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The Broken Bubble
By Philip K. Dick
Originally published in 1988
Currently out of print in the United States
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Plot Summary:
The Broken Bubble is a novel of San Francisco in the 1950's, about the unusual events that mix up and entwine the lives of four people at 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 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 humor.
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Reviews
"The Broken Bubble is at once terrifying, hilarious and compassionate. Particia Gray's breakdown reads like fingernails on a chalkboard, and the convention of wild optometrists is about as nervously funny a scene as has ever been written. As for the adventure of the remote-controlled Horch - I can't begin to explain; no writer but Phil Dick could have written it. It's a novel of evident (astonishing, wild) talent and originality by a writer who had both of these articles to spare."
James P. Blaylock
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The Broken Bubble Cover Art Gallery
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