My first Philip K. Dick novel turned out to be an inventive, fast-paced mind-bender, throwing out ideas and philosophical questions like a tennis ball machine.
Philip K. Dick is widely considered to be a titan of science fiction, yet until now I mostly knew him as the author whose writing inspired films like Blade Runner and Minority Report. I had no idea if this novel was the right entry point, but it definitely made an impression.
The world of The Three Stigmata is not the worst future dystopia ever imagined, but it’s not rosy either. Earth is literally cooked, with the rising temperatures making it impossible for humans to spend time outdoors without protection. Oceans have evaporated, and the rich elites are cooling themselves at the resorts in Antarctica. There are space colonies on Mars and other planets, where life is so miserable that the UN has to send people there through what seems to be a random lottery system. In this universe, there are precogs, individuals who can anticipate certain events in the future, and there exists technology for taking humans to the next stage of evolution.
The main protagonist of the book is Barney Mayerson, a precog working at Perky Pat Layouts, a firm that manufactures something like elaborate Barbie and Ken playsets for adults, complete with all sorts of miniature accessories. This is the legal side of the business; a more hush-hush side is the illegal hallucinatory drug Can-D, which enables the users to inhabit the happy carefree world of Perky Pat and her companion Walt. Needless to say, Can-D is in high demand among off-world colonists, who will take anything to escape their grim, meaningless lives.
As the novel begins, Barney finds himself in bed with his new assistant and fellow precog Roni, who he suspects is scheming to replace him. He also pines for his former wife, who he divorced for entirely selfish reasons, and sees a portable psychiatrist so that he can fail a psychological test and avoid being deported to Mars or worse. Meanwhile, his arrogant and brash boss Leo Bulero, one of the evolved humans, gets a whiff of trouble on a much larger scale. Palmer Eldritch, a wealthy industrialist, has returned from his ten-year interstellar journey, bringing with him a far more potent drug called Chew-Z that could crush Leo’s business empire. Competition stinks, but there’s also a growing suspicion that Chew-Z is part of an insidious plot to enslave humanity inside an illusory world, controlled by Palmer Eldritch… or whatever resides inside him.
If you’re looking for a sci-fi novel with elegant prose and deep characterisation, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is not it. Philip K. Dick’s unadorned writing can be clunky, and the dialogue exchanges feel stiff and unnatural in places. There’s some character development, especially when Barney comes to confront some unpleasant truths about himself and seeks atonement, but overall characters are hardly the book’s strong point. Also, while I can swallow the dated writing of female characters in books from decades ago, the amount of ogling in this novel is… noticeable. Especially when early on, one of the female characters begins a series of energetic morning exercises while stark naked. Do her breasts bob, of course they do.
However, Philip K. Dick is a brilliant speculative writer, and I was instantly sucked inside the novel’s vivid, detailed world, with its futuristic technologies and even its own invented slang. At times I felt like I was barely keeping up with the hectic and dense plot, especially when the distinctions between the reality and the Chew-Z hallucinations got well and truly blurred, but I was always onboard. During the chaotic and entertaining ride, the book riffs on God, free will, the fragile nature of reality, the role of religion and communal ritual, alien invasion, time travel, and the themes of individual vs all-powerful authority.
I also found the book very amusing, with scenarios and setups so absurd and comical I couldn’t help but laugh out loud (I even chuckled despite myself while reading the above-mentioned naked exercise passage). I don’t know if it was ever adapted onscreen, but I’d really love to see the book’s many hallucinatory realities portrayed in a quality mini-series one day.
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