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The Broken Bubble

On sale

12th June 2014

Price: £8.99

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Selected: ebook / ISBN-13: 9780575133099

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Four people’s lives intertwine and collide in this early novel from one of the SF greats

San Francisco in the 1950s, a turning point in American culture: the rise of rock and roll and the teenage lifestyle. Jim Briskin is a disc jockey on radio KOIF. He’s still in love with his ex-wife, Pat – even though she’s about to marry someone else at the station – and she’s vacillating between them. But when he takes her to visit the desperate household of two of his teenage fans, she seduces the boy into abandoning his pregnant wife – who then claims Jim as her protector and support.

And all around them the cultural upheaval of postwar American society is manifest, by teenage outcasts who have a remote-controlled Nazi automobile they use to bump into the rich kids’ cars; by Thisbe Holt, the dancer who performs for conventioneers by stuffing herself inside a clear plastic bubble; by blaring used-car ads and the conflict between generations.

Dick gives us a vision of redemption tempered with layered ironies and a lot of real humour.

Reviews

THE GUARDIAN
"The fascination of the novel lies in spotting the themes that Dick would later develop and make his own: the malleability of perceived reality, the imposition of the fake on the real and the struggle between good and evil. The Cosmic Puppets may be a minor work, but is nevertheless interesting."