The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Written by Philip K. Dick

Narrated by Tom Weiner

Not too long from now, when exiles from a blistering Earth huddle miserably in Martian colonies, the only things that make life bearable are the drugs. Can-D “translates” those who take it into the bodies of Barbie-like dolls. Now there’s competition: a substance called Chew-Z, marketed under the slogan “God promises eternal life. We can deliver it.” The question is: What kind of eternity? And who-or what-is the deliverer?

In this wildly disorienting fun house of a novel, populated by God-like-or perhaps satanic-take-over artists and corporate psychics, Philip K. Dick explores mysteries that were once the property of St. Paul and Aquinas. His wit, compassion, and knife-edged irony make this novel moving as well as genuinely visionary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blackstone Audio
• Release date: Sep 3, 2008
• ISBN: 9781433248214

Philip K. Dick

Over a writing career that spanned three decades, PHILIP K. DICK (1928–1982) published 36 science fiction novels and 121 short stories in which he explored the essence of what makes man human and the dangers of centralized power. Toward the end of his life, his work turned to deeply personal, metaphysical questions concerning the nature of God. Eleven novels and short stories have been adapted to film, notably Blade Runner (based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall, Minority Report, and A Scanner Darkly, as well as television's The Man in the High Castle. The recipient of critical acclaim and numerous awards throughout his career, including the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards, Dick was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2005, and between 2007 and 2009, the Library of America published a selection of his novels in three volumes. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

Reviews for The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

[booksfordinner · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The classic PKD visionary tale of an earth where you can't walk outside in due lack of atmosphere (global warming) and a recreational drug that transports people into another, miniature world (second life, etc)... Arguably the most underrated author of the 20th century, certainly in the Science Fiction genre... Minority report, blade runner, etc... all adapted from his works.

[selfcallednowhere · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book was incredibly freaky and stirred up a lot of thoughts in my head about things like the nature of reality. I enjoyed it for the most part, however I did have a different problem with the way he wrote the female characters--they were all either total bitches and/or fully sexually objectified. Not too cool.

[vlady-62549 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Jesus H. Christ, what a book. Mind trip all the way.

[schant-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Quite good

[alaskayo · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Philip K. Dick's best-known stories are teaming with creativity, implementing psychedelia and paranoia into the narratives long before Robert Anton Wilson or anyone else dared try it. Of his stories I've read, including the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the stories' ideas and outlines have left a lasting impression, but the writing itself often feels turgid and dry, his characterization marred by dated misogyny and fantasies for young boys.The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch fits alongside his classics. The Earth's been decimated by extreme climate change,* and humanity is being stretched thin to satellite colonies throughout the solar system. To escape general misery, people share an hallucinogenic drug called Can-D, which transports their consciousness into a shared cyberspace-like reality.It's a fascinating concept -- an early prelude to cyberpunk -- and it only gets better: Palmer Eldritch, corporate titan, returns to Earth after vanishing 10 years earlier in an alien star system. He's brought a new drug, Chew-Z, that promises not only the effects of Can-D, but actual immortality inside a person's dreams. By imbibing in Chew-Z, the consumer enters a reality of their own creation in which they can stay as long as they wish; regardless of time spent in this new universe, only a split second passes in the real world.The manufacturers of Can-D aren't too keen on this new drug, however, and not just for potentially ruining their profits: Something is off with the returned Palmer Eldritch and his drug. Eldritch remains mysterious, in hiding, and with his drug comes an uneasy feeling of being watched or *invaded*. Eldritch seems to be showing up everywhere, in every reality; it's near impossible to tell if we're layers deep in a Chew-Z fantasy, time standing still, or really marooned in a dying Martian hovel. Sooner or later, Eldritch seems to slip up, and his presence makes itself known through the three stigmata of the title: Your grandmother, your lover, your friend, your driver -- anyone might suddenly bleed into a metallic and alien persona, someone you don't know or want there.The creeping paranoia and Lovecraftian horror of the title remain brilliant, but PKD's writing is, I think, as bone-dry and bland as ever. His characters cardboard caricatures. His women ogled as brain-dead objects by the omniscient narration. His philosophizing defined by drugged-out, hippie naivete. Here are, for example, some of the most popular highlights by Kindle readers:---Loc. 278:She was a redhead and he liked redheads; they were either outrageously ugly or almost supernaturally attractive.Loc. 1040:"Who ever heard of a suitcase being dominated by minds from an alien star-system?"Loc. 2242:Can't the past be altered? he asked himself. Evidently not. Cause and effect work in only one direction, and change is real .Loc. 2781:Something which stands with empty, open hands is not God. It's a creature fashioned by something higher than itself, as we were; God wasn't fashioned and He isn't puzzled."---Even though I'm again blown away by the outline of a PKD novel, I struggled, as I always seem to, through his lifeless prose and the overt misogyny. (This is a boys' tale through and through.) Many of PKD's most famous stories -- the Man in the High Castle, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a Scanner Darkly -- have worked better on film or TV. It's an unpopular opinion, but I feel as long as the themes and feeling remain, butchering the original story seems to improve his work.*N.B. This was written before global warming or climate change entered mainstream public perception.

