Gazumped!

Terry Gilliam, the mad-scientist animator of Monty Python and director of bizarro films like Time Bandits, had this to say about my favourite author:

"For everyone lost in the endlessly multiplicating realities of the modern world, remember: Philip K. Dick got there first".

The reason I bring it up is because (yet again) it's just happened to me.  Loyal readers will know that I have just completed a protracted series of dubiously humorous puns about Ernest Hemingway and his novels, and so I chose to unwind by reading PKD's book Galactic Pot-Healer.  On page 13 I came across references to several works by Serious Constricting-Path, including The Male Offspring In Addition Gets Out Of Bed, and Those For Which The Male Homosexual Exacts Transit Tax.  His Hemingway references weren't intended to be funny, just puzzling, but I did find it incredibly surprising that they were there at all.

Galactic Pot-Healer is a very strange book.  It concerns the fate of Joe Fernwright, a professional repairer of ceramic pots, who is recruited by a vastly powerful alien being that plans to raise a sunken cathedral from the floor of an alien ocean and needs someone to fix the smashed up plates.  Shortly before I went to sleep I came to a part describing how Joe meets face to face underwater with his own rotting corpse.  That generates some crazy dreams, let me tell you.  I woke up in the middle of the night thinking I was an old man trapped in a hospital.  I careened around the room looking for the way out, and when I eventually flicked on the light and realized who and where I was, I laughed with relief.  Which didn't exactly endear me to my Smaller Half.

Good book though.