Galactic Pot Healer

What could an omnipresent and seemingly omnipotent entity want with a humble pot-healer? Or with the dozens of other odd creatures it has lured to Plowman's Planet? And if the Glimmung is a god, are its ends positive or malign? Combining quixotic adventure, spine-chilling horror, and deliriously paranoid theology, Galactic Pot-Healer is a uniquely Dickian voyage to alternate worlds of the imagination.

Joe Fernwright works as a pot-healer, a repairer of ceramics, in a dull future where there isn't much call for his skills. He's broke and bored when the offer from the Glimmung comes along. It might just be the answer to both his financial and spiritual problems, even if it does mean working on a strange project on Plowman's Planet with other assorted odd creatures. The only thing is that the Glimmung may just be divine and ask for more than Joe's commitment to the job . . .

The Glimmung is a mysterious alien, which looks alternately like a flaming wheel, a teenage girl, and a swirling mass of ocean life. In this hilarious Philip K. Dick novel, it recruits a disparate group of humans and aliens to help it raise a ruined temple from the bottom of the ocean.

Nick and his family are forced to leave Earth in order for him to keep his cat, Horace - because all pets are now banned, as they use up badly needed resources. They settle on Plowman's Planet, where they discover a variety of strange and wonderful alien lifeforms. But not all of these weird lifeforms are benevolent - and the family is involved in a series of increasingly dangerous mishaps. Can Horace and Nick manage to outwit the Wub, the Werjes, the Trobes - and the most dangerous of all, the Glimmung? Philip K. Dick's only children's book, first published after his death, brings together many of his most famous alien creations in one gently humorous tale.

A guide to the fantastic world of a science fiction legend Author of more than forty novels and myriad short stories over a three-decade literary career, Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) single-handedly reshaped twentieth-century science fiction. His influence has only increased since his death with the release of numerous feature films and television series based on his work, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, and The Man in the High Castle. In Understanding Philip K. Dick, Eric Carl Link introduces readers to the life, career, and work of this groundbreaking, prolific, and immeasurably influential force in American literature, media culture, and contemporary science fiction. Dick was at times a postmodernist, a mainstream writer, a pulp fiction writer, and often all three simultaneously, but as Link illustrates, he was more than anything else a novelist of ideas. From this vantage point, Link surveys Dick's tragicomic biography, his craft and career, and the recurrent ideas and themes that give shape and significance to his fiction. Link finds across Dick's writing career an intellectual curiosity that transformed his science fiction novels from bizarre pulp extravaganzas into philosophically challenging explorations of the nature of reality, and it is this depth of vision that continues to garner new audiences and fresh approaches to Dick's genre-defining tales.

Louis Rosen and his partners sell people--ingeniously designed, historically authentic simulacra of personages such as Edwin M. Stanton and Abraham Lincoln. The problem is that the only prospective buyer is a rapacious billionaire whose plans for the simulacra could land Louis in jail. Then there's the added complication that someone--or something--like Abraham Lincoln may not want to be sold. Is an electronic Lincoln any less alive than his creators? Is a machine that cares and suffers inferior to the woman Louis loves--a borderline psychopath who does neither? With irresistible momentum, intelligence, and wit, Philip K. Dick creates an arresting techno-thriller that suggests a marriage of Bladerunner and Barbarians at the Gate.

Hired to work for Quizmaster Verrick, the man in charge of the strange game in which the ruler of the Universe is selected, Ted Bentley is unaware that Leon Cartwright, the man destined to take over Verrick's job, is targeted for assassination or that Verrick is plotting to resume control of a not-so-random universe. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.