Trippy sci-fi, with religious overtones, as a man returns from ten years in deep space with a new drug he is eager to try on the gloomy, drafted colonists of Mars. A precog working for a rival company may be the only person able to stop the spread of the drug, which has possibly alien origins.
I decided to take a break from reading the great work of Samuel R. Delany and refresh my palette with another worthy contemporary, Philip K. Dick. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is one of Dick's notable works that I had missed to date. It features a lot of Dick's themes and plotting, notably his ability to take everyday people and set them against larger events. There is also a character in this novel that is similiar, in name and mannerisms, to a character in A Scanner Darkly. Some of the religious thinking of Valis and other work is meditated on here. But I would definitely say Three Stigmata is one of the more hallucinatory Dick novels I have read to date, and PDK fans know that's saying something.
I checked this out from the Morrison-Reeves Library in Richmond, Indiana. It was part of the Library of America's excellent Philip K. Dick edition, a present I bought for my son and friends this past Christmas, in the way that people buy presents for others that they secretly want for themselves.
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2 comments:
I found this book in a carboard box marked free on the sidewalk in Montreal. My knowledge of Dick's work is fairly rudimentary, so I didn't know what to expect going in. I quite enjoyed it and share your assessment.
My favorites (thus far) are probably THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE and, predicatably, DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP, with A SCANNER DARKLY rounding out my top three.
JOD
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