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. ( )

I assume that the shared escapism of Dick's interplanetary settlers was intended as a satire on PKD's contemporary suburbia, or perhaps a literalization of television's "vast wasteland"; but there is an eerie connection between their drug-induced state and the "consensual hallucination" (aka 'cyberspace') found in Wiliam Gibson's Neuromancer.

The religious aspect is inescapable, but he gives you fair warning in the title. As for the last couple of paragraphs -- okay, they're weird. I'll get back to you after I've thought about them a bit...

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prescient -- people escape the doldrums of their life through an artificial "second life," plastic surgery has been replaced by medical "evolution," and so on.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. ( )

In typical Dick fashion, this novel begins benignly enough -- even if this particular one features several unusual elements, like a hallucinatory gum and future-seeing "precogs" -- but eventually devolves into a complex, reality-bending nightmare.

Where this book lost me was not the projection of alternate realities that come to light with the emergence of the Chew-Z (it makes more sense, actually, to just assume that NOTHING after that is real), but with the incorporation of overt religious themes to explain what's happening.

The unresolved ending is open to a great deal of interpretation, and it's the interpretative work that ultimately turns this book from a simple sci-fi novel into a dense puzzle of a text. Prepare to have your mind warped.

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. ( )