Galactic Pot-Healer (1969)

Galactic Pot-Healer is a 1969 science-fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. Written in 1967–1968 and first published by Berkley Publishing Corporation as a paperback original, the novel belongs to Dick's late-1960s work concerned with predetermination and dualistic conflict. Dick's earlier young-adult novel Nick and the Glimmung shares elements with Galactic Pot-Healer.

The novel follows Joe Fernwright, an unemployed pot-healer on a bureaucratic future Earth, who is recruited by the alien being Glimmung to help raise the sunken cathedral Heldscalla on Sirius 5. The plot combines comic and surreal adventure with questions of fate, failed creation, and the value of effort when success is uncertain. Critics have often read the novel through Joe's craft, the Book of the Kalends, and Glimmung's divided nature, emphasizing themes of repair, prediction, agency, allegory, and spiritual crisis. Contemporary reviews were mixed, and later critics have generally treated the book as neglected and uneven but significant within Dick's fiction.

Background and publication

Galactic Pot-Healer was written in 1967–1968 and published in 1969, placing it among Dick's late-1960s science-fiction novels. It was first published in the United States by Berkley Publishing Corporation as a paperback original.

The Glimmung material predated Galactic Pot-Healer in Dick's writing. He completed Nick and the Glimmung, a young-adult novel, in 1966, although it was not published until 1988. Subterranean Press describes the book as Dick's only surviving young-adult novel and notes that it shares elements with Galactic Pot-Healer. Archival records at California State University, Fullerton also preserve Glimmung-related draft material for Galactic Pot-Healer, including an outline and related material using variant titles associated with Plowman's Planet.

After its 1969 Berkley publication, Galactic Pot-Healer appeared in a Science Fiction Book Club hardback edition and in a 1971 British hardback edition from Victor Gollancz. Later United States editions included a 1994 Vintage Books edition and a 2013 Mariner Books edition.

Plot

Joe Fernwright lives on a dull, overregulated future Earth, where his trade has become nearly useless. He is a pot-healer, a craftsman who can repair broken ceramics so completely that the restored object seems never to have been damaged. There is little demand for the work, however, and Joe survives on a veteran's dole while owing alimony to his ex-wife, Kate. He spends his empty office hours playing a telephone word game with acquaintances around the world. After deciding that he may quit the game and spend his saved coins consulting an oracle, he receives a strange note: "Pot-healer, I need you. And I will pay."

The offer becomes stranger. Joe learns that the payment will be in crumbles, the currency of Sirius 5, and that the amount offered is a fortune. His inquiry attracts agents from the Quietude Civil Authority, who require him to report to them daily. Research through an encyclopedia service tells him that Sirius 5, also called Plowman's Planet, is associated with a powerful being called the Glimmung. Another message tells Joe to leave for Plowman's Planet. Hidden writing reveals the project: Glimmung intends to raise Heldscalla, the sunken cathedral of the Fog Things.

Joe's situation on Earth collapses. After giving away much of his saved money, he is arrested and realizes that the authorities have already marked him. As he tries to escape, he is suddenly transported underwater into a crate in Glimmung's basement. Glimmung frees him and appears in shifting, impossible forms, speaking through an old phonograph. It sends Joe to the spaceport and gives him a beautiful potsherd. At the Cleveland Spaceport, Joe fears that he has lost his skill, but Glimmung, appearing in human form, tells him that the mission will give his life meaning.

On the starship to Sirius 5, Joe meets Mali Yojez, a marine biologist also recruited by Glimmung. Many of the passengers are Glimmung's employees, forming a strange interplanetary work crew that includes humans, humanoids, and nonhuman specialists. Among them are Harper Baldwin, a government psychokineticist, and a variety of alien life-forms. The recruits compare stories and begin to suspect coercion: several have recently fallen under police suspicion, while others were suicidal before Glimmung found them. Joe and Mali grow close after using a machine that predicts their future as a couple. Mali distrusts the prediction because a similar machine once falsely promised happiness with a man named Ralf, whose relationship with her ended violently.

On Plowman's Planet, Joe encounters the planet's single book, written by the Kalends. The book becomes the planet's history and appears to predict the future. It says that Glimmung opposes the Kalends and wants to defeat them. It also predicts that raising Heldscalla will fail and that most of the crew will be destroyed or altered. At a hotel meeting, the recruits debate whether to leave. Glimmung appears in its vast natural form, a shifting wheel-like body of fire and water, and its arrival causes the floor to collapse.

The crew travels to the work site, where Joe receives a robot assistant named Willis and sees technology that Earth had officially declared impossible. The work force includes not only the human and humanoid recruits but also stranger beings, including a gastropod. A Kalend gives Joe another version of the book, which predicts that something he finds in the cathedral will cause him to kill Glimmung and stop the raising forever. Against orders, Joe decides to visit the underwater cathedral. Mali goes with him. Willis explains that Heldscalla is a temple to Amalita, linked to Borel, Amalita's powerful and evil counterpart.