Chapter Four
“...took ten days”
Here it is confirmed that faster-than-light travel is not only made possible in Nick’s time but is also used commercially.
“‘...is trying to get in.’”
Horace the cat’s apparent irrational behavior of staring at a seemingly random wall of the ship seems a frivolous detail. On closer inspection, after what is revealed in chapter six, it may possibly be a hint to the presence of the very being whose fate is tied to both Graham and Fernwright together, Glimmung.
Chapter Five
“‘Orange forests; how odd.’”
Here the reader discovers that the greenery of Plowman’s Planet is in fact not green.
In Galactic Pot-Healer, the color orange is never used to describe the environment of Plowman’s Planet. The only colors used are “a mixture of brown and gray.”1
“...the flat landing-field...”
In Galactic Pot-Healer, when Joe Fernwright lands on Plowman’s Planet, instead of landing in an open field, his ship docks in a space terminal complex.2
And instead of a forest, Fernwright finds himself in a "reasonably modern-looking" city by the name of Diamond Head.3 In Diamond Head there is at least one hotel as well as shops and a taxi service.4
With the deforested and urbanized condition of Plowman’s Planet as it is seen in that novel it leads one to believe that Galactic Pot-Healer takes place after Nick and the Glimmung. If one were to estimate the gap in time passed between both books with the clues laid out from chapters one through five, it appears to be somewhere between twenty to forty years.
“I’D LIKE THE NICKEL NOW.”
From this card given by the wub the native creatures, or wubs at least, have adopted currency from Earth.
A nickel seems a rather pitifully small amount to ask for carrying luggage but there is one possible explanation.
In Galactic Pot-Healer, currency is given to citizens of Earth on the daily by the government in the form of trading stamps. But if these stamps are not spent quickly their value plummets due to rapid inflation.5 Fernwright, in the two years leading up to the main events of the story, had cultivated sixty-five quarters, which were made before the war. By his estimation his quarters amount to around “‘[t]en million dollars in trading stamps.’”6
If runaway inflation was occurring in Nick’s time, then a nickel may very well have similarly appreciated in value.
In Galactic Pot-Healer, Plowman’s Planet has a currency of its own called the crumble, more than likely adopted sometime after Nick and the Glimmung.7
“‘...the U.N. has given us.’”
Assuming Peter means the United Nations, it is the only time it is mentioned in Nick in the Glimmung.
The U.N. is never referred to in Galactic Pot-Healer. In its place is something called the Peaceful International World Senate.8
The specific country Fernwright lives in at the start of the novel is not called the United States of America but the Communal North American Citizen’s Republic.9 The citizens of this nation, as well as the others, are governed by what is described as a “planetwide Party apparatus.”10
With the words used to describe these, along with the survival of the USSR by the 2040s, it appears that the USA ultimately lost the Cold War sometime before Galactic Pot-Healer, either voting its old republic out of existence or collapsing into a civil war of some sort, possibly the war mentioned in Galactic Pot-Healer.11
The implied socialistic bent to this new government is made less subtle with an organization dubbed the Political Control Bureau which deals with people who are “‘an enemy of the working class’” and “‘engaged in a conspiracy to advocate agitation against the people and the servants of the people.’”12
Because Fernwright is a war veteran with a government pension, it appears he must have fought for their side.13
“‘...can’t seem to communicate with this creature.’”
Unlike this wub, the titular wub in Dick’s first published story Beyond Lies the Wub, which does not fit into the Glimmung universe due to a myriad of reasons, can speak. The prime examples to this conclusion being that that story appears to take place on Mars and the wub itself can speak English without ever having come into contact with humanity by reading the crew’s minds along with relating them such things as mythology in the same fashion.14
Other than that discrepancy, the wub’s physical appearance is much the same as it is in Nick and the Glimmung along with its friendly, easy going, and non-confrontational demeanor.
1) Galactic Pot-Healer (Vintage Books, 1994), pg.70
2) Ibid, pg. 73
3) Ibid, pgs. 70
4) Ibid, pgs. 79, 73, and 102
5) Ibid, pgs. 5-6
6) Ibid, pgs. 11-12
7) Ibid, pg. 19
8) Ibid, pg. 4
9) Ibid, pg. 5
10) Ibid, pg. 4
11) Ibid, pg. 3
12) Ibid, pg. 36
13) Ibid, pgs. 3-4
14) The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Volume 1 (Citadel Twilight, 1990), pg. 30
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