The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Philip K. Dick

HOW I GOT IT: As with many line-cutters, this one is spur of the moment - and spurred on by a book event. Philip K. Dick will be discussed by Jonathan Lethem tomorrow night, and I picked up the book yesterday. I would have to say that Jonathan Lethem is the best writer I've been introduced to this year, having read Motherless Brooklyn and his latest, You Don't Love Me Yet. He is in keeping with several of his contemporaries who are seen as writers of high literary merit that also explore genre (detective, science-fiction, etc.). In his own day, Dick hoped to me acknowledged as more than just a sci-fi writer. So has been done with the recent Library of America canonization. Lethem edited the edition.

HOW IT WENT: Rich would be an understatement for this, my introduction to P.K. Dick. In his presentation/discussion, Lethem laments at the dearth of success screen adaptation has had in retaining the author's ideas and talents. Who would challenge that cardinal rule that the book is always better? But this imposes an inverse negative on my reading experience. I can never bring myself to read the book if I've just seen the movie. I would be anticipating key plot points and contrasting the differences in tactics and style. (It's also kept me from watching a couple good movies, if I intend to read the book.) I couldn't read the book for what it is, even though it would, in a vacuum, be better. This blog is not about the works themselves, but about my experience with them. They stand in my room as a testament to futility and mortality.

So does Dick. Only he's not confined to my room or a particular volume. He is immortal through his words, and that is because he will now never be out of print (and the book will also lie open, as the book is bound with the grain of the paper). And he is in constant print because he has been aptly selected by LOA, a result of his tapping into the very essence of human existence. I hope I'm not getting too deep here. But if you want to go down another twenty levels or so, then read this book.

My own acid test for this writer is that I have seen several movies based on his works (Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall) and I am fully confident that the reading of the antecedent texts will be an entirely unique experience. It doesn't take away from the films, because they are all great and decent flicks. But Dick generated these incredible premises and plots and dystopias in the form of books, and his command of language and ideas underlines the inherent advantage of the book when it starts out as such.

This book is rich. It's also brief. It creates two solar systems with a dozen characters. Written in 1964, it is haunted by the greatest specter of 2007 - that we're making our planet uninhabitable. Lethem says that what makes Dick unique not only among SF but other great writers in general is his utter commitment and investment in his characters, no matter how stark and isolating their situations are. In keeping with what I find to be the most riveting science fiction, Dick keeps everything tidy on a literal and scientific level. But he goes further. It is also philosophically and metaphysically sound (at least to a layman's eyes). The characters are, at times, as vapid as their circumstances - and their physicality. Where an excessive coincidence sits heavy, an existential epiphany soars. The pseudo-theology might be undercooked romanticism, but the anthropologically-informed futurism is ready and crispy.

Or maybe the theology is richer still, at least for a less-evolved Terran.

"So I assumed. And if you imagine people are going to pay out skins for an experience like this...you're not just out of your body; you're out of your mind, too."