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    Galactic Pot-Healer
    Galactic Pot-Healer
    Galactic Pot-Healer
    Audiobook6 hours

    Galactic Pot-Healer

    Written by Philip K. Dick

    Narrated by Phil Gigante

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    A powerful andenigmatic alien recruits humans and aliens to help it restore a sunken cathedral in this touching and hilarious novel.

    Sometimes even gods need help. In Galactic Pot-Healer that god is an alien creature known as The Glimmung, which looks alternately like a flaming wheel, a teenage girl, and a swirling mass of ocean life. In order to raise a sunken city, he summons beings from across the galaxy to Plowman's Planet. Joe Fernwright is one of those summoned, needed for his skills at pot-healing—repairing broken ceramics. But from the moment Joe arrives on Plowman's Planet, things start to go awry. Told as only Philip K. Dick can, Galactic Pot-Healer is a wildly funny tale of aliens, gods, and ceramics.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateApr 16, 2013
    ISBN9781469251950
    Author

    Philip K. Dick

    Over a writing career that spanned three decades, PHILIP K. DICK (1928–1982) published 36 science fiction novels and 121 short stories in which he explored the essence of what makes man human and the dangers of centralized power. Toward the end of his life, his work turned to deeply personal, metaphysical questions concerning the nature of God. Eleven novels and short stories have been adapted to film, notably Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly, as well as television's The Man in the High Castle. The recipient of critical acclaim and numerous awards throughout his career, including the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards, Dick was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2005, and between 2007 and 2009, the Library of America published a selection of his novels in three volumes. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

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    Reviews for Galactic Pot-Healer

    3.5/5

    272 ratings7 reviews

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    • 3/5
      A very good (but not quite Ubik-great) Philip Dick novel. A classic Dick future is painted that seems advanced and cheap at the same time; shiny enough but with dustballs in every corner.
      The characters grapple with meaninglessness, rendered at times in shockingly simple yet sincere prose:
      I am like a gray thing, he thought. Bustling along with the currents of air that tumble me, that roll me, like a gray puff-ball, on and on.
      At other times, taking on a Beckett-like feel:
      And prepared to wait. Until it comes, he said to himself. Unless I physically starve to death first. I will not voluntarily die, now, he thought harshly. I want to stay alive. And wait. And wait.
      He waited.
      The meaninglessness is escaped for a time as the characters strive to decipher the meanings of messages on notes in bottles, in self-revising books, and in dreams.
      There's a bunch of ideas; it's a little sloppy; but it's Philip K. Dick: a paranoid genius in a hurry to get it all down on paper...
    • 4/5
      More that most of his other novels, the main character, in this case Joe Fernwright, doesn't so much exist as drifts from one scene to another. Everything he touches, he brings doom to, and though you want to grab Joe by the shoulders and try to shake him out of his fatalistic ennui, you can't help but sit back and watch the train wreck of his life. Dick doesn't pull any punches and keeps his characters consistent, right to the very sardonic end.
      One of my favourite Dick novels.
    • 3/5
      This novel was a bit of a subdued, yet still wild, ride through the mind of Philip K. Dick. The premise is enticing, but there is a sense of humor and satire-- especially regarding the ending, associated with it. Overall, I felt this to be a little detached from the rest of the oeuvre that I've seen by Dick, and his style seems to be verging on experimentation and poise rather than the usual romp through science fiction that I have become associated with through reading him. Nonetheless, it was not a bad read, per se, but rather an unexpected one. Nevertheless, it was still worthwhile.

      3 stars.
    • 3/5
      Disclaimer - I'm not much of a fan of PKD, but I love some of his lines and some of his ideas, so I keep reading despite the sexism, paranoia, etc.

      Also - Spoiler Alert - some of what I say below is quite far in the book, but otoh it's not exactly spoilers to the plot, and the plot isn't much anyway... but if you're *very* sensitive you might want to stop here.

      I found this to be quite clever, but not really memorable. Most of the humor was the kind that I realize is funny only after I've turned the page, and I say to myself, oh, that was cute, eh." The robot Willis is funny in a less subtle way, as are the automatons like the reference phone services.

      I never did figure out the connection (if that's even the right word for it?) between Mr. Job and real coins and suicide. If you understand, please comment.

      I would have liked more about pot-healing - Joe restores artifacts, doesn't just repair them. I guess there was enough description of ordinary potter's work, and enough mumbo-jumbo about healing, but I'd love to have seen Joe in action.

      I do like the various games - Translations, Headlines, and Thingisms.

      A sample line. "Deities do not fall ten floors to the basement." Not much out of context, eh? Read the book yourself to appreciate it as I do.

      I will read more PDK. I started with the stories upon which the movies were based, and that helped, as I had a glimmer of understanding about what was going on. Then I read some short stories, and am moving up. This, I don't think, would make a very good movie. It's a short novel."
    • 4/5
      This is a wacked-out, trippy Philip K Dick book with a philosophical heart. A man in a obsolete job in a US run by an overbearing socialist government is offered a job by a mysterious alien. Before I continue with the plot, let me interject that the protagonist plays this funny game with his friends to kill time. One fellow thinks of a book title, calls an English to Japanese translation service, has it translated to Japanese and then back into English. The second fellow has to guess the book title from the garbled translation ie Large Exhalation Flying Insect= The Great Gatsby. Anyway, the main character catches a flight to the alien's home planet. The protagonist is hired to repair an enormous pot from a sunken city. It's impossible to condense the reasons why he has to fix the pot and why the city must be raised from the ocean. The book is really a meditation on free-will versus predestination. Do we choose what we do or is everything preordained and if things are preordained, should one sink into fatalism. As with most of Philip Dicks' books the ending is not dramatic. With many of his book, you get the Dick would have these great ideas and then get bored with them in the last third of the book. Despite my reservation about the end, I highly recommend this story and if you have not read his work, it's a good one to start with.
    • 3/5
      Not a great book. Definitely not one of PKD's better books. It's about a man named Joe Fernwright, a "pot healer" of increasingly rare ceramic pots in a dystopian future earth who plays computerized games with people all over the world to keep from going batty. (This was written in the '60s.) A giant omniscient alien named Glimmung picks him up, along with possibly thousands of other human and alien "specialists," to go to a distant planet thought to be deserted to raise a cathedral dedicated to a couple of gods from the ocean for no apparent reason. The plot is iffy, the dialogue terrible, the character development non-existent, and it's just not a very good book. As a big PKD fan, I find myself disappointed. Recommended only for PKD fans.
    • 3/5
      Interesting but not PKD at his best. The central character is well-rendered but the novel sputters along, weird and tangential.