Somehow edited the rest of my post away.
Baldwin: you don’t know the premise. There are mainly two reasons I’m being so vague, and one is the one you hinted at - I might want to publish this. The other is that spelling stuff out for others before writing screws up my creativity. I’ve ruined a couple of good story ideas that way. Don’t know why I work that way, I just do.
What’s the name of the Fred Pohl story?
You forgot the “weather ballon” at Roswell. First thing to do: Get a crate of “canned eggs”.
Read the book that The Truman Show was based on (they don’t say it in the credits, but I KNOW it is!), Time out of Joint by Philip K. Dick. Actually, read a lot of Dick. He practically created the human-living-in-a-fake-society-but-doesn’t-know-it plot (and its corollary, the robot-who-doesn’t-know-he-is-one plot). Good stuff.
I don’t have any suggestions, because if I did, I’d want to use them for my own stories! I use these kinds of themes in my writing a lot.
I’ve read Time Out Of Joint and a lot of Dick’s other works. I love them.