All reviews copyright 1984-2015 Evelyn C. Leeper.
GALACTIC POT-HEALER by Philip K. Dick:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/08/2013]
GALACTIC POT-HEALER by Philip K. Dick (ISBN 978-0-679-75297-4) is a later Dick novel, after he has had time to develop a distinctive voice:
"A man is an angel that has become deranged, Joe Fernwright thought. Once they--all of them--had been genuine angels, and at that time they had a choice between good and evil, so it was easy being an angel. And then something happened. Something went wrong or broke down or failed. And they had been faced with the necessity of choosing not good or evil but the lesser of two evils, and so that had unhinged them and now each was a man. ... Joe felt weak and unsure of himself, and ahead of him lay a terrible job--terrible in the sense that it would put inordinate demands on his waning strength. I am like a gray thing, he thought. Bustling along with the currents of air that tumble me,that roll me, like a gray puff-ball, on and on."
At first, the view of Muslims as crazed jihadist terrorists seems to pre-date 9/11 here: when the "Padre booth" is dialed to Allah, the first thing it says is, "Kill your foe." Yet it is also true that when Joe replies, "I have no foe. Except for my own weariness and fear of failure," the Padre says, "Those are enemies which you must overcome in a jihad; you must show yourself to be a man, and a man, a true man, is a fighter who fights back." In other words, jihad is not necessarily a war carried out against other people; as many have pointed out, it can be against personal shortcomings or other abstractions. (One criticism I have of the Padre booth is that for most of the settings Dick uses the actual theology or belief system of the religion, but for Judaism he resorts to the booth recommending a bowl of fatworm soup. One, that is cultural rather than theological, and two, worms of any sort would not be kosher. So he is not just ignoring the religion and treating it as "funny culture" but he is actually contradicting the religion.)
Dick is not strong on zoology either. He refers to "the life of an insect, a spider," implying that spiders are insects.