Philip K. Dick's 24th published sci-fi novel, the whimsically titled "Galactic Pot-Healer," first saw the light of day as a Berkley Medallion paperback in June 1969, with a cover price of 60 cents. It both followed up and preceded two of its author's finest and most beloved works, 1968's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and 1969's "Ubik," and if not in the same rarefied league as those two, remains a fine yet mystifying addition to the Dickian canon nevertheless. In the book, in the dystopian Cleveland of 2046, we meet a depressed individual named Joe Fernwright. A ceramics repairman in a world now largely gone plastic, Joe spends his useless days sitting in a cubicle, waiting for work that never comes and playing retranslated word games via computer with "friends" around the globe (a la the Internet games of today!). Joe's lot is rapidly changed when a message in a bottle (found in his toilet tank, of all places) informs him that the semidivine being Glimmung wishes him to travel to Sirius 5 (aka Plowman's Planet) and assist an interstellar team in raising the cathedral Heldscalla from the oceanic depths of that world's Mare Nostrum. Joe's adventures of Sirius 5, and his budding relationship with the gray-skinned sweetie from Proxima, Mali Yojez, make up the bulk of this somewhat atypical novel from P.K. Dick.In truth, I'm having a bit of trouble writing about this novel, even more so than I had with Dick's largely unfathomable "Lies, Inc." "Galactic Pot-Healer" is simply written and tells a simple story, and yet it is difficult to tell whether its author is trying to make subtle statements or if everything is on the surface. Do the Glimmung and its dark doppelganger represent some sort of Zoroastrian-like cosmology or are they merely cool action elements in Dick's story? Sirius 5's Book of the Kalends, which predicts the futility of the Heldscalla endeavor: Is this just another fun story element, or is Dick making some kind of veiled pronouncement regarding free will vs. determinism? Joe's decision to go off on his own, at the novel's end: merely a nifty wrap-up or Dick saying how individual creativity is more important than love, companionship and teamwork? It is hard to know for sure, as none of these disparate story elements is explored with any great persistence. As usual, some of the author's pet themes and obsessions are touched on, including religion, suicide, divorce, classical music and operettas; the punlike "Thingisms" are trotted out again (they had been featured also in "Lies, Inc."); and the early 1930s vibe of Plowman's Planet is very similar to the devolved U.S. found in "Ubik." The book reads like a fantasy novel in parts, and is filled with any number of surreal, dreamlike touches. In one section, one of the mysterious Kalends appears in Joe's apartment and just kind of peters away as the author seemingly forgets its presence; in another baffling scene, Joe encounters his own decomposed yet still talkative corpse while exploring the planet's undersea realm! This is hardly a Hal Clement-like "hard" science fiction novel! The book also contains numerous imaginative touches, such as the SSA machine that can determine a couple's future compatibility (Dick, who was himself married five times, might have benefited from one of these); the talking beds that compel everyone to dream the same dream; the "rapid-transit hover blimps"; Hardovax, a drug for male erectile dysfunction that Phil thought of almost 30 years before Viagra came on the scene; and the book's remarkable cast of unusual life forms (Joe eventually befriends Nurb K'ohl Daq, a bivalve from Sirius 3). Glimmung itself, a blustering blowhard of indeterminate weight (Dick tells us it weighs 80,000 tons in one scene and 40,000 in another; still, either would make the "90-ton mass of protoplasmic slime" that figures in Dick's "Our Friends From Frolix-8" seem like a pip-squeak), is quite different from the Glimmung of Plowman's Planet to be found in Dick's only book for children, "Nick and the Glimmung" (written by Phil in 1966 but not published until 22 years later). The novel features a more blatant use of Dick's penchant for fragmented sentences, too. Thus, instead of writing "A Fog-thing from antiquity which still lived," Phil gives us "A Fog-thing. From antiquity. Which still lived." More readable this way? More dramatic? Perhaps. Anyway, whatever else might be said about "Galactic Pot-Healer," the fact remains that it is both unpredictable and fascinating from beginning to end; just try to foresee how Glimmung, Joe and the others ultimately grapple with that undersea cathedral, for example. And, oh...this is the first book I've ever read that contains my favorite word; the coolest word in the English language: chthonic. I would recommend it to all readers on that basis alone! One last thing: Can anyone please tell me the answer to the riddle "Bogish Persistentisms. By Shaft Tackapple."? I'm assuming that "Shaft Tackapple" is Ray Bradbury, but "Bogish Persistentisms"? Oh, wait a minute: "Something Wicked This Way Comes"?!?!
