The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Dick - Philip K. (2012)

There has been enough refinement in recent science fiction to make the concepts of this book obsolete. I have nothing against Phillip K. Dick. Its just that the plot, descriptions of items and people won't make sense to the reader

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is a psychedelic-fueled science-fiction trip - complete with flashbacks and paranoia.
Dick paints a ghoulish portrait of the future and, at the same time, illuminates some of the terryfying trends of the present.
The first colonists of Mars chew Can-D to relieve the tedium.
But the freewheeling Palmer Eldritch hatches a plan to bring the hovelists a more cosmic hit - salvation in a can.
What ensues is a swirl of alternate realities and mind trips as the principal characters stumble in and out of the evil one's steely grip.

God perished for man, but the superior being wants us to perish for it.

Read it.
It's a gas.

Far off on inhospitable planetary colonies, volunteers "chosen" by the UN make their lives bearable by chewing a drug called Can-D, which temporarily transports them into the life of the doll Perky Pat. The drug becomes a kind of religion, with fanatic users arguing that they really are transported into Perky Pat's world and that the experience constitutes a kind of Holy communion. Meanwhile, Palmer Eldritch returns from his ten year journey bearing a new kind of drug-- Chew-Z-- a competitor to Can-D. He claims that while Can-D promises a new life Chew-Z can actually provide it. However, there seem to be more than a few catches...
A book that deals with Dick's perennial obsessions-- God, the nature of reality, and the experience of the Holy. The ending gets a little too tangled for this to be one of his best works.

"The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" by Philip K. Dick shows that writer at his finest. In the novel, Dick is able to offer an interesting plot and bend reality through an exciting story. The novel proves humorous as Dick is able to satirize corporations, artists and even summon up drugs that turn users into Barbie and Ken. It's a tour de force of the imagination and perhaps no other writer could put it all together as well as Dick does. The novel also touches on religion--an increasingly important subject to Dick in the latter stages of his career. Still, the novel does show some of Dick's flaws as a writer. The novel often slows down and the characters--besides Palmer Eldritch himself--are not exactly memorable. These are minor flaws and "Three Stigmata" remains as fresh today as it did when it was first published almost five decades ago. Recommended--and not a bad choice for readers looking for a first Philip K. Dick novel to read.

This novel has a religious basis. People have refered to this as an 'LSD', or 'wildly disorientating' novel, but that is simply not the case. I guess many people don't really understand what PKD is getting at. This book deals with God and Satan, as well as the phenomenon of the wine into blood thing, ontology etc. I'm not qualified to discuss these issues, but it must be said that they were of profound importance to PKD.
As a SF novel, 3 Stigmata is absolutely brilliant. The ideas in this book are enough to ensure its brilliance alone; like Perky Pat and Can-D (which I felt was sheer genius on PKD's part), the hovels on Mars, the extreme temperatures on Earth (although this gets little attention as the book progresses), E-therapy, and of course Palmer Eldritch himself and Chew-Z. The time-travelling as a result of Chew-Z provides some of the best moments in the book, and the ending, where Barney and Palmer Eldritch merge into one... well, this defies words.
If anything is flawed in this book I believe it is the characterisation. In PKD's best books you feel strong empathy for the characters, good and bad (a prime example of this is Ubik.) Aside from Palmer Eldritch himself, who is a brilliant character, the chars. are not PKD's best. Barney, Leo, Roni, Emily are half the people Glen Runciter and Joe Chip are.
This is not my favourite PKD novel, but that is due to the subject material, not the execution of the novel. '3 Stigmata' is the first really religious PKD novel, and it stands as a precursor to later works such as 'Valis' and the 'Divine Invasion.'

Philip K. Dick's THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH has been published in 1965 and belongs to the masterpieces written by the american author. As in MARTIAN TIME-SLIP, another PKD first-class book of the same period, Dick gives here a tremendous life to the inner visions of his characters.
It's the first time in his literary career that PKD develops religious issues in a book. Only maybe the 1957 EYE IN THE SKY, a book which could be considered as a prelude to THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH had such mystical considerations in its plot. In TSPE, Dick clearly suggests that the illusions provoked by the drugs are similar to the Holy Mysteries revealed during religious celebrations.
Important themes developed in a magistral manner, inner visions described in the unique PKD style and, more important, the ability to create a novel with three or four novelettes linked tightly together, everything indicates that Philip K. Dick, in 1965, is at the beginning of the sumptuous literary career he will develop from the mid-sixties until his death.
A book for your library.

