Galactic Pot-Healer

Surrealism, absurdity, dadaism, abstraction. The twentieth century gave us plenty of words to describe the movement in art that eschewed normal dedication to order and jumbled together randomness, or at least stuff that might look random. Detractors argue, of course, that anyone can throw together nonsense. And they're right, of course. But it takes a genius to produce good nonsense. Joe Fernwright works as a healer of ceramic pots in a huge androgynous office complex in Cleveland. Business is slow, especially since ceramic pots have been outlawed in favor of plastic. To make matters worse, the government forces its citizens to dream about the glories of Che Guevera, inflation is diminishing his earnings, and he gets only limited use from telephone diciontaries and encyclopedias. Joe is almost ready to give up when someone badly in need of pot-healing services starts dropping messages in his toilet. After this mysterious benefactor transports him inside a crate, which he learns about by means of a radio show, Joe joins dozens of others on a galactic quest to Plowman's Planet where an enormous liquid (maybe) entity called Glimmung wishes to raise a gigantic cathedral from the depths of Mare Nostrum. Or possibly Hell. After that things really get strange. Of course, as with Douglas Adams or Neil Barrett there's much more at work here than pure silliness. The insanity is all being carefully orchestrated so as to make us think about the big questions of redemption, indivdiualism, determinism, death, purpose, and many others besides. And the philosophy in turn gives way to yet more insanity, such as when Joe argues with a computer over whether Glimmung's arch-nemesis' victims are sitting ducks or sitting hens. Phillip K. Dick obeyed few of the rules that any beginning writer is told to follow. But time and again, when we read his works we see his shrewd insight cutting effortlessly through the morass of modern thought. Consider at the start where Joe and other bored office drones play "The Game", which consists of running English phrases through a compujterized translator to Japanese and then back to English, and then trying to figure out the original phrase from the result. Absurd, no? Except that in our modern world, thanks to the wonder of the internet, many folks actually play such games with the Babblefish program, and often with hilarious results. That's Phillip K Dick for you. Don't laugh too hard at his notions, because they might get sneaky and come true.

In Galactic Pot-Healer, Dick's attention was more on creating a myth than on writing a novel. The characters are relatively undeveloped, and the science-fictional conceits are used rather casually as vehicles for archetypes; the work is almost a Jungian allegory. It does not lack Dick's characteristic humanizing touches, but its tendency toward myth makes it unique among his novels. It is certainly as dense with themes and ideas as any fiction he ever wrote. Joe Fernwright, the main character, is found at the beginning in an oppressive future dystopia where policemen stop people for walking too slowly, all phone calls are monitored, and everyone is programmed to have a common dream every night. He is a pot-healer; that is, he has the skill of not just mending but restoring broken pots to their exact original condition. A godlike extraterrestrial being called the Glimmung enlists him on a team made up of species from throughout the galaxy to help raise a sunken cathedral called Heldscalla on the Glimmung's home world, Plowman's Planet. From this Faustian undertaking, Joe experiences an awakening to self-knowledge. This is a story of hope and ultimately religious transcendence.

.KD.'s secretly cerebral novel whose protagonist, an average Joe named, appropriately enough, Joe Fernwright, is a sound showcase for his usual talents. The bizarre story begins with Joe bored out of his mind at a desk job in the future-2040s, which was the future in 1963, when this book came out. Recently divorced (he half-heartedly longs for the company of his estranged wife, whose intelligence he respects), his boredom at his desk job is alleviated only by long-distance games such as guessing film titles from metaphorical rephrasings and telling jokes based on computerized translations (similar to Google's German translation program). The book's plot takes off when Joe is recruited by a huge alien intelligence known as Glimmung that uses the unusual expedient of leaving a message in the water closet of his toilet. (Later the Glimmung, on its home planet, will communicate from the bottom of the sea by means of messages on bottles.) Joe is recruited because of his expertise in ceramics and their reconstruction. The extraterrestrial monster seems to have a good heart but is intent on raising a cathedral from the bottom of the sea and reconstructing its shards, to which end the Glimmung-manifesting most reliably as two spinning rings, one of fire, the other of water, and sometimes a giant young female face-has recruited depressed and suicidal aliens (many of whose species Joe has had the privilege of eating) from all over the galaxy. The planet upon which they congregate affords Joe time for a dalliance with an ambitious humanoid female, who proves to be his confederate, along with an intelligent robot (who is funny, and has a tray table with phone built into his chest), as events unfold. The water-steeped planet has a long history of warfare and alien take-overs and is susceptible to Solaris-like manifestations, such as Joe's striking encounter, underwater, with his own future corpse. There is also the Book of the Kalends, which is said to correctly predict all future events, including Joe's destruction of the Glimmung (thus foiling the very purpose for which he was recruited to the extraterrestrial planet's surface). Tension mounts as the Glimmung's equal and opposite foe the Black Glimmung engages it a battle to the death. The foreign workers grapple with the meaning of fate, the choice between exciting danger and boring work at home, and the metaphysics of fate. At one point the Glimmung engulfs all its recruits in its own body, allowing them a closer consciousness of both each other and the entity that surrounds them-endosymbiosis with humans as the symbionts of a higher power. As always, Dick's pulp provides the commercial rationale for a mediation on evolution and metaphysics. A fun book whose alien archeology project reminds us of the preciousness of handicraft in age of mechanization.

