Classic Science Fiction Review: Philip K Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Drug use, alien life forms, planetary colonization, mutation, climate change, virtual reality induced both by technology and pharmacopeia, psychic abilities, and big helping of conspiracy and paranoia; these are emblematic ingredients for a Philip K. Dick novel, and he serves up a full course of them in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
Typical to many Dick’ stories, nuance and ambiguity make the plot of the The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch hard to pin down. Characters who have taken the drug Chew-Z automatically lose all trust as a credible view point, because the drug offers up a reality that is indistinguishable from our own. Then, just when you think that other characters are reliable, you learn that the drug is so powerful that it can throw your consciousness into the real world where you will exist momentarily as an incorporeal phantasm. Or can it? With the drug world—enhanced by technological virtual reality layouts—and our own world intermingling so closely, it becomes almost impossible to say who is who, and so, what exactly the outcome of the story is. Instead you are forced to accept many possibilities in the end, which will be annoying to some readers, but was fun for me.
In my opinion, Philip K. Dick novels are meant to be enjoyed for the ride, not the destination. They are disorienting, but in a fun way that makes you question the world that you experience. If that’s something that you enjoy from reading his other stories, or from seeing movie adaptations like Total Recall, then I would suggest this book. If you enjoy a book for its themes and the questions that those themes provoke, then you will like it. If you like a convincing ending, then avoid it.
Some Deeper Analysis
One thing I feel I can say with some certainty is that drug use and religion are equated in the novel often, and that Dick seems to think that our reality is defined by them. The humans that colonize Mars face a fate much harsher than that of the early American settlers, which is only made worse by the fact that a majority of them were drafted into colonizing other planets by the U.N., due to the Earth’s over population and climate-change-induced heat. These colonists are only able to face the insufferable conditions by escaping on a daily basis through the use of drugs like Can-D and Chew-Z. Some colonists refuse the drugs, and instead turn to religion as their method of escape, which is what leads me to claim that Dick finds the two methods equivalent.
Another aspect of the novel that points to that claim is that Palmer Eldritch can be understood to be playing the interchangeable role of drug dealer and God. Without giving too much away, the novel admits that Palmer Eldritch is responsible for spreading Chew-Z in an attempt to gain control over people’s minds; to be in them or apart of them like God. Once on the drug, the users are presumably under Palmer Eldritch’s control in an alternative reality. On the other hand, there is a good deal of evidence that shows that Palmer Eldritch, or the being that inhabits his human form, has existed for a long time, can travel to different points in time, and has major influence on—what the reader is told—are real life outcomes. If Eldritch is both a drug dealer and God, and religion and drug use are both acceptable forms of altered perception, then I think The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is Dick’s way of telling us that deviants and the devout are all after the same thing, a more pleasurable way to tolerate existence.
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