Sporting one of the neatest titles in all of literature, SF or otherwise, this novel is considered one of Dick's handful of absolute masterpieces, written during his peak in the sixties. People who saw Blade Runner, went and read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and liked it enough to want to explore Dick further and came here (remove the seeing Blade Runner part and that's me) may find this book a decidely odd experience. Not outwardly psychedelic in nature but certainly dealing with altered states of conscious and the nature of reality versus our perception of it . . . if you find yourself reading it and think you're missing something, trust me you aren't alone. Probably no one other than Dick knew exactly everything that is going on in here but for the rest of us it's an interesting dilemma trying to discern his exact meaning, or our best interpretation. In the future, the earth is unbearably warm, people are being drafted to be sent to dreary colonies and Can-D is the drug of the moment, a substance which allows people to "translate" into layouts based on a doll called Perky Pat and basically experience a life that isn't theirs. Then Palmer Eldrich returns from outside the solar system with his new drug Chew-D which he claims will deliver immortality and show the nature of God . . . and then things get funny. Dick's vision of a future world is absolutely fascinating and for us low brow folks who don't get all the wacky symbolism, makes the book worth it simply for his depiction of an overheated earth, the boring spiritual desolation of the Mars colonies, the pre-cogs who determine the latest fashions, it all feels bleak and despairing but there's a sense of humor lurking in the wings and a vague feeling that something larger is going on. It starts to lose coherency toward the end as the reader begins to question reality, especially what is the nature of Palmer Eldrich (great name, by the way) and eventually you find your head starting to hurt just a bit. And it's not that bad a feeling, as it turns out. PKD books are more experienced than described and nothing here is going to really be able to convey the texture of his novels, you just have to read it for yourself. It's not perfect but it's both thought provoking and entertaining on vastly different levels and so in that sense comes highly recommended.

If you like mind-bending plots and twists, alternate realities, space travel, aliens, pre- or post-apocalyptic themes, and refreshing originality, then you HAVE to read this book. You will love this story. Philip Dick is a sci-fi genius. That's a known fact. While reading this book, you will discover how many other stories this one story inspired. And you will most likely go back to read it again.

Another quirky, clever, emotional ride for over-active minds.....shooting off on many possibilities and plans, but centering around the usual Dickian themes of drug translation, addiction/dependence and the meaning behind life.

It's an impressive read as ever, with the possibilities it presents for the characters within the scenarios.....how much do they know themselves? They don't seem to know until they are presented with their realities.....Palmer Eldritch....an enigma....another simple but advanced lifeform permeating itself through false realities....the hollowness of worlds....the need for a shared reality presents itself...through the hand, the teeth, the eyes... Identity is transcended by this strange lifeform......

Its ideas and its characters grow weaker, but this work is still significant food-thought to chew on, not obvious to digest but it is digestable....and bleak.

I really enjoyed reading Philip K Dick's short stories and even wrote an article for an ezine, outlining his dystopian world and the recurring motifs of his hyper active mind. The next stop was reading the much-spoken about full-length novels. With a choice between Valis, UBIK and The Stigmata ..., I probably chose the least fascinating. The storyline and imagination in this book is all right and the book looks very promising at the start. But soon enough it becomes complex with the characters merging into one another, with places and incidents overlapping, the line between the past, present and future blurring, religious themes and concepts of "atonement" and "who am I" taking over. Between interstellar worlds and the pertinent question of who is God and what is evil, Dick's work becomes pyschedelic and if you are not as drugged as the characters in this book, there drug-induced world becomes all the more alient to the average reader. This book may have merit from academic research perspective, and can be read from the perspective of digging deep and wide to understand the psyche of Philip K Dick, but it is not an entertainer. It is not an easy read and gets all the more complex towards the end. It may be a critic's delight, but an average readers nightmare of a book. Read it only if you are a big Philip K Dick fan, are able to hallucinate, or have an academic interest in this work.

Philip K. Dick is probably my favorite author at the time, and it is probably because of this novel. I disliked the first novel of his that I read and I wrote PKD off after that experience. It was months before I gave him another shot. I already had this book so I felt obligated to read it. "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" was instantly captivating and I was converted into a PKD fan. I am unable to articulate why I enjoyed this book so much; I think it is something you just have to experience for yourself. Dick is able to create worlds so easily and then bring them crashing down around his characters. If you have already written PKD off like I did, give this novel a shot. It's well worth it.

Set in a science-fiction genre the story teller (PKD) has developed the uncanny ability here to insert a small but important wedge into the consciouness of the reader which will lead the reader to uncontrollably question their reality in a way previously only obtained through mind-altering practices of meditation or certain types of drugs. Will the reader be better off after such an encounter with PKD's craft? Only time will tell.

This is one of my favorites by PKD. Very similar elements to a lot of his other work, but, with Three Stigmata, I feel that he was far more successful in wrapping everything together into a cohesive whole than with some other PKD books. The actual three stigmata of Eldritch become downright eerie when they start manifesting themselves in this book.... very twisted and fully image inducing.

A darkly comic, often disturbing journey of self discovery where PKD cleverly gives the reader a literary acid trip. A book which stirs the reader to question the world in which we all live. Maybe, just maybe, things are not quite what they seem! This story haunts you after you read it - when PKD wrote this book he uncovered dark meditations on life which are truly unsettling but (as always with PKD) extremely funny. One of his best!

