Review: galactic pot healer by Philip k Dick

[lemming]

What's extraordinary about Philip K Dick is that while he often has his characters (even a robot in this book) discuss theological ideas and quote poetry, he is rarely accused of being pretentious. It never feels like he does it to make his own ideas or characters seem deeper than they are, maybe because every page is filled with ideas that could only come from Philip K Dick. This also explains why he can write such plainspoken prose that's still unmistakably him. First his ideas are plausible yet inventive and ahead of their time. I saw an ad the other day for a phone number you can SMS words to and get a reply with a dictionary definition of the word that you SMSed. This is reminiscent of the dictionary and encyclopedia hotlines in Galactic Pot-Healer. But the spin PKD puts on this simple, plausible idea is more ingenious than the idea itself. In the book the technology is supposedly expensive, so the government has put a quota on how many times you can call the encyclopedia robot per day; in other words, a technology that should have made information easier to get at has restricted it. Think of the internet restrictions in China for a real world illustration of this irony. But don't think too long, because PKD has a million more ideas to throw at you, which also makes this novel fast paced with the perfect balance between depth and a sense of fun. The only thing that prevented me from awarding five stars was a weird digression about the lead having believed that robots were impossible after he talked with robots on the phone in the beginning. Also the ending... While not as gloomy as I expected from other reviews and the buildup in the novel itself, it's unusual to come across a down ending that seems tacked on, but this one did