The Broken Bubble
First British Edition, 1989
The Broken Bubble is an early non-science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick, written around 1956 and set in San Francisco, published posthumously in 1988. This is the first British edition, published by Victor Gollancz the following year.
Hardcover. First British Edition, First Printing. Octavo, black paper covered boards with gilt lettering on spine. London: Victor Gollancz, 1989. Wintz & Hyde MS7.4. ISBN: 1557100128. #11188.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Hardcover. First British Edition, First Printing. Octavo, black paper covered boards with gilt lettering on spine. London: Victor Gollancz, 1989. Wintz & Hyde MS7.4. ISBN: 1557100128. #11188.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Additional Details
The Broken Bubble was written around 1956 under the title The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt, set in the same period in San Francisco. The novel opens with a sound truck circling the streets of Van Ness Avenue, broadcasting an advertisement for Looney Luke's Used Car Lot. For several paragraphs, Dick lingers on this scene of Luke in his straw hat and double-breasted suit, his ballpoint pens and Blue Book, and his clowns on the roof waving at pedestrians. It is an unusual opening for a realist novel, but it establishes something important, which is that the world the book's characters inhabit is saturated with commercial noise.
Jim Briskin is a DJ at KOIF, a small San Francisco radio station with a thousand watts of operating power. He plays classical music and remains emotionally attached to his ex-wife Patricia Gray, from whom he is divorced partly because of his sterility. When they both become involved with Art and Rachael Emmanual, a young married couple, they find themselves romantically drawn to the wrong spouses. Pat becomes involved with Art, whose volatility eventually turns physically dangerous. Jim and Rachael drift into a quieter connection, briefly imagining a life together somewhere else. Ultimately both relationships dissolve and the original partners find their way back to each other, though not quite as they were before.
Miss Thisbe Holt, a minor character who performs her act inside a clear plastic ball at an optometrists' convention, lends the novel its original title and its central metaphor. The bubble is the self-contained world each character builds and inhabits: the radio station that barely reaches across the city, the marriage that was never quite working, the brief domestic fantasy that almost happens. Dick is precise and unsentimental about how each of these bubbles collapse, and about what remains afterward.
Originally rejected along with Dick's other mainstream novels, The Broken Bubble was published posthumously in 1988 by Arbor House, with a simultaneous limited edition by Ultramarine Press.
Jim Briskin is a DJ at KOIF, a small San Francisco radio station with a thousand watts of operating power. He plays classical music and remains emotionally attached to his ex-wife Patricia Gray, from whom he is divorced partly because of his sterility. When they both become involved with Art and Rachael Emmanual, a young married couple, they find themselves romantically drawn to the wrong spouses. Pat becomes involved with Art, whose volatility eventually turns physically dangerous. Jim and Rachael drift into a quieter connection, briefly imagining a life together somewhere else. Ultimately both relationships dissolve and the original partners find their way back to each other, though not quite as they were before.
Miss Thisbe Holt, a minor character who performs her act inside a clear plastic ball at an optometrists' convention, lends the novel its original title and its central metaphor. The bubble is the self-contained world each character builds and inhabits: the radio station that barely reaches across the city, the marriage that was never quite working, the brief domestic fantasy that almost happens. Dick is precise and unsentimental about how each of these bubbles collapse, and about what remains afterward.
Originally rejected along with Dick's other mainstream novels, The Broken Bubble was published posthumously in 1988 by Arbor House, with a simultaneous limited edition by Ultramarine Press.
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