While not one of Dick's better known books (probably for good reason), Galactic Pot-Healer still has some interesting elements that, in combination with its relatively short length, make it worth reading. The plot starts off simply enough; set in the future, Joe Fernwright is a pot-healer from a family of pot-healers, a popular profession after a war in the distant past shattered most of our the world's pottery. The problem is, after generations, most pots are fixed, and he's faced with a deep existential angst in the middle of a society that doesn't seem to have a place for him any more, and doesn't much care either. I think that’s a story that relates well to what a lot of people feel in modern society, pot-healing or not. And then, just when he’s at his worse, a manifestation of Glimmung, an immensely powerful alien from another world invites him to take a spaceship to its planet to help in the raising of a sunken cathedral devoted to a long forgotten god. So it veers from relatable, a bit, at that point. Being a Philip K. Dick novel, Galactic Pot-Healer is full of interesting ideas, which range from mildly weird to slightly uncomfortable. In the future, religion has sunk to the point where it consists of coin operated robotic padres on street corners. You insert a quarter, select the religion of your choice, and receive some advice based on your chosen creed. Or, there’s the Kalends, a group who distribute pamphlets that perfectly predict everything that will happen on Glimmung’s planet—and they predict its failure, which turns Glimmung’s raising into a strange battle against determinism. Or, there’s the story of how the god of the cathedral fell in the first place: he created a second being to feel sexual desire for, because he was lonely. Only, the biggest motivators for sexual desire are (apparently) incest, the fundamental universal taboo, so he made a sister; loving that which would otherwise disgust you, so made his sister evil; and loving someone stronger than you, and so he made her capable of dominating him. That’s... very, very strange. And behind all the determinism, sexual domination, and loss of meaning, there’s a series of simple word games, featuring headline misinterpretations, guessing quotations, and translation error. The book has a lot going on, and it doesn’t really come together, in the end. But at the core, there’s an intelligent questioning of what makes living worthwhile, and that elevates the book, even if the rest of the ideas don’t quite fit together.
What do You think about Galactic Pot-Healer (1994)?
Joe Fernwright lives in a bleak distopia where Earth's international government has finally eradicated war and violence through constant Orwellian surveillance of every citizen's words and actions. The rigid, Soviet-style bureaucracy has wrecked Earth's economy and left skilled artisans like Fernwright bereft of meaningful work, whiling his days with meaningless amusements. The Glimmung, a god-like entity from a distant world, recruits Fernwright as part of a huge project that will raise a massive ancient temple from the bottom of the alien planet's ocean. He is initially relieved to escape the despair and fear of the police state, and delighted to find an exotic new alien girlfriend. However, he soon realizes that he is just as scared of the probability of failure as he was of the police back home. Galactic Pot-Healer takes as its main theme something that figures in many other PKD books, albeit usually in a minor way: the dignity of useful, creative work. Many of Dick's protagonists are craftsmen whose creative impulses are frustrated in some way. Here, the plot focuses very tightly on that tension within Fernwright. In fact, the plot in general is much tighter and better focused that most of PKD's novels, and the cast of characters is limited. Organization of ideas and focus was not always Dick's strong suit, but here he truly got it right, and a thoughtful and enjoyable novel resulted.
—Mike
Lots of fascinating ideas in this book. Beings wtih an evil counterpart, with the requirement of reciprocal exclusion (unlike the Yin/Yang complementary concept). A (superior) being that can manipulate their material appearance, expanding or condensing it, splitting into different locations. A being that can integrate other beings' consciousness (or other beings in their entirety). A being whose sexual identity fluctuates from monosexuality to bisexuality. The cause/effect dilema (i.e. does the statement become reality because it was foretold in a book and, if it hadn't, an alternate outcome would have been possible?). The gloomy dehumanizing future of mankind in which overpopulation led to living and working in smaller and smaller spaces reminds me to "The Caves of Steel" by Asimov... a little too much, actually. "Galactic Pot Healer" would have been a 5 star book for me if it wasn't for too much dragging Glimung's fate in the 2nd part of the book (it almost seemed like stalling).
—Cristina
A telepathic and shape-shifting being of seemingly infinite power recruits a restless and depressed ceramics worker, living in an artless and joyless futuristic Earth. The task? To restore a submerged cathedral on a distant planet back to to its original glory. Along the way, he meets a beautiful android as well as dozens of other fantastical creatures from other worlds. Soon, he discovers that his original task is not all that it seems and soon is on a quest that leads him to discover the nature of religion and destiny, of trying and failing. Not the more famous of Dick's works but still as inventive and as relevant as any of his other novels.
—Nicholas
