Philip K. Dick: Galactic Pot Healer

I have long held Dick to in my holy trinity of Sci Fi writers, alongside Vonnegut and Asimov, but this books really serves to highlight the ways in which he can't hold his own alongside the other two.  As always, in Pot-Healer he is observant, profound and very nearly clarivoyant, but as in most of his other works the structure and plot are just sloppy enough that it loses something.  In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, I found myself giving him that benefit of the doubt that we sometimes grant out of instinct when a book is generally well regarded, and assumed that the inconsistencies or strange, misplaced beats were purposeful and woven into the overall theme somehow.  Unlike in Sheep, however, those moments were so prevalent in Pot-Healer that I can't bring myself to give Dick the same kind of credit here.

Which is a shame, because he managed to put something into words that I really love:

"What do I really yearn for? he asked himself.  That for which oral gratification is a surrogate. Something vast, he decided; he felt the primordial hunger gape, huge-jawed, as if to cannibalize everything around him.  To place what was outside inside."

This is exactly my experience.  I love to eat, drink, kiss, bite, swallow, anything one can do with one's mouth.  And it is exactly as Dick details: the desire to consume, to somehow be bigger and exterior to something else.  I also happen to have the obverse urge as well:  to sing, fart, belch, talk, yell and otherwise put what was part of me outside of myself, to somehow make my nature part of the greater order.  And so I have a blog.