The Annotated Glimmung: The Glimmung Connection

For most of Philip K. Dick’s creative output, the worlds he depicted, from the mid twentieth century to the many diverting paths of better and worse futures, stand isolated from one another.

However, there were exceptions to this rule. The Preserving Machine (1953) and The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford (1954) focused on the character of Doctor Rupert Labyrinth and his experiments in saving the culture and items of his civilization. Second Variety (1953) and Jon’s World (1954) featured the destructive smart weapons of war called the claws and the ultimate threat they pose to a war-torn humanity. The trio of short stories Top Stand-By Job (1963), What’ll We Do with Ragland Park? (1963), and Cantata 140 (1964), the last of which would be expanded into the novel The Crack in Space (1966), followed the political campaign of media funnyman turned presidential-candidate Jim Briskin in a world dealing with severe overpopulation. And arguably the most well-known of these, the novels Dick wrote involving the god-like entity known as Vast Active Living Intelligence System, which makes direct appearances in VALIS (1981) and The Divine Invasion (1981) and Radio Free Albemuth (1985).

Here, the focus will be on another shared universe, one that may have the most to uncover compared to the others: the only children’s novel he ever wrote, Nick and the Glimmung (1988) in association with his novel Galactic Pot-Healer (1969).

Both were written relatively close together, the former sometime in 1966, originally submitted under the title “Glimmung of Plowman’s Planet,” and the latter around a year or so later.^1
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The main body of The Annotated Glimmung will feature entries for the seventeen chapters of Nick and the Glimmung with notes annotating relevant quotes. Due to some chapters having few notes they will be combined with other chapters.

Concluding this blog will be a speculation outro covering different topics of the overall history that can be ascertained and inferred using the context clues gathered over the course of the notes as well as additional information that could not be related in the main blog. A timeline will be theorized in an attempt to place the above-mentioned novels, along with Dick’s short stories The Father-thing (1954) and Pay for the Printer (1956) into a plausible continuity.

Due to copyright, only fragments of quotes will be used to indicate what is being made note of. The edition this blog will be referring to is its original Gollancz 1988 publication from the United Kingdom, which uses European English. It is recommended that readers of this blog have already read the books and the stories as well as the short story Beyond Lies the Wub (1952) for a better understanding of the notes. It is also recommended that readers have copies of their own on hand to follow along more closely. Consider this as a spoiler warning to those interested in reading what is contained who have not read the relevant material as of yet. At the end of each entry there will be sources cited.

Any conversation on the observation and interpretation of these texts in each entries comment section is encouraged.

So, with that, may you enjoy this little blog and may it cast a new light on this curious and over-looked world.