Galactic Pot-Healer
First British paperback, 1972
Galactic Pot-Healer (1969) is a science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick following a bored, unemployed craftsman living under a repressive government who is summoned by a godlike alien entity to help raise a sunken cathedral from the bottom of an alien sea. This is the first British paperback edition, published by Pan Books
Softcover. First British Paperback Edition. Pan Books 23337 (25p). Cover art by Ian Miller. London: Pan Books, 1972. Levack 17d. Wintz & Hyde SF11.6. ISBN: 0330233378. #11010.
Fine.
Softcover. First British Paperback Edition. Pan Books 23337 (25p). Cover art by Ian Miller. London: Pan Books, 1972. Levack 17d. Wintz & Hyde SF11.6. ISBN: 0330233378. #11010.
Fine.
Additional Details
Galactic Pot-Healer (1969) opens in the Communal North American Citizens' Republic in the year 2046, in a drab totalitarian state where most people sit in cubicles doing nothing useful and the government dole pays in inflationary printed notes that lose eighty percent of their value within forty-eight hours. Joe Fernwright is a pot-healer, a craftsman who repairs broken ceramic ware, the best on Earth by his own assessment, but he has had no work for seven months. His father did the same job before him. Almost no one needs his services.
To fill the void, Joe plays The Game with a loose network of other bored government workers scattered across the planet, connected by phone. The Game involves feeding titles and phrases, often from books, into translation computers and challenging opponents to identify the original from the mangled result. "The Lattice-work Gun-stinging Insect" is The Great Gatsby. "Those for Which the Male Homosexual Exacts Transit Tax" is For Whom the Bell Tolls. The sequence is one of the funniest passages in Dick's work, and also one of the saddest. These people are so thoroughly trapped by a system that has nothing meaningful for them to do. "Nothing but the harsh vacuity of their collective society," as Dick puts it, and The Game is all they have.
This all changes when Joe is summoned by the Glimmung, an ancient and vast entity that has migrated to Sirius Five and is assembling artisans from across the galaxy for the single purpose of raising Heldscalla, the sunken cathedral of an extinct civilization, from the bottom of an alien sea and restoring it to its original state. Joe accepts, partly out of desperation and partly because the invitation is the first suggestion in years that he might be needed for something.
The novel that follows is less concerned with the raising of the cathedral than with what it costs and what it means. The Glimmung is godlike but ambiguous, simultaneously benevolent and manipulative, and the Book of the Kalends, a prophetic text that records everything that has ever happened or will ever happen, predicts that the mission will fail. Whether the Glimmung is trying to defy fate or fulfill it is a question Dick never quite resolves. The artisans Joe works alongside include beings from multiple species, all of them damaged in one way or another, all of them brought to Sirius Five by the same obscure pull toward something larger than themselves.
Dick would return to this world in Nick and the Glimmung, a children's novel written around the same time but published posthumously. Galactic Pot-Healer was first published as a Berkley Medallion paperback original in 1969.
To fill the void, Joe plays The Game with a loose network of other bored government workers scattered across the planet, connected by phone. The Game involves feeding titles and phrases, often from books, into translation computers and challenging opponents to identify the original from the mangled result. "The Lattice-work Gun-stinging Insect" is The Great Gatsby. "Those for Which the Male Homosexual Exacts Transit Tax" is For Whom the Bell Tolls. The sequence is one of the funniest passages in Dick's work, and also one of the saddest. These people are so thoroughly trapped by a system that has nothing meaningful for them to do. "Nothing but the harsh vacuity of their collective society," as Dick puts it, and The Game is all they have.
This all changes when Joe is summoned by the Glimmung, an ancient and vast entity that has migrated to Sirius Five and is assembling artisans from across the galaxy for the single purpose of raising Heldscalla, the sunken cathedral of an extinct civilization, from the bottom of an alien sea and restoring it to its original state. Joe accepts, partly out of desperation and partly because the invitation is the first suggestion in years that he might be needed for something.
The novel that follows is less concerned with the raising of the cathedral than with what it costs and what it means. The Glimmung is godlike but ambiguous, simultaneously benevolent and manipulative, and the Book of the Kalends, a prophetic text that records everything that has ever happened or will ever happen, predicts that the mission will fail. Whether the Glimmung is trying to defy fate or fulfill it is a question Dick never quite resolves. The artisans Joe works alongside include beings from multiple species, all of them damaged in one way or another, all of them brought to Sirius Five by the same obscure pull toward something larger than themselves.
Dick would return to this world in Nick and the Glimmung, a children's novel written around the same time but published posthumously. Galactic Pot-Healer was first published as a Berkley Medallion paperback original in 1969.
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