Don't hold out for the film version-- this story one will never be made into one, though it's one of Philip K. Dick's most interesting and bizarre novels. The story begins on a freedom-challenged earth of the future and travels to a distant planet where an oddly limited godlike being is on a mission to resurrect a mythological city. Between the variety of aliens, the psychics and their book of sometimes misleading predictions, the (supposedly) living dead, and the ambiguous "god" and his evil counterpart, this is more a religious allegory story than science fiction or fantasy (as Dick's work is sometimes mislabeled) and it raises a lot of questions. Philip K. Dick's symbolic story veers miles away from the comfortable good versus evil and faith versus fear struggles other authors offer. (Remember this is the guy who for years received messages from God and/or aliens through a pink beam of light.) There's no tidy ending here, but as always it's the ideas and their implications that are the heart of Philip K. Dick's novels. Those will remain with your long after the story is over.

Here Dick explores the theme of how a god can be irrational and somewhat malevolent, like the Old Testament Yahweh, and still be a god. On another level, this book is saturated with sadness, a sense of loss. A godlike entity known as the Glimmung has summoned a group of colonists, typical PKD average Joes and Joans, to a far off planet called Plowman's Planet. Each of the people summoned possesses a unique ability, a talent, that is desperately needed by Glimmung for some purpose which is not readily revealed.Joe Fernwright is the PKD everyman, and his talent is healing pots, that is, he is able to repair ancient clay vessels by essentially feeling how they were and how they want to be repaired. Joe is of course attracted and repelled by a dark haired girl, Mali. Both become pawns of the Glimmung in his/its quest to raise an ancient sunken temple called Heldscalla from it's watery grave. Here the tale twists. Up until now, there are plenty of PKD ruminations on religion and relationships, but suddenly the story takes on an almost Cthulhu-like tone. There are other forces at play, and the Glimmung may or may not be what it claims.Dick as usual is commenting on the relationship between reality, what we believe, and how we have arrived at our individual version of reality. Here he seems to be going on at length on the issue of self-worth, and finding one's humble gifts worthy in the grand, galactic scheme of things. Dick invests Joe with a modest skill, repairing pots, but then does an about-face by making this pedestrian job one of great importance, on par with restoring great paintings. As the story evolves, Joe becomes less of a sad sack and more of an existential soul adrift. Joe's world becomes filled with paranoia and dread the more he learns about Plowman's Planet. Alongside Dick's other sci-fi novels, Galactic Pot-Healer is less frivolous in tone than most of his other books (no Lord Running Clam here, folks), despite the title. The love relationship between the male and female characters is also one fraught with angst and emptiness. Yet somehow in the middle of all this bleakness, Dick reigns in his story and refuses to be overwhelmed with despair.One gets the sense that Dick ended writing a different novel than he had intended and with a different ending than he originally had in mind. It's also a variation on the theme that crops up in "The Divine Invasion", "A Maze of Death", and some of his more theologically inclined short stories. This book is more unsettling than most Dick novels, and darker themes are touched on that leave an odd, haunting effect. It's a strange novel. Galactic Pot-Healer is in many ways a companion novel to "A Maze of Death" and also "Flow My Tears...". Similar in the emotional range of the story and the interactions between characters. It is less philosophical than "Man in the High Castle", yet contains a provocative view point.