The three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch: the gods watch us from above

The three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Often associated with the production of Philip K. Dick is the concept of unreality, a vision of the world that transcends what we can usually perceive with our senses, which are unable to cross a sensory limit that prevents us from finding answers and revelations that remain with us. unknown. Reading like Ubik can confirm this view of Dick's literary corpus, but this photographic production of one of the masters of social science fiction would be limiting, unfair. In his prolific activity, the American novelist has gone far beyond this emotional principle, he has gone into a more unbridled and lysergic search for further truths, which have found shape in mainstays of genre literature such as The Swastika on the Sun or But the androids dream. electric sheep? . Yet, if he decides to approach Dick using Palmer Eldritch's Three Stigmata as a point of contact, the feeling is that the unreal is not the vital spark of Dick's visual narrative, but a hyper-reality that, at the time, it was filtered by the writer's hyperstimulated perceptions.



three stigmata Palmer Eldritch's three stigmata represents a particularly interesting moment in Dick's production. It is no mystery that the American novelist was a tormented spirit, plagued by a series of ailments that were exacerbated by his misuse of amphetamines, used as a stimulant for literary production, which had a nefarious impact on his already fragile psyche. . To this, it should be added that Dick was active after the Second World War, within a society that was returning from an inhuman conflict found itself having to manage decades of internal distrust, with social struggles and a progressive invasiveness of established power in the lives of citizens. Between the danger of a nuclear holocaust and the constant feeling of being a constantly controlled individual, it is no wonder that Dick came to conceive a story like that of Palmer Eldritch's The Three Stigmata.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch: drugs, toys and gods

To sell these products, and the illegal Can-D, is Leo Bulero, who through the use of pre-cog, individuals capable of intuiting the future potential of new products related to Perky Pat, has built an economic empire based on the exploitation of the nostalgia of the settlers. An economic security that is jeopardized when Palmer Eldritch reappears on the scene, a competitor who disappeared ten years earlier during a commercial mission to Alpha Centauri. The return of Eldritch, apparently in possession of a new drug capable of replacing Can-D, becomes a risk to which Bulero does not intend to succumb, to the point of wanting to find out if whoever has returned to Earth after so many years is really Eldritch or a alien threat in disguise.

Palmer's Three Stigmata Eldritch is arguably one of Dick's most paranoid and disturbing works. Although there are typical elements of his production also found in other more successful works (the pre-cogs have achieved notoriety with Minority Report, a film based on a story of the same name by Dick), with this novel the constant paranoia that characterized the existence of Dick. The inspiration for this novel, according to the myth, came to the author after one day he had the vision of a titanic face watching him from the sky, a manifestation of his unconscious according to the psychoanalyst with whom he was being treated, the apparition of Satan to hear her acquaintance, an alcoholic ex-policewoman who had found salvation in religion. Obviously Dick, who has always been a scholar of religions and mysticism, recognized the correctness of the vision of women.

It is not surprising that in The Three Stigmata by Palmer Eldritch this vision of a microcosm (Perky Pat) which becomes a refuge therefore develops of personality to the limit (the colonists), but it is not salvation, but a voluntary surrender, a search for relief in a habit that prefers a sure lie to a frightening truth. Dick, throughout his production, makes his characters move on this dichotomy, whether it's the replicate hunter from But do androids dream of electric sheep? to the atypical death of the protagonists of Ubik. With Palmer's The Three Stigmata Eldritch goes further, letting the vision of an obsessive and unsettling religious interference emerge with new urgency.

Lysergic investigation into creed

Mondadori publishes a new edition of The Three Stigmata by Palmer Eldritch within the Oscar Moderni Cult series, continuing a journey in the fiction of Dick started with Ubik and should soon be enriched with a new stage, The Swastika on the Sun. The series of volumes of Dick's works, edited by Emanuele Trevi, shows that they want to offer an authentic experience of Dick's fiction as much as possible, making use of the translation by Marinella Magrì, who through a convincing choice of words proposes the claustrophobic emotional construction of the novelist American. Mondadori's volume maintains the simple identity but with the disturbing tones of the cover graphics already appreciated in Ubik, welcoming the reader with a preface by Emmanuel Carrère, which provides the right points of reference to understand the inner complexity of one of the tutelary deities of the science fiction fiction of the last century.