Yesterday I read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the first book, in a compilation of 5, that I am planning to read over the summer. I really enjoyed the book. I liked Phillip K. Dick's bleak vision of the future. The overheated and overcrowded New York environment was presient, given how the book was written in 1965. The sandy Martian colony, where unfortunate people are sent to live out their lives, is a bleak world where people have nothing to do except "chewing" hallucinagenic drugs Can-D and Chew-Z. I especially liked the scenes where the characters have fantastical Can-D and Chew-Z induced trips. But by far my favourite, was the scene in the Strangelove-esque Dr. Denkmal's E(volution)-therapy clinic, where one of the characters is given a treatment which allows him to evolve and experience "Broad, all-inclusive preoccupations?" Brilliant. Toward the end, though, I got a little bit confsed. The book got all philosophical, saying that Palmer Eldritch was god, or wasn't god, and the ending was too ambiguous for my liking.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yFLX9ruBEgI