[stahl2ricco · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I picked this up after reading Dick's short story,"The Days of Perky Pat". It intrigued me enough to give this a shot! It's the future, with space travel and precogs, and extreme global warming - even the mail is delivered at night! (as a letter carrier, that gave me a good chuckle, especially with the recent hot spells here in Northern California due to ... global warming!) Perky Pat is the game obsession of the colonists, played while being high on Can-D! The game, and the drug, make life bearable for over one million unwilling expatriates from Terra. That part of the story I enjoyed! But then it became super confusing with alternate realities, different time lines, and some sort of God-like, or alien, super being. I really had a hard time following it. There was even a cat and steak joke that I could not make heads nor tails of! I'm kind of bummed I didn't like it more, but from about page 94 on I was just bewildered...

[richjj-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My first PKD novel. Pretty wild.

[ahs7wolfy · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Barney Mayerson has just received his draft notice to join the Mars colony. He can probably gt out of it if he wants to but he's not entirely sure that he does. Currently employed as one of the top pre-cognitives for P.P. Layouts, makers of Perky Pat and her accessories which, used in conjunction with the drug Can-D, offers a virtual escape from the humdrum colonial existence. The illegal drug is also manufactured and supplied by P.P. Layouts although if rumours are to be believed it may soon have a competitor and Leo Bulero (P.P.'s boss) isn't too happy at the prospect. Palmer Eldritch has returned after a 10 year absence for a trip to the Proxy system and has brought back a competing product that is supposed to be much better than Can-D. Offering a more full immersion and for longer and without the limits imposed by the supplied layouts. Minutes spent under the influence offers up years of experiencing whatever you want. Immortality and total wish fulfilment could put P.P. Layouts out of business unless Leo finds a way to stop Eldritch by fair means or foul.As with most of the PKD books I've read so far there are an awful lot of ideas and themes within its 200 page length but it's all put together to form a coherent whole (so far as his books go). The nature of reality, religion and religious experience, drugs, pre-cognitive abilities and genetic engineering are all at least touched upon here. Characters are fairly typical of mid-60's science fiction with women in mostly subservient roles. The ending is not entirely conclusive but fits well with the build up to it. Not one I would recommend to first time readers of this author but if you've tried one or two others prior then you should be fine with this one.

[brakketh-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Questions raised by this novel who is controlling who and what is reality and what is fantasy.

[9sunny9 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Jeez. Kind of like the movie Inception but more so. Similar to the first book I read by this author, Ubiq, which also had a 'dream-within-a-dream' element. If ever I'm feeling too secure in my sense of reality, I'll just re-read this book, I guess. For all that, I enjoyed this story immensely, especially as things got more and more bizarre near the end. Who needs drugs when you've got Phillip K. Dick?

[lukerik-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Perfectly paced world-building, high imagination and themes of drugs and religion. Very clever how the drug induced effects on one character can invade the future reality of other characters. I've had a few drugs in my time and Dick absolutely nails how the mental state of two or more people taking drugs together can become reality for those involved. I've also had a bit of religion; I'm not into transubstantiation, but it's quite true that if the people involved believe in something, it may as well be.

[thedivineoomba · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This isn't PKD's greatest book. It has all the elements of one, but the plot tends to be rambly, the characters uninteresting.Set in a much warmer earth of the future, the UN sends people to mars as colonists, but nobody wants to go due the bleakness of the place. Their only respite is a drug called Challed "Can-D" which makes a user part of a fictional world. When a drug called "Chew-Z" is introduced, it starts a spiral involving the UN, a returned space explorer who may, or may not be who he says he is, and an ad-man who is drafted into the Mars Colony Program.Its an interesting concept,but it has some unnecessary characters with unnecessary plots. Recommended if you like PKD stories, but if you are new to the author, start somewhere else.

