Name: Galactic pot-healer
ISBN: 9780307495617

Galactic pot-healer

Galactic Pot-Healer is a science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, first published in 1969. The novel deals with a number of philosophical and political issues such as repressive societies, fatalism, and the search for meaning in life. Dick also wrote a children's book set in the same universe, Nick and the Glimmung, in 1966. It was published posthumously in 1988. The story concerns a man who thanklessly heals pots in a totalitarian future Earth, only to be summoned by a godlike alien known as Glimmung, who has recruited him as part of a multispecies specialist team sent to "Plowman's Planet" (or Sirius Five) for a mystical quest, which is to raise the sunken cathedral of Heldscalla from a surreal alien ocean.

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ahazred8taApr 2025

Irony: the original bladerunner novel was about a courier carrying surgical instruments so that the doctor would not be arrested for black market medical treatment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bladerunner

FWIW I was a Galactic Pot-Healer fan.

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pmoriartyOct 2022

I consider Ubik to be Dick's best work... so if you found it only "somewhat intriguing", I doubt you'll be any more pleased with anything else he wrote.

That said, if you are interested in reading more by him, of his books I can recommend:

- The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

- Martian Time-Slip

- Galactic Pot Healer

- Eye in the Sky

- the middle part of Lies, Inc

Some of his short stories:

- Beyond Lies the Wub

- Faith of Our Fathers

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atombenderOct 2022

For those who have read Dick's "standards", I recommend one of his novels that never appears in these lists, and probably never will: Galactic Pot-Healer (1968).

PKD later said he couldn't call writing it, this being the period where he consumed copious amounts of amphetamines, and produced a ridiculous number of novels and short stories. I still think it's one of his most enjoyable books.

The plot is a ramshackle Vonnegutian comic fantasy featuring a totalitarian dystopia, an alien demigod, a man who "heals" broken ceramic pottery, and an early version of the old Internet pasttime where you use machine translation tools to translate English into other languages and then back again in order to produce humorously mangled sentences. It's a weird, fun, sad book.

Also worth mentioning is A Maze of Death (1970), which is a creepy alien planet exploration story that becomes something else and unexpected, and probably the closest Dick came to writing a Harlan Ellison story.

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pmoriartyMay 2021

I strongly recommend reading Ubik. To me it is his strongest and most consistently good book.

I used to love The Three Stigmata too, but when I tried to read it again recently I couldn't get in to it either. I do think you have to be in the right mood to savor a Dick book, so maybe I was in the wrong mood that time.

The other first-tier PKD book for me is Martian Time-Slip.

Second-tier PKD books for me are VALIS and Galactic Pot Healer.

Third-tier are Maze of Death, Eye in the Sky, and Divine Invasion (the 2nd in the VALIS trilogy.. didn't like the 3rd in the series, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer at all).

Many of his other books, like Lies, Inc, also have great parts in them, but are kind of inconsistent.

Some of his short stories are excellent. My favorites:

- Beyond Lies the Wub

- Roog

- The Father Thing

- Faith of Our Fathers

I didn't really like A Scanner Darkly, nor Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep and would consider them of minor import had not movies been made of them. Other books in this category are Now Wait for Last Year (made in to Total Recall) and Time Out of Joint (made in to The Truman Show.. though the book is much darker). The movie Minority Report was based on another minor short story of his, as The Terminator might have been partially based on his story Second Variety.

Virtually all of the movies made from his work only bear only a very slight resemblance to the originals, which tends to be a lot darker, a lot less action-filled, and much more thought-provoking than the Hollywood adaptations.

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atombenderMay 2021

Dick certainly refined his skill throughout his career. But at the same time, we can't deny that he wrote a lot of garbage in between his masterpieces.

For example, in the same 4-year time period as masterpieces like Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, we got forgettable (and in some cases quite terrible) books like The Ganymede Takeover, The Game-Players of Titan, The Penultimate Truth, The Simulacra, and of course the universally maligned The Crack in Space.

The sad truth is that Dick was fueling his writing habit with drugs (particularly amphetamines) during this time period. He wrote six novels in one 12-month period during 1963-1964. It's a marvel that even the clunkers are fairly readable things, though they're often throwbacks to his earlier pre-1960s work. Another sad truth is that Dick's output was also drive by the need for money (by 1964 he had three ex-wives).

The odd one out from this period is Galactic Pot-Healer, which Dick claimed to have no memory of having written (too many amphetamines), and which he practically disowned. But it's one of his best, a colourful Vonnegutian mix of tragedy and comedy.

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pmoriartyJun 2020

I'd add Ubik to this as well, and would personally rate it higher than the Three Stigmata. For me, Ubik is PKD's greatest and most accessible book.

1st rank - Ubik, The Three Stigmata, A Martian Time Slip, Faith of Our Fathers

2nd rank - (The Divine Invasion or The Galactic Pot Healer ... don't remember which now... it's been a long time), A Maze of Death

3rd rank - VALIS, Eye in the Sky

Honorable mention: the middle of Lies, Inc -- it has a weak start and ending, but the middle is up there with the best PKD has ever written.

I found The Transmigration of Timothy Archer to be pretty boring, but I didn't make it all the way through, and some PKD books (like Lies, Inc) start dull and turn great, so I might give it another go sometime.. but the impression I got when first reading it was that this was a book written around the time PKD was starting to transition to writing more "serious literature" (aka not scifi), and to me PKD is just much stronger at writing scifi, particularly of the really mind-bending, bad acid trip kind, and he just wasn't cut out to write "serious literature"... so yeah, right now I'd pass on The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

I'm also kind of sick of his obsession with his pink light mystical experience.. I wish he'd just gotten over it already and moved on to something else. Writing about it once was more than enough.

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