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For those who have read Dick's "standards", I recommend one of his novels that never appears in these lists, and probably never will: Galactic Pot-Healer (1968)
by atombender 4y ago
For those who have read Dick's "standards", I recommend one of his novels that never appears in these lists, and probably never will: Galactic Pot-Healer (1968).
PKD later said he couldn't call writing it, this being the period where he consumed copious amounts of amphetamines, and produced a ridiculous number of novels and short stories. I still think it's one of his most enjoyable books.
The plot is a ramshackle Vonnegutian comic fantasy featuring a totalitarian dystopia, an alien demigod, a man who "heals" broken ceramic pottery, and an early version of the old Internet pasttime where you use machine translation tools to translate English into other languages and then back again in order to produce humorously mangled sentences. It's a weird, fun, sad book.
Also worth mentioning is A Maze of Death (1970), which is a creepy alien planet exploration story that becomes something else and unexpected, and probably the closest Dick came to writing a Harlan Ellison story.