帕莫·艾德里希的三道圣痕 (1965)

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is a 1965 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. Published by Doubleday, it was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel.

Set largely among colonists on Mars, the novel depicts a society in which users of the hallucinogen Can-D inhabit the shared fantasy world of the Perky Pat layouts. Its plot turns on the return of Palmer Eldritch, a powerful industrialist who introduces the new drug Chew-Z, drawing Leo Bulero and Barney Mayerson into increasingly unstable levels of reality.

Critics have read the novel as a hallucinatory dystopia concerned with false or ersatz worlds, religion, evil, and the relation between metaphysics and capitalism. John Clute describes Palmer Eldritch as one of Dick's "God-substitutes", while Darko Suvin treats the book as a major work of Dick's central period in which political and ontological questions are equally at stake.

Contemporary reviews were mixed but often struck by the novel's ambition: Algis Budrys praised it highly, while Judith Merril and P. Schuyler Miller were more divided about its execution. Later critics and writers, including Michael Moorcock and China Miéville, continued to discuss it as a major Dick novel.

Background and publication

Philip K. Dick later said that he wrote The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch during a crisis in his religious beliefs and conceived it as a novel about "absolute evil" embodied in human form. He also recalled that the book disturbed him so much that he could not bear to reread the galleys. He later connected the novel to his reading on hallucinogens and noted that some critics had called it "the first LSD novel", while denying that his own drug experiences had been directly transposed into his fiction. The novel's background has also been linked to Dick's 1963 vision of "perfect evil" and to the Ken and Barbie dolls owned by his daughters, which fed into the Perky Pat material.

Dick's short story "The Days of Perky Pat", first published in the December 1963 issue of Amazing Stories, introduced the Perky Pat layouts and related material later incorporated into The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

The novel was published by Doubleday in 1965 and was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel. In 2007, it was reissued in the Library of America volume Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s, edited by Jonathan Lethem.

Plot

In the novel's 2016 setting, Earth has become increasingly uninhabitable, and many people are drafted or pressured into colonial settlements on Mars and elsewhere in the Solar System. Colonists endure harsh conditions by using the illegal drug Can-D together with elaborate Perky Pat doll layouts, which allow groups of users to share a fantasy of affluent life on Earth. The market for this escape is dominated by Leo Bulero, head of P. P. Layouts. His most valuable employee is Barney Mayerson, a precognitive consultant who predicts consumer trends. Although professionally successful, Barney is embittered and increasingly insecure. He lives with his assistant, Roni Fugate, fears replacement, and remains preoccupied with his former wife Emily, a ceramic artist whose work he rejects when it is offered to his company. His anxieties deepen when he is selected for possible colonial resettlement.

Bulero's business is threatened by the return of Palmer Eldritch, a merchant-explorer who has come back from the Prox system with a new hallucinogenic product called Chew-Z. Unlike Can-D, which depends on shared props and produces a communal illusion, Chew-Z offers a more private and seemingly unlimited experience. Bulero sees Eldritch as both a commercial rival and a personal menace. Guided by precognitive forecasts, he becomes convinced that he is destined to kill Eldritch and attempts to confront him. Instead, he is captured and forced into a Chew-Z experience. Within it, ordinary reality becomes unstable: apparent exits fail, time shifts, and Eldritch repeatedly appears, marked by his three stigmata of an artificial arm, artificial eyes, and steel teeth. Bulero is even shown what appears to be a future memorial crediting him with Eldritch's death, but he cannot tell whether what he sees is prophecy, deception, or another layer of hallucination.

After Bulero returns, or seems to return, he blames Barney for failing to rescue him and dismisses him, but later recruits him for a covert mission against Eldritch. Barney is sent to Mars with instructions to take Chew-Z and, at the height of the experience, ingest a second substance that will make the drug appear medically dangerous to regulators. On Mars he encounters the same emotional and spiritual desolation that drives colonists toward artificial escape. He meets Anne Hawthorne, a Christian missionary who opposes both Can-D and Chew-Z, and observes growing local interest in Eldritch's product. Eldritch begins to appear by projection or simulacrum, presenting Chew-Z as a superior form of transcendence. Barney delays carrying out his mission, working in a garden and attempting to recover a sense of ordinary reality, but eventually gives in and takes the drug.

Barney's experience with Chew-Z becomes a succession of shifting realities involving Emily, Roni, Bulero, and future versions of himself. He repeatedly seems to awaken, only to discover that the world he has entered is itself another layer of the drug. In one sequence he reaches a future in which Eldritch appears to be dead, only to learn that Chew-Z users may continue there as spectral presences. Eldritch confronts Barney directly, alternately explaining, threatening, and enticing him. Barney comes to believe that Eldritch is using Chew-Z not merely to sell hallucinations but to enter and dominate the realities of others. He also begins to suspect that Eldritch is attempting to replace him, so that the person Bulero is fated to kill as Palmer Eldritch may in fact be Barney.