The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

"This was written in the early 1960s. After The Man in the High Castle, he thought: I’m a successful writer, maybe now I can sell my straight novels and my mainstream novels? But no, they didn’t go anywhere! He’d made a literary breakthrough with The Man in the High Castle, which wasn’t strictly science fiction, although it wasn’t mainstream – it was a sort of a hybrid. His next novel, We Can Build You , was science fiction. It wasn’t what he wanted to produce. So, he sold that, and then he had to reevaluate his writing. He said, ‘Well, I can’t sell my literary novels. I have to make some money. I’m just going to concentrate on science fiction.’ This is 1962, ’63, ’64, on into 1970 or so. He cranked out three novels a year – that’s a lot of writing, a lot of speed. So then comes The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and many consider it one of his greatest masterpieces. I told you he was going to his little hut up the road where he’d go type, and he’d call this ‘the hovel’… One day he was walking from his house to his hovel to work on something – or just to sit around smoking pot, I don’t know – when he looked up in the sky and he saw a vision of a metallic mask glaring down at him, and there was a face of pure evil. And he went on shortly after that to write The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch . How do you explain this book? It’s science fiction, but it’s a horror story at the same time. Mankind has sent a lot of people to Mars as colonists, but it’s a pretty sorry state of affairs on Mars. They live in hovels. They’ve got all this machinery and stuff to terraform the planet, but it’s just sitting there idle and going to rust, nobody’s bothered with it. The characters in the hovels on Mars are all intent on playing this board game. By the use of a drug they take called Can-D, they enter into something like a Barbie doll game – it translates them into this Barbie doll world, and they can have all these affairs with their fellow colonists that they wouldn’t normally have in the real world. And then a new drug comes on the market to oppose Can-D: it’s called Chew-Z. Chew-Z is a drug made by Palmer Eldritch, who is a man who went out into space and came back many years later. He doesn’t look like you or me: he’s got a metal face, and a metal hand, and his eyes are sort of like a band across his face. He’s come back with this alien Chew-Z drug that he wants to introduce to Mars, to supplant Can-D. And he does it, but the trouble is this is about the worst possible drug you could possibly imagine. It’s horrible: if you take one hit, it’s not a matter of becoming addicted, it’s a matter of no longer even knowing where you are. You’re in Palmer Eldritch’s world now, and you will never ever come out of it. There’s a gripping realisation halfway through that Palmer Eldritch is not human. This is an alien invasion, with an alien drug – oh, crikey . So then you have one of Philip K. Dick’s ordinary common-man heroes, just a regular working stiff. He has to battle Palmer Eldritch, and at the end he maybe wins, but maybe not. Again, it’s an indeterminate novel. Do the characters ever get out of Palmer Eldritch’s world, or do they stay in it forever? It’s a horrible thing to contemplate. Yes. It has different interpretations. Some people see it as resolved, some people don’t. I don’t think it’s really been heavily critically studied. But it’s definitely indefinite! So that’s the third book of my five. I’m going through chronologically."