[dbsovereign · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dick writes very believable, very interesting and thought-provoking nightmares...

[kale.dyer · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Questions raised by this novel who is controlling who and what is reality and what is fantasy.

[musecure · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I picked up and re-read "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" after many years. Other than Palmer Eldritch himself, perhaps because of the mystery surrounding his return, I was not really taken by any of the characters. But the story PKD weaves around corporate espionage, alien invasion, alternate reality, drug use, hallucination, spiritually and identity is compelling. I was also struck by his exploration of climate change and our human response to it (E-therapy) which should speak so much more strongly to us today that it did in 1965.

[don.a · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A masterpiece. Philip K. Dick used to write with deceptively simple prose and a straightforward style with very few embellishments. But he used that to deliver some of the most thought-provoking and intellectually challenging stories that could ever be imagined. And in this and some other of his works, he foreshadowed some of the ideas that became commonplace in science-fiction stories about twenty years later, such as virtual worlds and alternate realities. This book is the work of a true visionary.

[randystafford · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of Dick's classics with virtually all his famous motifs and themes: multiple realities, chatty robots, a scheming woman, desperate colonists on Mars, gnosticism, the machine as an emblem of death, corporate and political intrigue, time travel, and pre-cognition. Industrialist and drug smuggler Leo Bulero has a problem. Mutilated cyborg Palmer Eldritch has returned unexpectedly after a ten year absence in space. Now he's threatening to undercut Bulero's business: providing a sort of commodified communion for colonists on Mars. With the elaborate playsets built around his Perky Pat dolls and with the aid of the narcotic Can-D, Bulero offers groups a pharmacological return to the Earth they've been exiled from and that is now burning up for unknown reasons. But Eldritch's Chew-Z offers a different, longer lasting trip, and one more solipistically seductive. But is Eldritch a man or the spearhead of an alien invasion? As with some of Dick's best work, the story feels oddly up to date whether it's the climatically changed Earth, the obsession with spotting commerical trends via pre-cognitives, a corrupt UN, or the talking suitcase that also happens to be a psychotherapist. Even if you're not quite sure what to make of the ending, this is one of Dick's very best novels.

[sturlington_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I was a bit annoyed with this novel up to the very end. There's so much going on, and not much is well explained. It was causing my suspension of disbelief to seriously waver.This novel is set in a future when Earth is very, very hot and crowded. So hot that going outside at noon is suicide (literally). So crowded that people are drafted to live in colonies on other planets and moons. There, life is so much worse than on Earth that the colonists have to take an illegal drug to transport themselves into a Barbie-like dreamworld just to get through the day. (No word from Dick on how space travel became so quick and easy -- 8 hours to Mars! -- or how human life is supported on these colony planets, which aggravated me quite a little bit.)Then the infamous Palmer Eldritch returns from an interstellar voyage with a new, even better drug, which threatens the existing monopoly. Plans are hatched to quell the new competition; conspiracies are formed, and stooges put in place. But when people start taking the drug, they soon realize that Palmer Eldritch himself has infiltrated their fantasies. He is recognizable because of his three "stigmata": a deformed jaw hiding steel teeth; a mechanical hand; and slit-like artificial eyes. Because the effects of the new drug wear off gradually, it soon becomes unclear what is reality and what is hallucination. Just as much in question is who exactly is Palmer Eldritch? Is he man, alien, perhaps even God?This is when the book became really interesting for me, about three-quarters of the way through. Palmer Eldritch's drug makes time malleable, calls into question the nature of reality and re-examines God Himself. The novel ends with a question mark -- we readers aren't sure what is real or not by then, or who is having the hallucination, if it is one -- and that's okay. I only wish it hadn't taken so long to get to the meaty stuff. But the image of the constantly reappearing Palmer Eldritch -- with his unusual stigmata, he is more like a demon than a god -- sticks with me. Even his name means "foreign, strange and uncanny."

[hglotzbach_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Very interesting book, very deep...

