The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich

The work of Philip Dick describes various options for the illusory nature of life, because the theme of drugs pops up with him repeatedly. At this time, Philip Dick was experimenting with psychedelic substances , which was reflected in the plot of the novel. Rolling Stone magazine described Three Stigmata as the “classic LSD novel of all time,” although Dick himself tried LSD later. According to the writer, everything he knew about LSD at the time he was writing the novel, he read in an article by Aldous Huxley : “And yet - all these terrible things that I described seemed to come to mind only under the influence of a drug,” he said Dick in an interview with American journalist and writer Charles Platt in 1980 ^[2] . French writer and screenwriter Emmanuel Carrer in the biographical book Philip Dick. I’m alive, it’s you who died ”quotes the statement that Philip once knew the popular Asterix comic book in France, he had something to answer to the hint of mentioning the action of LSD in the novel“ Three Stigmata by Palmer Eldrich ”:“ Obelix , to become super-strong, it was not necessary to drink a magic potion, since he fell into the vat when he was still a little one ” ^[3] .

Among other things, Dick often used amphetamines until the 1970s ^[4] , which could affect the writing of the novel, however, according to the therapists, the writer amphetamines never acted on him thanks to the work of Dick's liver, as a result of which all the effects did not have time to reach the brain ^{[ 4]} .

Also, according to the author himself, the composition was influenced by the suddenly formed “religious precepts”: “By the time I wrote“ Three Stigmata ... “, I was already a new parishioner of the Anglican church ...” ^[5] . His established religious vision helped create the image of the main antagonist of the novel - Palmer Eldrich:

Once I was walking along the street and suddenly looked at the sky. And there, in the sky, I saw this face looking down at me, a gigantic face with alkali eyes, the face that I described in The Three Stigmata ... It was in 1963. And the appearance of this evil-looking monster was just awful. I did not see it quite clearly, but it was there, no doubt. <...> After what I saw in heaven, I really began to seek refuge in Christianity. That heavenly face was undoubtedly an evil deity, and I needed confidence that there was a deity in the world more powerful, but kind and merciful. <...> However, this memory continues to torment me as evidence that the god of this world is an evil god

- Interview with Charles Platt, 1980 ^[6]

The whole Dick novel is a lengthy allegory of the coming of the Antichrist . Palmer Eldrich is no longer a man, but some transcendental evil, as his “stigmata” directly indicate - an artificial hand, steel teeth and electronic eyes. Those who have tasted the Chuying-Zet, that is, those who choose false salvation, acquire marks similar to the Eldrichevsky ones. Compare with the " Revelation of St. John the Evangelist ":

And he will do what everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slaves, is supposed to

there will be a mark on their right hand or on their forehead,

- 13:16

.

Stanislav Lem in his monograph Fiction and Futurology (book 1) described the character as follows: “Eldrich’s appearance is terrible (dead eyes, dead hand, dead jaws), he looks like a dead man, but invincible, like God. The less they say about Palmer’s essence, the better for Dick as the author of Three Stigmata. For it is worth going deeper into reflection how sawdust of science fiction rains down from Palmer (a “monster” that has infiltrated a person; an “alien mind” that abducted the astronaut and “infiltrated” him; an alien “parasitism”, etc., but only Dick is a metaphysical and even a bit “divine parasitism”) ” ^[7] .

Later, Dick will write the novel " Turbidity " (1977) expressed in a similar vein with topics about episodic use and abuse of psychoactive substances and religion .

In his 1968 essay, entitled Self-Portrait, compiled in 1995's Philip Dick’s Changing Realities, Dick reflects on his work and lists which books, in his opinion, “could have avoided World War III,” which includes the novel "Three Stigmata" itself; he calls it “the most vital of all” ^[8] .

In the XXI century, global warming leads to the fact that during the day on the surface of the Earth you can only be in special protective devices. The planetary government is forced to gradually expel the population to Mars. The conditions there are by no means more pleasant - very few people are attracted to the hard work of developing cold, inhospitable deserts, and the colonists, eking out a miserable existence, now and then run off into a narcotic slumber. One of the earthly megacorporations produces “P.P. Sets” - sets of dolls according to the type of Ken and Barbie. And at the same time, he is spreading the special drug Ken-Di clandestinely. When used, you can temporarily feel yourself in the place of dolls - in a luxurious, comfortable and completely empty life. The more branded accessories to purchase, the more material and larger the hallucination will look like. And puppet mysteries allow you to merge consciousness with other people of the same gender.

