The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - Philip K. Dick

Somewhere in the mid-nineties I took up reading science fiction again. In my teenage years I was an avid science fiction reader although one I can't quite understand in retrospect. I have no idea why for instance I kept reading the Dune series which if memory serves me right didn't even excite me that much. Probably a sense of obligation, lack of choice and ignorance of the real possibilities of science fiction kept me circling around the same authors until eventually at the beginning of my student years I forgot about the genre in its entirety. The discovery of the work of Philip K. Dick through a second hand collection of short stories, signaled my renewed interest in science fiction that has never wavered since that day. On one level science fiction presented new exciting possibilities that the classic novels I avidly read where unable to give me anymore. But without a doubt it was my wrestling with the meaning of rave culture (see for instance my thesis on house music), the relationship between technology, bodies and consciousness which was somehow already a normal topic of discussion in science fiction, that eventually pushed me back into SF. But to put it more bluntly: drugs. Where psychedelics are consumed Philip K. Dick's books soon are read (and become a drug itself, at one point I would finish a book in days and keep returning to Waterstone's to get "a new fix"). His unparalleled ability to question reality and make paranoia almost a way of life are instinctively understood and loved by the user. I have forced myself to choose one Dick novel as my favorite and I chose his most frightening book, although Ubik, We Can Built You, Flow My Tears The Policeman Said, Valis, A Scanner Darkly, Maze Of Death, Now Wait For Last Year and others are as important to me as the amazing story of Palmer Eldritch. Dick himself stated that he had trouble with writing the book whose main character was so dark and evil. The story is permeated with a unique sense of dread once Eldritch, who once was lost in space returns to Earth, maybe possessed by aliens, transformed with mechanical stigmata and an ability to move through dreams and reality itself. Once Dick starts taking away layers of reality he never lets up, leaving the reader in a permanent state of uncertainty and surprise.