Perky Pat Layouts are making a comfortable profit from their monopoly providing colonists on marginally inhabitable planets with an escape to an idealised ‘virtual’ earth-side reality (virtual in experience but drug induced dream world rather than cyberpunk-style). Then Palmer Eldritch returns from Proxima with a competitive product, only his drug is apparently much less harmful than P.P. Layouts. Although no cause is identified in the book, Earth itself is far from an idealised reality with soaring temperatures and unprotected exposure to the daytime sun resulting in rapid death.
Dick is right in his element here playing with issues of identity and reality. Which is the more real world for the colonists? The reality scratching a living from the inhospitable colonies or the dream reality of Perky Pat. Is each colonist really living such a terrible life with no hope of ever returning to Earth or is the dream-world life they escape to the real life they so desperately wish for. But he is also pulling religion into the picture and, when combined with precognition, a kind of time travel, and (rich) humans enhancing themselves by treatments that artificially push their bodies into an advanced evolutionary state, there is a risk of Three Stigmata getting a little muddled, and I guess it does, but few Dick books don’t involve some degree of muddle for the reader to disentangle. As such this is a book that does demand some effort from the reader but that effort is amply rewarded by a convoluted dystopian vision of a possible future.
4/5 stars
Dick is right in his element here playing with issues of identity and reality. Which is the more real world for the colonists? The reality scratching a living from the inhospitable colonies or the dream reality of Perky Pat. Is each colonist really living such a terrible life with no hope of ever returning to Earth or is the dream-world life they escape to the real life they so desperately wish for. But he is also pulling religion into the picture and, when combined with precognition, a kind of time travel, and (rich) humans enhancing themselves by treatments that artificially push their bodies into an advanced evolutionary state, there is a risk of Three Stigmata getting a little muddled, and I guess it does, but few Dick books don’t involve some degree of muddle for the reader to disentangle. As such this is a book that does demand some effort from the reader but that effort is amply rewarded by a convoluted dystopian vision of a possible future.
4/5 stars
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