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.
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