Galactic Pot-Healer in Philip K Dick

Mar 15, 2012 Lixma rated it it was ok

Joe Fernwright is a man doomed to merely exist on an overpopulated, overbearing, socialist Earth. His only joy in life are the increasingly few commissions to mend earthenware; a tradition passed down to him since his grandfather's era. Thus the novel's title.

He is contacted by a mysterious entity, the Glimmung, who wants to employ Joe for a very particular and very well paid project on the planet of Sirius 5, colloquially known as 'Plowman's Planet'.

That's the setup.

The first part of the book ...more

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Mar 13, 2013 Jack Stovold rated it liked it

My Philip K. Dick Project #41

Entry #41 - Galactic Pot-Healer (written Jan. 3, 1967-Feb. 28, 1968, published June 1969)

Galactic Pot-Healer is an extremely strange book, one of Dick’s weirdest, which is no mean feat. It shares an enormous amount of DNA with the previous entry, Dick’s sole children’s book, Nick and the Glimmung. At the time, and up until after Dick’s death, Nick and the Glimmung was unpublished, so it seems as if Dick felt justified in cannibalizing so much of his previous work for My Philip K. Dick Project #41

Entry #41 - Galactic Pot-Healer (written Jan. 3, 1967-Feb. 28, 1968, published June 1969)

Galactic Pot-Healer is an extremely strange book, one of Dick’s weirdest, which is no mean feat. It shares an enormous amount of DNA with the previous entry, Dick’s sole children’s book, Nick and the Glimmung. At the time, and up until after Dick’s death, Nick and the Glimmung was unpublished, so it seems as if Dick felt justified in cannibalizing so much of his previous work for this novel.
Not only do the books share an antagonist in Glimmung (although defining him, or it, as an antagonist is more problematic in Pot-Healer), an ever-changing and all important book (which come to think of it, is quite similar to the book in Lies, Inc.), a setting in Plowman’s Planet (here revealed to actually be Sirius V), wubs, printers, and other creatures, but they also share similar ideas and themes. There’s Dick’s commentary on drab authoritarianism and the soul-crushing tedium of desk work. There’s freedom in escaping to a frontier.
Joe Fernwright, is a pot-healer, a man with the ability to perfectly repair any broken ceramics. Unfortunately for him, there aren’t many customers waiting for his work, which means he whiles away at his desk, at his boring office in his lifeless company, in a dystopian and Orwellian future America. The only entertainment he gets in his life comes from The Game, in which he and his telephone buddies feed the titles of classic books to translating computers around the world and then back into English, and try to guess what the garbled translations were originally. He is lonely, suicidal, and depressed, until he gets an incredible request from a mysterious customer.
It turns out to be Glimmung, a strange, semi-divine, although highly flawed entity, who appears in many forms, and has summoned various sad-sacks like Joe with special skills from many worlds in order to raise an ancient cathedral from the ocean floor of Plowman’s Planet, for his own obscure reasons. Like I said, it’s weird. As in Nick and the Glimmung, Glimmung fears, or rather, rebels against the mysterious ever-changing book, but its description of the future always comes to pass, and the book always says Glimmung will fail to raise the cathedral. The mysterious Kalends (calendar?) write the book, but nobody knows much more about them. Joe hooks up with a sexy alien named Mali, and together, while working with Glimmung and his motley crew, they try to unravel the mysteries of what exactly is going on with Glimmung and the cathedral, and decide whether or not to just give up on the whole damn thing and get the hell off Plowman’s Planet. If they even have a choice.
Whatever else this book may be, it’s extremely philipdicky (I’m aware of the term phildickian, but here philipdicky just seems more accurate). He conjures up plenty of spooky and atmospheric images and situations. One of my favorite moments in PKD so far occurs early in the book, when Joe finds himself transported out of the police station into a crate in “Mr.” Glimmung’s basement, but is trapped in the dark with only a phone and a match, and the ensuing conversation with Glimmung, where he takes the form of two giant spinning rings of fire and water, with a cute teenage girl’s head superimposed over them, as his voice comes from an old phonograph player. The somewhat horrifying experiences our heroes face in the strange, timeless ocean floor around the cathedral also come to mind, and Dick perfectly captures the mind-numbing drudgery of Joe’s pathetic life back on Earth. This book also contains one of my very favorite tropes, that of a down-on-his-luck man with nothing to lose leaving everything behind and trying to start over in a strange and different world.
Despite being quite depressing, filled with themes of fatalism, this is also one of Dick’s weirdly funniest books. I won’t forget soon scenes like Joe, and two of his buddies, a bivalve mollusk-like man and a spider-like creature discussing Kant and philosophy, or of a gigantic Glimmung crashing through ten or so floors of a hotel room and landing in the basement. Glimmung himself, despite being a god-like and mysterious being, has a predilection for communicating via tersely written notes that he floats to the surface of the ocean or even, in one case, in Joe’s toilet bowl. He always signs them, “-G”.
I never thought my review of one of Dick’s more “minor” works like Galactic Pot-Healer would end up being one of my longest reviews, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. It’s far from perfect. The plotting is all over the place, and the final revelations about Glimmung and the Cathedral, while interesting, are frankly a little baffling. But it’s got enough amiable weirdness to make up for it. The very last sentence of the book is one of Dick’s greatest. I wasn’t sure to laugh, or to cry.

My edition: Victor Gollancz, Grafton, Panther Science Fiction paperback, 1987

Up next: “A Maze of Death”

May 10, 2013 ...more

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