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XXVII Philip K. Dick, The Cosmic Puppets (1957 to keep Clute happy; the edition here is London: Grafton, 1987)
Reread (obviously - probably about the fifth) for this Saturday's paper which needs to be written soon. Like by Thursday. Fortunately there's a draft one.
Ted Barton returns to the town he grew up in, to find it transformed utterly and that here Ted Barton had died in 1935. He discovers that some strange being has altered it (for reasons that actually remain pretty opaque) and he tries to turn it back to the town he remembers.
Of course, it's not the town he remembers, but that town after twenty years (I half expect not to recognise Nottingham when I go there after five years) rather than a thirties town preserved in aspic. What about the brothel? The interiors of the bars?
The novel's interesting for its usage of Platonic forms, of bitheism (Ormazd and Ahriman for Zorastrianism) and the question of whether the truth is better than a fake.
There's been a move of late to suggest the novel was inspired by Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life (1946). It's not clear that Dick saw the film at the cinema in the 1940s (he did go to see films with his second wife Kleo, but suffered from agoraphobia so I'm not convinced it was that often) or on tv in the 1950s(I'm not sure when it was first shown, not sure he would have had a TV). Bedford Falls becomes Pottersville more or less because George didn't exist; Ted hasn't had the same impact on Millgate. George wants to leave town and hasn't; Ted has and returns. There's the small town setting - which Dick could have got from any number of films of the period - but the what if scenario owes as much to A Christmas Carol.
Reread (obviously - probably about the fifth) for this Saturday's paper which needs to be written soon. Like by Thursday. Fortunately there's a draft one.
Ted Barton returns to the town he grew up in, to find it transformed utterly and that here Ted Barton had died in 1935. He discovers that some strange being has altered it (for reasons that actually remain pretty opaque) and he tries to turn it back to the town he remembers.
Of course, it's not the town he remembers, but that town after twenty years (I half expect not to recognise Nottingham when I go there after five years) rather than a thirties town preserved in aspic. What about the brothel? The interiors of the bars?
The novel's interesting for its usage of Platonic forms, of bitheism (Ormazd and Ahriman for Zorastrianism) and the question of whether the truth is better than a fake.
There's been a move of late to suggest the novel was inspired by Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life (1946). It's not clear that Dick saw the film at the cinema in the 1940s (he did go to see films with his second wife Kleo, but suffered from agoraphobia so I'm not convinced it was that often) or on tv in the 1950s(I'm not sure when it was first shown, not sure he would have had a TV). Bedford Falls becomes Pottersville more or less because George didn't exist; Ted hasn't had the same impact on Millgate. George wants to leave town and hasn't; Ted has and returns. There's the small town setting - which Dick could have got from any number of films of the period - but the what if scenario owes as much to A Christmas Carol.
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