Palmer Eldritch: The Three Stigmata of Philip K Dick

After ubik-like decay hit our move to blogger, a reader requested another review of The three stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by, yez, Philip K Dick. Well, what can one say about one of the best books ever written? Even though Im much more a fan of quasi-weird-fantasy and psychological density, this one book by PKD has more psychology in it then most of his other stuff, though I have to admit I havent read but a few others. A little too male for me. It still has a lot of the evil-woman-sado-maso thing oing on but its a very realistic laydown. And the plot is just too weird. Palmer Eldritch is a person or thing, something, that went away to visit unknown spaces and returned somehow changed. Or at least something returned. The UN does battle with the private market global-industrial complex. The little people fight the ability of the super-rich to evolve themselves technologically. Everyone has to fight something God-like from the unknown.. shades of Lovecraft? And the Entertainment Industrial Fashion complex has to fight a takeover by a space drug, Chew-Z, that nullifies the drug the Industry uses, Can-D, to addict soviet-gulag style existential farmers on Mars to their Fashion-istas type Entertainment feed. The writing is excellent and labyrinthine. The future and past get involved but they may not be the future or the past. Another book of his Ive read, A Maze of Death, has similar quasi-religio-philosophical stuff about the Ultimate Nature of Reality, but instead of a drug its a book written by A.J. Specktowsky, "How I Rose from the Dead in my Spare Time and So Can You". Anyway, if you have seen any of the movies based on short stories by this author, like screamers or minority report or bladerunner or a scanner darkly, you should read this one. Its like the movies x 10 x 10^10^10.