The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (S.F. MASTERWORKS): Philip K. Dick

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I was also particularly intrigued by the few times that communion or transubstantiation is mentioned. I think in the book, the body and blood of Christ idea is equated to Eldritch as well. If at communion a person is actually a perpetuation or manifestation of the body and blood of Christ, it’s not a complete representation of God, but just a manifestation of some small part of God. The form God is taking so to speak. This is explained metaphorically in the Cat joke that Anne tells towards the end. “Don’t tell us Barney, that whatever entered Palmer Eldritch is God, because you don’t know that much about him; no one can. But that living entity from intersystem space may, like us, be shaped in his image. A way he selected of showing himself to us. If the map is not the territory, the pot is not the potter”. If you agree with Anne, Palmer Eldritch is no more God than we are or could perceive ourselves to be. I think this paints the portrait that Palmer Eldritch is not God, but it would also be hard to make the argument that he is human either. Do we live in solipsistic worlds of our own creation? If in fact we live in a shared world, then bonds between people are possible (love as salvation).

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I feel that Philip was struggling with the identification of good & evil throughout eternity in this book. How to tell if one’s experiences are a manifestation of illusion, or some kind of damnation, that will continue forever without any kind of certainty or knowing that there is ever the possibility of escape from this endless cycle of suffering. Are our imaginary & imagined worlds some kind of hellish mirror wherein we see only ourselves & our own projections, or can they serve as a beacon or guiding light to freedom & to knowing? I think Philip wrestled with this for a good portion of his life & his experiences with drugs in a way served as both an inspiration & a torment for him. (Fortunately for us, he came out of it all with such a tremendous body of work that will continue to beguile readers for many, many years to come!) Chew-Z, on the other hand, delivers an experience that is supposedly better than religion. Palmer Eldritch claims - Joe: Far out, man. I dug a lot of the stuff going on at the periphery of this novel. Flying taxi cabs and a personal computer that fits into a suitcase. Some of it was hard to picture, you know, like radical gene therapy treatment that gives people bubble heads, but I like what PKD is saying about higher consciousness in the 21st century being available only to the super-rich. This was the 10th and final PKD book I read last year after 40 years without reading any. I always felt as a teenager that I would get more from his books as an adult, and I think I was right. This one is a real mind-bending experience, deliciously strange and tantalizing with its ideas.

This is one of the earlier novels by PKD and one of the nuttiest pieces of storytelling of the 1960s. You get climate warming and outer-space settlements, chewing and fuse-inducing drugs like Can-D or Chew-Z (but “ be choosy. Chew Chew-Z”!), precogs, virtual entities by the name of Perky Pat or Winnie-Ther-Pooh Acres, evolution therapies invented by post-Nazi mad scientists, religious fanatics that look like Barbie dolls, lots of theological thinking and pranks, choruses of office employees with slit eyes, mechanical arms and, most of all, stainless steel teething rings. Oddly reminiscent of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the parts left out of Bladerunner) this novel brings out some of PKD’s unique abilities to combine science fiction with theological explorations. Leo departs for Ganymede to ensure, by any means necessary, that Eldritch ceases to be a threat. Barney Mayerson's precog powers convince him that at some time in the future Palmer Eldritch will die at the hands of Leo, and Leo will be charged with the first degree murder of Palmer Eldritch. Barney vows to help Leo achieve his goal. I've little more to say. This book is... unknowable as Eldritch itself. Instead of trying to make sense of the book, I will instead give you advice. You wrote in your Commentary section the following: “… the period between Barney’s awakening and his subsequent overdose (chapters 10 and 11) is slightly less clear. During the overdose, Eldritch tells Barney that he was never awake, and was manipulated into overdose, but if he wasn’t awake, how did he overdose? …there is a consistent interpretation of the book where neither Barney or Leo ever return to sobriety.”

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch: John C Adams Reviews The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch: John C Adams Reviews

Mundane Utility: Two of the main characters are "pre-fash consultants", people with precognitive powers employed to find out whether or not various products will become fashionable before they're accepted for production. Don't fight the book. The plot will not make sense, but it IS a mostly coherent plot. Just take it easy and ride it out. Are the visions achieved by Eldritch's Chew-Z illusion? Are they part time travel? Does it really matter? Reality is always to be questioned in this book... perhaps Eldritch just showed our characters that.

Since 2009, John Hansen has been reviewing new and old movies, TV, books and comics. Shaune Redfield and Michael Olinger were previous regular contributors to RFMC. But there’s little doubt that PKD is upping the chill factor by suggesting that the god of humanity isn’t human (or the template for humans), but rather a “creature” that has lost some of its humanity.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (GOLLANCZ S.F.) The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (GOLLANCZ S.F.)

His characters are seldom well rounded complex individuals but generally I can never guess what a PKD character is going to do or say next. The most interesting character in this book has to be the titular Palmer Eldritch himself. The most interesting thing about him is not so much who is Palmer Eldritch, but who isn't Palmer Eldritch? The man gives the word ubiquitous not so much a new meaning as a super literal one. If that makes no sense to you then I urge you to read the book and take the trip for yourself. Barney Mayerson is a precognetic consultant at P. P. Layouts, a company that produces miniature accessories for a fictitious couple, “Perky Pat” Christiensen and Walt Essex. He is having a bad day. As the climate on Earth has worsened, the U.N. has started drafting people to become colonists, and Barney has received his draft notice. He is using a computerized psychiatrist to help him beat the draft by becoming mentally unstable. Helping this along is the fact that he is sleeping with Roni Fugate, his ambitious, insubordinate and equally precognetic new assistant. Can-D is derived from Titanian lichen grown on heavily guarded plantations on Venus. Leo describes it as "like religion; Can-D is the religion of the colonists...It provides a reason for living."On Mars, Mayerson buys some Chew-Z from Eldritch, who appears in holographic form. Mayerson tries to hallucinate a world where he is still with Emily but finds that he does not control his apparent hallucination. Like Bulero, he finds himself in the future. Mayerson arrives in New York two years hence where he speaks with Bulero, Fugate and his future self about the death of Palmer Eldritch. Without going into the synopsis in any detail, this novel features a drug induced virtual reality, initially with the aid of Ken and Barbie-like dolls in their nicely furnished dollhouse. The VR sessions are called "translations", a very popular past time in the hellish Mars colony. The drug is caled Can-D, later on a new type of drug called Chew-Z comes on the market and immediately make the Can-D drug obsolete by doing away with the dolls and other paraphernalia and allowing any fantasy world to be created by the user. Of course this being a PKD novel things are never what they seem. The book is a fascinating philosophical dive even if one isn’t looking for a religion of their own, but if someone is in their spiritual-search phase, I can see them saying: “Yes, if a god comes into our lives, this is how it will be.” In that sense, “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” is a work of biblical proportions.