It's "about" nearly everything, (but mostly the eucharist, guilt, drugs, reality, virtual reality, entropy, redemption and the very human hope that Happiness (or God) can be found in a syringe, bottle or pill). In the hands of any other writer this book would simply collapse under its own weight, but Dick makes it seem light, and quite entertaining. I kept returning to this novel as the implications of each idea began to grow in my mind.

While prose is not as compact as poetry, a question I asked myself while reading The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich was "What could have been deleted from this book without harm?" Another question perhaps harder to justify - perhaps because it gives the reviewer too much degrees of freedom - is "What could have been added to improve this book?"

Personally while I have great respect for Phillip K. Dick, I found this book had a lot of soft stone that should have been removed to reveal a "sculpture" worth seeing. Perhaps if one regards the book as an incoherent dream of some fictional insane mind - it makes some sense.

I think Dick wrote some great works, but l consider the time I spent reading this story to be a waste. In some sense it reminds me of some of the books by George R R Martin in the Game of Thrones Series (though Dick does attempt to reach something deeper it seems to me). This book and perhaps all of those by Martin suffer from being entertaining over a few pages and pointless over many. The well-written scenes end up leading to nothing more than a collection of well-written scenes that promise something greater than the sum of its parts but does deliver.

There are many great descriptions of this book's narrative in other reviews below- so I won't repeat what has already been well-explained. However, I would like to add why I think this is such a great book.

(NOTE: I am NOT about to give anything away)

In this book PKD posits the idea that if we could choose our own afterlife/paradise/eternity, then we would all choose the SAME thing/event/idea. Of course, to know what THAT "thing" is, then you will have to read the book. ... ENJOY !... it is really, really great - I have read it three times...

This book is like being somewhere in between a prophetic dream and a bad drug trip. There's too much chaos involved in the plot for me to give this book 5 stars, but there's are enough creative ideas that will give the reader something to ponder. The idea of advanced life on Mars is also kind of quaint but bothersome, but Dick couldn't have known that until Mariner 4's photographs one year later.

This was my first encounter with Philip K. Dick, the prolific sci-fi writer. His writing is confident, straightforward, and manages to make the distant future recognizable and believable. I enjoyed the plot - it wove together a number of separate storylines and included a bit of mystery - but felt that at the end of the book the author was trying too hard to say "something important" about the nature of reality and eternity. The story wasn't strong enough to carry weighty philosophical ideas; it began to seem a bit far-fetched, but it did make me think.

A really remarkable concept, and brilliant execution. The story really flows off the pages and into the reader's head with exactitude and poignancy. One of my favorite books of recent, and an easy read, no less.

A really remarkable concept, and brilliant execution. The story really flows off the pages and into the reader's head with exactitude and poignancy. One of my favorite books of recent, and an easy read, no less.

One of the few science fiction books that gave me something to think about once I'd finished it. The drug Chew-Z catapults the user into a bizarre universe dominated by the evil Palmer Eldritch, the man who discovered it. But is it really Palmer Eldritch who is in control? If not, who or what is? And is it really all that evil? Either way, an enigma worth puzzling over.

PKD had a unique writing style that reaches deep into your mind and makes you bond with his characters. He does it quickly and in many cases right at the very first paragraph.
I read this book some ten years ago and yet the story stays with me...even with today's distractions (Internet for instance!)bombarding my fading memory.
If you get a chance, read his works and you will soon thirst for more! It's a fact.

A great novel is kind of like a knockout cocktail - it takes just the right mix to make it work out. Unfortunately, for all it's grand ideas, Philip K. Dick's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" just doesn't have the recipe down. There's far too much Christian theology and not enough philosophy for my taste.

The book contains an embarassment of riches in terms of ideas floating around in this heady brew. However, especially in the last quarter of the book, all of these ideas are seen through an overtly Christian prism. For example, the identity of Palmer Eldritch: is he a god, The God or some kind of God viz. Christianity. Only the latter is really explored. Nothing about what it might mean to be a god, the responsability of a god to mankind, etc.

Moreover, characters, some of whom are not overtly followers of Church dotrine, debate the bizarre events as if they were Cardinals with a lifetime of diocese experiance. In particular, Anne Hathaway is a self-professed missionary why tries to convert Barney, yet he's drawn to her? Why? She seems like a smarmy schoolgirl. She may be sexy, but who could deal with her self-righteousness? This just doesn't ring true to me, nor does it make much sense.

When faced with the inneffable, why would we revert to ideas that were worn out 1,000 years ago? Transsubstantiation!? Please! No one's taken that seriously since Martin Luther! Why would one turn to ideas the Church fathers argued over in order to justify their wholey man-made religion in order to make sense of psychadelic experiance? The end result just seems to be an intellectual game of twister in order to justify some kind of Christian belief. Well, if it takes such contortions to make it work, you'd better find a spiritual chiropractor because this is just silly.

Still, the book retains value for the simple fact that Dick is juggling so many interesting ideas. If only he'd let us see them through a multitude of view points instead of just the Christian one.