humans and other mundane forms of life as if puppets on strings? On this last point, The Cosmic Puppets touches on such ancient dualistic religions as Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism and Manichaeism.
Ah, if we humans only knew the true nature of the ultimate, underlying reality! Philip K. Dick went on to write not only entire novels exploring this question in its many manifestations, such novels as The Divine Invasion and Valis but you can read all about it in his 1,000-page The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. Want a preview? Dickheads of the world unite! - read The Cosmic Puppets.
American science fiction author Philip K. Dick, 1928-1982
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