This is largely because the characters are taking hallucinogenic drugs, either on Earth or Mars, or in transit between the two planets. Alone again in his garden, Barney confronts a telepathic predator that calls him unclean and unfit to eat, because he displays the stigmata. Later, Eldritch stops by, and Barney recounts that event. Eldritch responds that the primitive mind often confuses the unclean with the holy. He say that after three centuries of contemplation, he decided to let Barney go. The whole scheme with Palmer Eldritch and Chew-Z was an attempt by the creature to perpetuate itself. After passing his physical and mental exams and getting his assignment to Fineburg Crescent on Mars, Leo comes to him with a plan. He asks Barney to go to Mars and take Chew-Z, and then file a complaint with the U.N. about the side effects. Barney considers it, knowing full well that Palmer Eldritch may try to kill him if he agrees.

How the hell do I review this book? How is it even possible to get across the feeling this book gives? This book frankly seems like a dark downward spiral into insanity... and yet inside that it offers both hope and despair. God” may not be human necessarily, but needs human interaction to survive. If people believe that humanity needs God, they should also realize that God needs humanity to exist. If none of us believed in God, the idea wouldn’t exist.” Unfortunately, Can-D now has competition. Palmer Eldritch, a man who has been in deep space for ten years, crash lands on Pluto. The head of P.P. Layouts, Leo Bolero, finds out that Eldritch discovered a compound like Can-D, but even more addictive, and he plans to sell it as Chew-Z. Adding to the bad news is that the U.N. has seized a shipment of Can-D. Leo uses Roni’s precognition to find Eldritch on the moon Ganymede. Roni and Barney also see that Leo kills Eldritch, and Roni warns him against his plan. Richard Hnatt’s rejection at P.P. Layouts means that he signs with their new competitor, Chew-Z. As for Palmer Eldritch, weird & sinister pilgrim that he is, I feel like he represented Philip’s ambiguous feelings towards religion, or perhaps Christ in particular. Is he come to save or to deceive? Will what he brings to us release us into an eternal life of clarity & liberation from death, or into one of delusion & unknowing? Seeing life as through a glass, darkly, as it were. There is a large and diverse precedence in the idea of "finding God" with the assistance/facilitation of mind altering drugs. There are similarities between the euphoria of worship and the euphoria of drugs. Just look at the Dionysian & Eleusinian Mysteries with their ambrosia, the Bwitists and their root bark, the Kiowa's and their peyote. The Rastafari's smoke a bit of the cannabis, the Vedas have their Soma, the Rus' people have their mushrooms. Hell, some people in Appalachia even get close to God with a little sip of strychnine and few rattlesnakes. Who am I to judge?

Title: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

You wrote in your Commentary section the following: “… the period between Barney’s awakening and his subsequent overdose (chapters 10 and 11) is slightly less clear. During the overdose, Eldritch tells Barney that he was never awake, and was manipulated into overdose, but if he wasn’t awake, how did he overdose? …there is a consistent interpretation of the book where neither Barney or Leo ever return to sobriety.” Leo is threatened by the new drug. "Palmer Eldritch is horning into my business and if he does I'll probably be ruined..." Chew-Z is like Pepsi to his Coke. What value is the monopoly with respect to his secret recipe, if somebody can imitate (or improve on) its effect by discovering an alternative lichen-base? "Can-D is obsolete, because what does it do? It provides a few moments of escape, nothing but fantasy." On Mars, Mayerson buys some Chew-Z from Eldritch, who appears in holographic form. Mayerson tries to hallucinate a world where he is still with Emily but finds that he does not control his apparent hallucination. Like Bulero, he finds himself in the future. Mayerson arrives in New York two years hence where he speaks with Bulero, Fugate and his future self about the death of Palmer Eldritch.

