Galactic Pot-Healer

Galactic Pot-Healer is a science fiction novel by the American writer Philip K. Dick, published in 1969.

Joe Fernwright is a craftsman in a bureaucratic world where his craft has become unnecessary, and the novel's first pleasure is the deadpan account of his days: the offices, the pointless commissions, the letters he writes to a woman who does not want them. Then a being called Glimmung summons him to Sirius Five, where a mixed crew of experts has been assembled to lift the sunken cathedral of Heldscalla. The crew includes people who have something to lose at home, and Joe's position among them is the weakest, since he is a pot-mender and the job appears to need something else. Glimmung is powerful and divided against itself, and the specialists have to work out what they are being asked to do and who is telling them the truth. The novel belongs to the group of books Dick wrote in the late 1960s about predetermination and the experience of being pushed by forces that cannot be argued with, and it treats repair as a serious idea: the question Joe is left with is whether effort is worth making when the outcome is already settled. Dick had already used the Glimmung in a children's book he completed in 1966, Nick and the Glimmung, which was published much later.