Finished reading "Galactic Pot Healer". I hadn't read any Philip K. Dick in quite some time. Good to remember his dry style of writing - sterile backdrops against which ideas run amok. So much more of a philosopher (a little crazed perhaps, in synch with his schizophrenic times) than a writer somehow, despite his vast pulp production. Definitely a great artist of the last century, a paranoid seer.

And funny to find the sci-fi visions of yesteryear among us today. At the start of this novel (published in 1969), an unemployed artisan sits in his cubicle playing a game with a crew of dole buddies scattered around the globe. The game consisting of feeding the name of books, films, and other cultural artifacts into computer translation programmes, and then retranslating back into the original - a game found on british radio these days, where listeners dial in to guess what song title the babelfish remix refers to. Also a foretelling of viagra when a radio playing in the book's narrative broadcasts an ad for "Hardovax will turn disappointment into joy..."

On a totally different note, also finished the breezy, eighties pop-flavoured first novel by Matteo B. Bianchi "Generations of love"