The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Description

In the overcrowded world and cramped space colonies of the late 21st century, tedium can be endured through the use of the drug Can-D, which enables the user to inhabit a shared illusory world. When industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from an interstellar trip, he brings with him a new drug, Chew-Z, which is far more potent than Can-D, but threatens to plunge the world into a permanent state of drugged illusion controlled by the mysterious Eldritch. THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH is, by universal consent, one of his three key novels, and the book in which he first took his perennial interest in the fragile nature of reality to a new level of imaginative intensity.

Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) was born in Chicago but lived in California for most of his life. He went to college at Berkeley for a year, ran a record store and had his own classical-music show on a local radio station. He published his first short story, 'Beyond Lies the Wub' in 1952. Among his many fine novels are The Man in the High Castle, Time Out of Joint, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.

One of the most original practitioners writing any kind of fiction, Dick made most of the European avant-garde seem like navel-gazers in a cul-de-sac * Sunday Times * For everyone lost in the endlessly multiplicating realities of the modern world, remember: Philip K. Dick got there first * Terry Gilliam * Dick quietly produced serious fiction in a popular form and there can be no greater praise * MICHAEL MOORCOCK * One of the genuine visionaries that North American fiction has produced * L.A. WEEKLY *