Review by C.J. Bunce
Galactic Pot-Healer contains major themes pre-dating The Last Starfighter, a host of Michael Crichton novels including especially the ocean voyage Sphere, and The Borg Collective of Star Trek, while providing Dick’s readers with his own twist on Faust, Cthulhu, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. As of 1969 Philip K. Dick had published 25 science fiction novels, and this book came just after his career-defining Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Unlike many of his prior works, here he doesn’t include his typical round of too many characters to keep track of and his dizzying array of plot threads is pared down to a manageable story. But his hero is again practically interchangeable with the rest, Dick as his own protagonist, wrestling his personal demons through his writing. Joe Fernwright is plagued by despair and the specter of the end, more so than Dick’s regular guy as he is on the verge of suicide. But there’s hope for this man.
In this look at the future, the future on Earth is boring–a future of office jobs with that same old day-to-day grind of what was the 1960s when the story was written, mind-bogglingly hardly different than the office jobs of 2024. That’s when an alien presence comes to the rescue.
Joe Fernwright is a pot-healer, which surprisingly has nothing to do with drugs. In fact the concepts of illegal drugs and Dick’s overt distaste for marriage (if not women in general) is happily absent in this story. No, a pot-healer repairs broken ceramics. As one might imagine, as a vocation this is as obscure in the future as it is today. So Joe sits in his office bored most of the day. This is where PKD’s prescience shines: As in the 2020s, so in Dick’s dismal future. But where we might play mahjong on our PCs, Joe calls into a worldwide puzzle-exchange line where he passes time figuring out a phrase based on it being translated from one language to another then translated back again. Things like that (has everyone tried this with Google Translate?), a very 1990s dial-a-faith chatline, and a 24-hour dictionary service that functions amazingly like the Internet are the high points of this novel.
Readers can enjoy PKD stories at many levels. For me the best is often in the corners–the asides that don’t drive the narrative forward–those details that made 1950s and 1960s science fiction predictive of so much of the future. But this story is about political and philosophical ideologies first and foremost, and it’s also an indictment of sorts of religion in general. The Glimmung is a being that returns in the great kids’ story Nick and the Glimmung (PKD’s only attempt at the genre), published posthumously. The Glimmung is an alien described as looking like a gyroscope, a teenager girl, and the contents of the ocean (no surprise if you’ve read PKD before).
The Glimmung sends Joe an offer he can’t refuse, curiously timed when Joe is near done with his life and lot. The Glimmung is a highly-evolved being from another planet (Sirius Five) where he is assembling a Michael Crichton-esque dream team of people to help raise an ancient cathedral sitting on the bottom of an ocean. The pay is life-changing. The decision for Joe is to stay home and walk away from this mortal coil, or take whatever comes with the Glimmung because… why not?
It turns out this is just what Joe needed. He even meets a woman named Mali who is from another planet, someone to provide some much needed camaraderie. Joe is not just any player on this team–he soon learns he is a critical component for the future of many beings on the planet and all the others arriving from across the galaxy. Those aliens are some of PKD’s best–varied and strange like you’d find on Doctor Who (these could be incredible realized on the big or small screen one day).
It’s difficult to ignore how much the Glimmung is like both a god and a cult leader. Did he really tap all these people for their abilities, or because they were all alienated and weak-minded, or at least experiencing similar levels of despair? But what of his plan is real and what isn’t? If you’ve seen the Star Trek Voyager two-part story “Workforce,” you’ll get a similar vibe here.
As with so many PKD stories, the greatest thing to fear in the world of Galactic Pot-Healer is entropy. “No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.” Fans of psionics in PKD tales won’t be disappointed here. The best example of psionic people in Dick stories might be those submerged psychics in the Steven Spielberg adaptation of Dick’s Minority Report, but here it presages Star Trek’s most famous cyborg “collective.”
Check out prior reviews in my ongoing series looking at Dick’s novels and stories here:
Roog
Solar Lottery
The World Jones Made
The Man Who Japed
The Broken Bubble
Time Out of Joint
Now Wait for Last Year
We Can Build You
Simulacra
Galactic Pot-Healer
Philip K. Dick’s cover art archive
borg articles referencing Philip K. Dick
As a life-long Philip K. Dick enthusiast, I found Galactic Pot-Healer in the category of the more readable books from the author’s late era. It would be fun to see some good director try to make this into a movie. A recommended retro read, Galactic Pot-Healer is available in several editions here at Amazon.
