Miskatonic University Press

Galactic Pot-Healer

literature

I’m continuing to read my way through my Philip K. Dick books. However readable they all once were, few are rereadable.

Cover
Cover

I’m up to Galactic Pot-Healer, from 1969. It’s typical PKD in many ways: nebbishy male protagonist with a shrewish ex-wife, stuck in a dead-end job, no money; gets mixed up with a group of people, none of them developed characters that seem like real people; one is an attractive woman who soon has sex with the protagonist; they all travel somewhere far away—Europe, the Moon, a different solar system—on a spaceship, and, unlike most SF, no attention is given to how any of that works; reality becomes confused, or God appears, or both, etc. I dropped it midway.

On the first page (just inside the cover of this paperback, there are no endpaper or flyleaves), there is this inscription:

From Peter to Peter
From Peter to Peter

Peter,

May the P.K.D. “Death-Cult” live forever.

Enjoy, Peter

I like to think that Peter inscribed the book to himself but forgot he did so, and when he found it began to question if reality existed.