[etimme_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I thought the idea of the Earth heating up so much that people cannot go outside and vacation at the poles was a great background for this story. The idea of the rich using evolution chambers to leave behind the shackles of their former humanity was also an interesting perspective on the idea of the future.Overall, I enjoyed the writing and pacing of the story, but not the story itself. I didn't like closing the book and being left with more questions than answers, especially when the core question was "did this even happen?" Did Bulero even really wake up from his drug fugue?

[theoclarke · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

From a stock pulp science fiction beginning, this novel swirls away into a psychadelic exploration of marketing, metaphysics and xenology. It is so heavily layered that it multiple readings and much reflection are needed to optimise its value but even at a superficial plot level it is an astonishing work if one can cope with the confusion that it generates towards the end.

[bumpish · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I know that everyone says that this is PKD's masterwork, and I can see why, it's a pretty brilliant set of ideas, and the writing is splendid. I, however, didn't enjoy reading it as much as other PD books I have read in the past.

[collsers_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

PKD's vision of the future presented in this novel is frighteningly prescient -- people escape the doldrums of their life through an artificial "second life," plastic surgery has been replaced by medical "evolution," and so on. The ending will throw any reader for a loop, and requires several rereadings until you even think you might understand what is happening. However, PKD's strength has never been a coherent plot conclusion, but the startling details of the worlds he creates. In this novel, he excels at what he does best.

[reverends_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very few Science Fiction authors manage to create memorable works that easily retain their relevance in the near and/or distant future. Phillip K. Dick is one of those talented few, and The 3 Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is one of those works.Dick's not-so-distant dystopian future is one where global warming is an adaptable but growing dillema, with the bulk of humanity virtually sealed away in air-conditioned office buildings and apartment complexes. The solution, space migration to nearby planets, is such a bleak and arduous task that 'settlers' need to be drafted. These off-world settlers often resort to drug-induced shared hallucination involving miniature recreations of life back on earth. Within this structure we find corporations employing psychics to predict future sales trends, upper class elitists physically evolving themselves into 'superior beings', naturally created drugs that allow users to connect on different plains of reality and traverse freely throughout space-time, to name a few. In the center of it all is the titular Palmer Eldritch, a powerful and mysterious businessman who has spent decades communing with alien races, and has returned with what he claims to be mankind's mental and spiritual salvation. What would normally be a one-trick-pony for other authors becomes a multi-layered examination of everything from religion and philosophy to physical/mental evolution and individual freedom versus responsibility. Dick doesn't bother with simple 'Good Vs. Evil' conflict, but instead shows us that both possibilities are sides of the same coin, and simply asks us to call it in the air. Highly recommended for those who like to think about a book long after reading it.

[raggedprince · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very rich novel in ideas. I'm keen to see someone try and make a film of it. An interesting and unnerving book.

[krypto_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

All Philip K. Dick novels are about the nature of reality, and I think this is his best. Completely mind-blowing yet still comprehensible, it has the incomparable PKD style that I find so hard to pin down - it's some combination of brevity, the unexpected and a sense of the alien, but there's still something entirely Other about the way he writes that I find unique. Hard to describe the plot (not much of a review, this), but as with anything PKD it's completely unpredictable.

[soylentgreen23 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Like "Ubik," this one will have you in a spin. Who is Palmer Eldritch? And does even he know?I love the aspects of escapism: the fact that people take drugs to actually commune together in a fantasy world of their own construction reminds me a lot of modern videogames, especially MMORPGs. I love the fact that escape from the Earth is considered terrible, like a cruel fate that awaits the unsuspecting. In all, I really like this book.

[laphroaig_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One day I will have to return to this book and re-read it. Very slowly.Despite its pre-1980s origins (would any modern sci-fi author consider flying cars anything but out-moded fantasy?) Dick presents a very up-to-date view of the future: unremittingly grim; global warming; corrupt in every detail. Spartan in detail, terse in style and with some larger-than-life but always realistic characters, this was a good read.Despite this, there is no escaping that this novel is as mad as a box of frogs. Alien invasion? The nature of God? The ability of the human character to form bonds in the most hostile of situations? Perhaps just drug-induced fantasy ... who knows what this is really about? I would advise anyone to give it a try and if they figure it out to e-mail me the explanation.

[alsatia_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As usual, if you want your mind blown, Phil K. Dick delivers. Perhaps the most stunning thing about this book is its copyright date: 1964. He delivers a book about corporate espionage, drugs, consumerism, alien invasion, climate change and Gnosticism all in one go...in 1964. Wow!

[marx4200 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Love PKD... More please...