The three stigmata of the Palmer Eldritch

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The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (original title The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch ) is a science fiction - novel by the US author Philip K. Dick , the first in 1965 appeared. In German-speaking countries, it was also temporarily published under the title LSD Astronauts .

The book was nominated for the Nebula Award in 1965. Like many of Dick's works, it is set in a dystopian world and challenges the usual perception of reality . Drugs play an important role in this. It is also one of the first works by Dick to deal with religious subjects.

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On the completely built-up, artificial earth it has become so hot that a walk in the midday heat is life-threatening. The United Nations is the dominant political force. It is within their power to force everyone to serve in colonies. Mars , in particular, is a popular destination for such compulsory obligations, although the planet is an air-poor desert, in which life is made bearable simply by the drug Can-D. In addition to the drug, it also requires a so-called layout for the trip, which corresponds roughly to a doll's house. Under the influence of the drug, men imagine themselves in the male, women in the female doll and can live out their fantasies in a kitschy dream world. The layouts are produced by the company PP Layouts - as is the drug, the production of which is illegal but is tolerated by the corrupt rulers.

When the mysterious industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from an expedition to the Proxima Centauri system , he brings the drug Chew-Z with him. Chew-Z promises the change to an alternative reality in which you can create anything you want. The reality created by Chew-Z should be just as real as ours. In addition, no time passes during the trip in the objective universe. Eldritch, who has remained hidden for a long time and appears only through middlemen or illusions, receives permission from the UN to bring the new drug onto the market. A fight breaks out between him and PP Layouts. Its managing director Leo Bulero wants to murder Eldritch, but is captured himself, drugged with Chew-Z and finds himself in his private nightmare world.

Now the plot of the novel overturns: From this moment on, Bulero and the reader never again know for sure what reality he is in. Bulero's employee Barney Mayerson, a torn person with clairvoyant abilities and unresolved feelings of guilt, gets caught between the front lines of the argument. He eventually volunteers as a colonist on Mars, where he works as an agent for Bulero. There he also takes Chew-Z and learns that Palmer Eldritch is no longer a human, but a puppet taken over by an extraterrestrial power who can be understood as the spirit of the new drug. By taking Chew-Z, humans become, in a sense, avatars of this intelligence. A sign of this development is the constant appearance of Eldritch's prostheses : teeth made of steel, an artificial hand and artificial eyes, the three eponymous "stigmata".

At the end of the book, this also seems to happen to people who have never taken the drug. The book closes just before the moment when Leo Bulero will kill Palmer Eldritch. Barney Mayerson also knows from the dialogue with the intelligence behind Eldritch that it will submit to her death. However, it is not clear whether the attack will actually succeed or whether the Palmer Eldritch shell is simply no longer necessary.

background

As the earlier German title shows, the drug effects depicted attracted particular attention in the 1960s and 1970s. The trips are similar to those induced by the psychedelic drug LSD . Dick did take LSD and similar drugs later , but always emphasized that he had written this work beforehand. His own drug experiences were more likely to be incorporated into later works such as The Dark Screen .

The genesis of the novel has a certain curiosity: According to his own admission, Dick saw a face in the sky for several weeks that corresponds to the Palmer Eldritchs. In order to exorcise this phenomenon , he wrote the novel without knowing in large parts what reality the events in the novel should have.

The idea of ​​“layouts” and the “Perky Pat” doll, with which the colonists flee their desolate world, had already been used by Dick in his 1963 short story Zur Zeit der Perky Pat ( The Days of Perky Pat ). He took over some paragraphs almost word for word, but changed the whole context. Even people with clairvoyant abilities and their use for commercial purposes, with Dick "Präkogs" ( Precogs ), come in several of his works, such as The Minority Report ( Minority Report , 1956) and Ubik (1969).

As one of Dick's first works, the novel deals with religious themes. Even the term stigmata from the title has a religious background. The text also contains several express references to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation : Just as Christ attains a " real presence " in the Lord's Supper , Palmer Eldritch or the power behind Eldritch appears when taking the drug Chew-Z.

The power behind Palmer Eldritch has both godlike and malicious, satanic features. That "evil" is an attribute of God, or the fear that God himself is an immoral or malicious power, was a speculation that Dick later took up again and again, for example in Ubik, Maze of Death ( A Maze of Death, 1970) and finally the so-called VALIS trilogy (1980–1982). Dick often referred to Gnostic teachings.

Translations into German

A German translation of the book was published by Insel Verlag in 1971 under the title LSD Astronauts , and in 1982 it was reissued as Volume 60 in the Fantastic Library as a Suhrkamp paperback .

In 1997 a new translation with an afterword by Paul Williams under the title The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch appeared as part of the complete edition by Haffmans Verlag , and in 2002 in the paperback complete edition by Heyne Verlag . In 2014, S. Fischer Verlag published a new edition of the book as part of the Fischer Classic Series.

expenditure

  • The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Doubleday, 1965; Gollancz, 2003, ISBN 0575074809
German-language editions

Web links