The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

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Leo is threatened by the new drug. "Palmer Eldritch is horning into my business and if he does I'll probably be ruined..." Chew-Z is like Pepsi to his Coke. What value is the monopoly with respect to his secret recipe, if somebody can imitate (or improve on) its effect by discovering an alternative lichen-base? "Can-D is obsolete, because what does it do? It provides a few moments of escape, nothing but fantasy."

A psychiatrist who is an advanced computer living in a briefcase, offering advice to men like Barney Mayerson. How the hell do I review this book? How is it even possible to get across the feeling this book gives? This book frankly seems like a dark downward spiral into insanity... and yet inside that it offers both hope and despair.On Mars, Mayerson buys some Chew-Z from Eldritch, who appears in holographic form. Mayerson tries to hallucinate a world where he is still with Emily but finds that he does not control his apparent hallucination. Like Bulero, he finds himself in the future. Mayerson arrives in New York two years hence where he speaks with Bulero, Fugate and his future self about the death of Palmer Eldritch. This is largely because the characters are taking hallucinogenic drugs, either on Earth or Mars, or in transit between the two planets. At this point the plot gets extremely convoluted (yes, more so!) as several characters get caught up in Chew-Z hallucinations, during which they frequently encounter the ominous Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the mechanical arm, artificial eyes, and steel teeth. Both Barney and Leo start to travel in time and space and it’s not clear what is real and what is induced by Chew-Z.

And as Leo finds out, Eldritch isn’t lying. When you imbibe Chew-Z, you go into an imagined world of your creation, you spend as much time there as the drug’s effects allow, and then you wake up in reality with only a split-second having passed and no negative physical effects. (Can-D, on the other hand, allows real time to pass and causes headaches.) God” may not be human necessarily, but needs human interaction to survive. If people believe that humanity needs God, they should also realize that God needs humanity to exist. If none of us believed in God, the idea wouldn’t exist.”

I also focused on the idea of reality being a shared event. One of the main points I kept in mind about Can-D is that it can be a shared experience with other people, and I think it’s alluded to that reality itself is a shared experience. If it’s not shared with someone else it can be considered a dream or an illusion. When Eldritch is first explaining Chew-Z to Leo, he makes reference to the fact that there are no layouts and that the user is more in control of their own experience rather than sharing it with others (except for Eldritch of course). By the same logic though, I believe that Eldritch (or any God figure) still has some human elements because if they don’t share some sort of reality or space with us then how can they exist? Eldritch isn’t completely free of human influence which is why I think he “fused” with Barney during his use of Chew-Z. When Barney awakes from his Chew-Z experience in his Hovel, he and Anne discuss the fact that Eldritch needed to gain something from Barney during the experience, which is why I think they “fused” and I think that is the shared reality idea.

His ex-wife Emily, meanwhile, learns that her attempt to sell her pottery designs to Perky Pat Layouts has been rejected, a decision which Barney had no involvement in whatsoever. There is in THE THREE STIGMATA and MARTIAN TIME-SLIP something that I regard as funny, which nobody else

It’s equal parts story and think piece, and this is a natural choice given the subject. The events and situations lead Barney, Leo and the reader to think about big spiritual questions. Palmer Eldritch is both a mystery and, eventually, a corporate magnate. Leo disputes Eldritch's claims for Chew-Z. He also believes that, in contrast, "with Can-D you undergo a valid interpersonal experience," in that your peers share the experience. It's a "communal world". But one could argue that “Three Stigmata” is actually portraying the most extreme drug-trip consequences one can imagine: the end of the human race as anything other than “Matrix”-like pod-dreamers. In addition to dominating the market among depressed colonists, Eldritch thinks Chew-Z could be a hit on Earth too. PKD tiptoes into cli-fi Red Right Hand: Palmer Eldritch has horizontally slitted metal eyes, metal teeth and a mechanical right arm: all physical signs of his metaphysical transformation into something very other than human. First of all, the general context is ludicrously, unnecessarily odd. It concerns a company that mass-produces miniature furniture and accoutrements which can be bought by colonists on Mars to be used in the miniature town layouts the colonists all have in their hovels – and the reason these Mars colonists all have miniature town layouts in their hovels is because they all take a mind-altering drug called Can-D which allows them to hallucinate their way into the dolls that inhabit this miniature town, as a break from the monotony of life in a hovel on Mars.

There are multiple pieces of evidence to think that Barney never recovers from his 1st Chew-Z experience: The difference between Can-D and Chew-Z is that the areas you go when you hallucinate on Chew-Z can be controlled, e.g., by Palmer Eldritch (although there's a suggestion that they might be controlled by the humanoid inhabitants on Prox, the Proxers [a rumour which the novel later describes as "trash"]).The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch was the kind of book that Kilgore Trout, the fictional recurring character in Kurt Vonnegut's novels (based on science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon) would have been proud of – deftly original, scathingly satirical, wildly entertaining – and funny in the kind of subtle way that would have pleased Vonnegut. While the drugs are not strictly legal, they are marketed with the complicity of the UN Narcotics Control Bureau (which is obtained by an enormous yearly tribute paid to the UN for immunity).