Plot Summary
The novel takes place in a dismal future America, the “Communal North American Citizen's Republic.” The United States government has become extremely intrusive and repressive, monitoring the actions, speech and even thoughts of its citizens.
The protagonist, Joe Fernwright, is a pot-healer, one who can perfectly restore pottery to brand new condition. Joe finds himself constantly depressed and idle at the opening of the novel. He is unemployed and on a war veteran's social security benefit, given that ceramic pottery has been replaced by plastics, and his profession is not in great demand. He longs for purpose and meaning in life. His one entertainment is to call various friends on the worldwide telephone network and swap puzzles. These puzzles are based on imperfect translations of sayings and book titles obtained by using language translation computers available to anyone. The object of the game is to guess the original from the translation.
Joe finds meaning when he is summoned to "Plowman's Planet"/Sirius Five by a mysterious highly evolved alien, Glimmung, with seemingly godlike powers. Along with other similarly talented but depressed and alienated people and creatures from all over the galaxy they are employed by Glimmung, in a grand endeavor to raise an ancient sunken cathedral from the ocean floor.
Glimmung is also in a struggle with the Kalends, a species gifted with precognition who are constantly writing a book that supposedly foretells the future, one which inevitably is proven right. Glimmung is determined to continue with his struggle, even when the book predicts certain failure.
At the conclusion of the book, Fernwright and his companions are offered the opportunity to join a gestalt or hive mind that also encompasses Glimmung. Fernwright and an unnamed octopoid companion alone refuse the offer. Fernwright is then given various options, such as going back to earth, going with the octopoid to its planet, going to Mali's planet ( a young humanoid female he had become romantically involved with and who chose to become a part of the collective conscious ) or stay back on Sirius Five. The gastropod also suggests to him that he should start creating pots with the tools Glimmung has given him instead of just healing them. The story ends by saying the first pot he created was 'awful.'
Read more about this topic: Galactic Pot-Healer
Famous quotes containing the words plot and/or summary:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments; and, as it is the shortest and most agreeable and summary feeling imaginable, the first moment of an universal republic would convert me into an advocate for single and uncontradicted despotism. The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, nor worse, for a people than another.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)