Arnold
Tash Jayasinghe
CibbuanoThe Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
February 6th 2008 08:10
Dick was a master of creating tantalizing scenarios, universes that seemed so easy to translate to film, and this book is no different: in the future, Dick imagines an Earth that is overheating due to global warming, causing the booming human population to try and colonize other planets in the Solar System.
No one wants to leave Earth, hellish as it may be, and the UN has to draft colonists. The colonies portrayed by Dick are hilariously satirical - the colonists try futilely to grow crops, but native fauna destroys all of their crops, and the equipment breaks down rapidly. As a result, the UN is forced to drop supplies often, but in typical bureaucratic mismanagment, they rarely drop anything usefull, dropping, for example, a crate full of salt.
The only pleasure they can find is in the Perky Pat layouts that every colony has... it's a little dollhouse, with a doll named Perky Pat and her boyfriend, Walt. By chewing an illegal drug, called Can-D, they can hallucinate and project their consciousness into the dollhouse, living as Pat or Walt, allowing them to enjoy all the pleasures of Earth - or at least, Earth as it used to be.
Wonderful!
Dick sets up this universe, but his novel is much deeper and labyrinthine. The return of an explorer also brings a competitor to Can-D, called Chew-Z, and people are eager to try it... the novel veers off into a dreamlike reality, confusing the reader with unstable environments and settings.
It's a mysterious read, and it's hard to grasp what you've just finished, but the world is so compelling that you can imagine the film potential. Yeah, I'd make it.
Sci-fi fans should go apes over this, an imaginary world, but dense with satire and meaning. Dick proves again that he's got the mettle to last for an entire novel.
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