Leonard Gaya's Reviews > The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Shortly after Martin Luther’s death, the heads of the papal Church, then widely challenged by the Protestant movement, felt the need to beef up their positions on several doctrinal points. In October 1551, the Council met in Santa Maria Maggiore church in Trento, to discuss the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist. In the end, and after a lengthy thirteen-sessions deliberation, the bishops concluded, borrowing from earlier theological debates and Aristotelian metaphysics, that “by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the Body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his Blood.” What you get ain’t what you see.

In the alternate future of 2016, imagined by Philip K. Dick, the simulated reality magnate Leo Bulero, kidnapped on Luna and forced into a Chew-Z hallucination, meets a young girl. At some point, she declares, using the same Aristotelian line of reasoning: “My accidents are those of this child, but my substance, as with the wine and the wafer in transubstantiation—” (LoA omnibus edition, p. 310). Just as the church cracker is none other than Jesus Christ Himself, the young girl is none other than Palmer Eldritch, shortly after he met with God (or is he none other than God himself?), off Proxima Centauri.

This is one of the earlier novels by PKD and one of the nuttiest pieces of storytelling of the 1960s. You get climate warming and outer-space settlements, chewing and fuse-inducing drugs like Can-D or Chew-Z (but “be choosy. Chew Chew-Z”!), precogs, virtual entities by the name of Perky Pat or Winnie-Ther-Pooh Acres, evolution therapies invented by post-Nazi mad scientists, religious fanatics that look like Barbie dolls, lots of theological thinking and pranks, choruses of office employees with slit eyes, mechanical arms and, most of all, stainless steel teething rings.

This novel probably sat on Kurt Vonnegut’s nightstand while writing Slaughterhouse-Five. Likewise, regarding Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, William Gibson’s Neuromancer or even Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. At any rate, with this PKD novel, more than ever, what you see still ain’t what you get.