The next day, Barney works on his garden, thinking that the drugs have made everyone else give up on a normal, productive existence. Then a simulacrum of Palmer Eldritch arrives, to sell Chew-Z to the colonists. He appears as a tall, gaunt man with an artificial arm, Jensen eyes and steel teeth. Eldritch asks Barney about his chat with Allen Faine, and hints that their plans to stop him will fail. The surface story itself, if it were made into a movie, could be cast and produced in a similar fashion as the Bruce Willis film The Fifth Element – it’s over the top, bizarre, absurd, and yet all fits together. PKD’s underlying commentaries on religion and the drug culture are both erudite and socially informed. The author also applies a generous portion of irony and outrageous circumstance to an already volatile mix, like evolution of humans into a neo-bug-like thing. Critics before me have said that it is one of his best and I must wholeheartedly agree. In the middle of it all, the mysterious figure of Palmer Eldritch continues to manifest himself in the characters lives, seemingly all-powerful and yet trapped within the confines of his fate. It seems that Palmer Eldritch is no longer human, but instead may have become a god in the Prox system, or been taken over by something alien and powerful. Palmer’s motivations for spreading the use of Chew-Z in the solar system are unclear. In many ways, his existence seems a lonely one, and he actually tries through elaborate means to switch bodies with Barney to avoid his predestined death at the hands of Leo Bulero in the future. And I suspect that’s where “Three Stigmata’s” charges of being a challenging novel come in. It’s not hard to read; it’s hard to deal with what PKD is saying. Tapping into the spiritual notion that maybe God exists outside of time and space as we commonly know it, PKD tells a robust, convincing story about a god (or near-god) who has god powers (or godlike powers). PKD tones down the humor

In his story, Barney Mayerson is a precog who works for Perky Pat Layouts. His job is to use precognition to predict which accessories will become popular for users of the illegal drug Can-D, which allows users to escape into the world of Perky Pat and Walt, two Barbie and Ken-like characters who live an easy and bourgeois existence. The drug is used pervasively by off-world colonists, who live grim and miserable lives trying half-heartedly to establish human settlements, since the Earth is suffering from severe global warming. Extreme Chew-Z users/abusers find themselves jumping through time. Here a reader is well-served to have a grounding in PKD’s beliefs about the nature of reality — that reality might not be real, that there might be multiple equally valid realities, that each person might create their own reality, that all points in time might exist simultaneously, and so forth.

Mislim, na kraju krajeva; morate uzeti u obzir da smo napravljeni samo od prašine. Mora se priznati da se iz toga ne može izvući baš mnogo i to ne bi trebalo da zaboravimo. Ali kad se sve uzme u obzir, mislim, to je nekako loš početak, ne ide nam baš loše. Pa ja lično vjerujem da čak i u ovoj gadnoj situaciji u kojoj se nalazimo, možemo da se provučemo. Jesam li jasan? There are multiple pieces of evidence to think that Barney never recovers from his 1st Chew-Z experience:Here Barney encounters other colonists using Can-D, but cannot bring himself to use it. Instead, he is there when Palmer Eldritch’s pushers come and try to get the colonists to switch to Chew-Z. In the meantime Leo Bulero has convinced him to serve as a double-agent and wants him to try Chew-Z, then develop a medical condition (epilepsy) as a result of the drug, thereby discouraging others from switching.

Red Right Hand: Palmer Eldritch has horizontally slitted metal eyes, metal teeth and a mechanical right arm: all physical signs of his metaphysical transformation into something very other than human.This was the 10th and final PKD book I read last year after 40 years without reading any. I always felt as a teenager that I would get more from his books as an adult, and I think I was right. This one is a real mind-bending experience, deliciously strange and tantalizing with its ideas. Are the visions achieved by Eldritch's Chew-Z illusion? Are they part time travel? Does it really matter? Reality is always to be questioned in this book... perhaps Eldritch just showed our characters that. Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: The Perky Pat dolls are an obvious reference to the then-five years old Barbie. For a time I thought the book would have been better had it ended with Mayerson’s bleak final words and skipped the Leo ending. I finally broke down and googled for a second opinion and this article helped immensely — thanks. Only, I rather like seeing Leo’s “temporary slip” as him mistaking himself for a deity in his own right rather than as the Eldritch creature itself to fill the vacuum of Eldritch’s impending demise. It explains him harping on his highly evolved appearance and saying things like “Eldritch came from another space but I came from another time. Got it?” He sees himself as the “only one keeping the old way alive” and as a Protector. Perhaps this is only part of the alienation inherent to Palmer’s drug but it seems to me him reaching for divinity to fill a void which, as you say, nature abhors. The plot begins as several people are having very bad days. Barney Mayerson, a precognative fashion market analyst with a disaster of a personal life, has learned he's been drafted for the Martian colonization effort. This means leaving behind his life on Earth, and his cozy job at Perky Pat Layouts: producers of the popular Perky Pat line of collectables. Said items just happen to be perfect for guiding and enhancing a multiple-user sims-like experience by those using Can-D, a drug which induces a communal Virtual Reality-like hallucination.