The Cosmic Puppets
Ace paperback original, 1957
The Cosmic Puppets (1957) is a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick in which a man returning to his Virginia hometown finds it subtly wrong, discovers his own death certificate, and uncovers a supernatural conflict rooted in Zoroastrian mythology playing out through the town's children. First issued as an Ace Double paired with Sargasso of Space by Andrew North (Andre Norton).
Softcover. First Edition, Paperback Original. Ace Double D-249 ($0.35). Cover art by Valigursky. New York: Ace, 1957. Levack 6a. Wintz & Hyde SF18.1. #10084.
Faint wear to extremities and soft crease on rear cover, otherwise an excellent copy, about fine.
Softcover. First Edition, Paperback Original. Ace Double D-249 ($0.35). Cover art by Valigursky. New York: Ace, 1957. Levack 6a. Wintz & Hyde SF18.1. #10084.
Faint wear to extremities and soft crease on rear cover, otherwise an excellent copy, about fine.
Additional Details
The Cosmic Puppets (1957) is Philip K. Dick's fourth published novel, and one of his most mythologically explicit. Ted Barton, a man in his late twenties, convinces his reluctant wife Peggy to make a detour through Millgate, Virginia on their vacation to the small town where he spent his early childhood before his family moved away. He has been nursing a vague longing to see it again.
What he finds is wrong. Not dramatically, not in any way he can immediately articulate, but wrong. The town's geography is subtly different from what he remembers. The people are different. When he tracks down an old record, he discovers that according to official documentation he died in Millgate at the age of nine from scarlet fever. There he is standing in the street reading his own death certificate.
Millgate, it emerges, has been sealed off from the surrounding world and is being used as the battleground in a conflict between two supernatural forces drawn from Zoroastrian cosmology, Ormazd, the principle of creation and light, and Ahriman, the principle of destruction and darkness. The children of the town carry the powers of these competing forces. Mary, the doctor's daughter, can shape clay into living creatures. Peter Trilling, quiet and watchful on the porch steps, has different abilities. The town's reality has been constructed and maintained by these children without their fully understanding what they are doing or why.
Dick drew the novel's mythological framework directly from Zoroastrianism, whose cosmic dualism, the eternal struggle between a wholly good creator and a wholly evil adversary, was an early influence on Christian theology and on Gnostic traditions Dick would return to throughout his career. The Cosmic Puppets is a lighter work than his later explorations of similar themes, but it is one of the earliest places where his fascination with the idea of a false or constructed reality begins to take recognizable shape. Expanded from his short story "A Glass of Darkness," first published in the December 1956 issue of Satellite Science Fiction. First issued as an Ace Double paired with Sargasso of Space by Andrew North (Andre Norton).
What he finds is wrong. Not dramatically, not in any way he can immediately articulate, but wrong. The town's geography is subtly different from what he remembers. The people are different. When he tracks down an old record, he discovers that according to official documentation he died in Millgate at the age of nine from scarlet fever. There he is standing in the street reading his own death certificate.
Millgate, it emerges, has been sealed off from the surrounding world and is being used as the battleground in a conflict between two supernatural forces drawn from Zoroastrian cosmology, Ormazd, the principle of creation and light, and Ahriman, the principle of destruction and darkness. The children of the town carry the powers of these competing forces. Mary, the doctor's daughter, can shape clay into living creatures. Peter Trilling, quiet and watchful on the porch steps, has different abilities. The town's reality has been constructed and maintained by these children without their fully understanding what they are doing or why.
Dick drew the novel's mythological framework directly from Zoroastrianism, whose cosmic dualism, the eternal struggle between a wholly good creator and a wholly evil adversary, was an early influence on Christian theology and on Gnostic traditions Dick would return to throughout his career. The Cosmic Puppets is a lighter work than his later explorations of similar themes, but it is one of the earliest places where his fascination with the idea of a false or constructed reality begins to take recognizable shape. Expanded from his short story "A Glass of Darkness," first published in the December 1956 issue of Satellite Science Fiction. First issued as an Ace Double paired with Sargasso of Space by Andrew North (Andre Norton).
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