Meanwhile, tycoon Palmer Eldrich is offering humanity a new drug based on an alien lichen - Chuying-Zet. It seems that it allows not just dreaming, but literally creating tangible physical worlds at one’s discretion. And travel in time. There is a suspicion that the proxies are behind the spread of the dangerous obsession - the mysterious inhabitants of the system of Proxima Centauri, from where Eldrich had just returned. One of the heroes of the novel, Leo Bulero, is trying to confront Eldrich: losing himself in a hallucination, he remembers his real self.

In the Boston Globe magazine, the novel was described in the following words: “A psychedelic odyssey of hallucinations in hallucinations, after which the reader will not remain unharmed” ^[9] .

Galaxy Science Fiction 's Algis Budris described the novel as "an important, well-controlled, seamlessly crafted book that will turn your mind around if you give it the least chance to do so." He praised Dick's achievement, saying that “the whole creation resonates with the touch of the only real science fiction writer who could do this”, and described the result as “witty, sometimes carefree and always fascinating piece of science fiction” ^[10] . Later, Budris called the book the best science fiction novel of his first year as a reviewer of the magazine, saying that others “call it a kind of semi-conscious failure” ^[11] . The American science fiction writer Michael Moorcock in his essay "The Real Ideas of Philip Dick" (1966) wrote the following about the novel:

Perhaps the novel “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Aldrich” lacks the power of vision and the powerful symbolism of Ballard, the elegance and ability of Aldiss to create a mood. But it contains the seriousness of the plan, the decisive intention to get to the truth, such as the author sees it, the ability to create a convincing world, which we see every day, but which nonetheless changes with each new scene to the extent that we begin to doubt the reality of every aspect of this world. The same thing was done with the characters: the person seems to be sure that he knows himself, but gradually Dick nullifies this belief, leaving him to be lost in conjecture about the reality of his own existence. Dick uses all his skill as a great science fiction writer to create a book that is more than a virtuoso about escapism. He does not play with half-blind, half-understood concepts, like many of his contemporaries, who were able to impress so many readers with their utterly simplified social and "philosophical" ingenious fabrications and who are so boring and so far from creating a real look at anything that plunges into perplexed by the lack of even the simplest insight ^[12] .

Philip Dick himself spoke of his novel somewhat from the negative side:

I am afraid of this book; <...> I wrote it during the crisis of my religious beliefs. I decided to write a novel, which would speak of absolute evil, personalized in the form of "man." When the galleys came, I could not even edit, because I could not force myself to read the text, and this is true.

- "Self-portrait", 1968 ^[13]

In the “Afterword to“ Ubik “F. Dick,” written by Stanislav Lem in 1975, the Polish writer expressed the following about the novel: “... in“ Palmer Eldrich’s Three Stigmata “the main character becomes a source of transcendental evil, which, however, is a metaphysics of a rather low quality, which is related to the base versions of “influx” and “vampires,” and only the author’s narrative balancing act saves the composition from fiasco ” ^[14] .

• Simulated reality
• Psychedelics
• The novel " Turbidity " (1977)

• Charles Platt. Interview with Philip Dick (translation by A. Chertkov) // Philip K. Dick. Ubik. - St. Petersburg: Terra Fantastica, Corvus, 1992 .-- S. 288-315.
• Michael Moorcock. The real ideas of Philip Dick // GOD in the gutter (electronic fanzine dedicated to Philip Dick). - Issue 4 (2000).
• Self-portrait (1968) // GOD in the gutter (electronic fanzine dedicated to Philip Dick). - Issue 1 (March 1999). - S. 15-17.

• List of publications by The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich in ISFDB
• “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich” on the Open Library in online archives

• Rossi, Umberto. “Dick e la questione della tecnica (o Della tecnologia)”, Technology and the American Imagination: An Ongoing Challenge , Atti del XII Convegno biennale AISNA, Eds. Mamoli Zorzi and Bisutti de Riz, Venezia: Supernova, 1994, p. 473-83.
• Tuck, Donald H. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy. - Chicago: Advent, 1974. - P. 142. - ISBN 0-911682-20-1 .