The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
by Philip K Dick
320pp, Gollancz, £6.99
Next year SF celebrates a fairly significant anniversary. It will be 40 years since JG Ballard published The Terminal Beach , Brian Aldiss published Greybeard , William Burroughs published Naked Lunch in the UK, I took over New Worlds magazine and Philip K Dick published The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch . It was a watershed year, if you like, when SF rediscovered its visionary roots and began creating new conventions which rejected both modernism and American pulp traditions.
Perhaps best representing that cusp, Dick's work only rarely achieved the stylistic and imaginative coherence of those other writers. His corporate future came from a common pool created by troubled left-wingers Pohl and Kornbluth ( The Space Merchants , 1953) or Alfred Bester ( The Demolished Man , 1953). His Mars is the harsh but habitable planet of Leigh Brackett ( Queen of the Martian Catacombs , 1949) or Ray Bradbury ( The Martian Chronicles , 1950). His style and characters are indistinguishable from those of a dozen other snappy pulpsters. Even his questioning of the fundamentals of identity and reality is largely unoriginal, preceded by the work of the less prolific but perhaps more profound Charles Harness, who wrote stories such as "Time Trap", "The Paradox Men" and "The Rose" in the 50s.
So how has Dick emerged as today's best-known and admired US SF writer? It's hard to judge from this book (which was promoted enthusiastically by me and many others when it first appeared). Palmer Eldritch's three stigmata are his artifical arm, steel teeth and electronic eyes. He is a merchant adventurer lately returned with something valuable from Proxima Centauri to a globally overheated Earth. The UN (a regulatory body replacing government as such) is protecting him like a state secret.
Corporate boss Leo Bulero is the head of the Perky Pat empire, which employs "precog" telepaths to read the future and design business strategy. Bulero's business is the Barbie and Ken-type Perky Pat dolls and accessories used by planetary colonists to ease their misery and remind them of a materially idyllic Earth. In conjunction with the Perky Pat toys, colonists chew Can-D, an illegal drug which allows them to imagine themselves as the main characters in the Perky Pat world. Bulero's company secretly controls Can-D and publicly sells endless accessories for the miniature twosome.
Barney Mayerson, a high-ranking precog, predicts that Bulero will murder Eldritch, who has discovered a drug more attractive and powerful than Can-D. In confronting Eldritch, hoping to kill him, Bulero is plunged into powerfully realistic hallucinatory worlds clearly controlled by his bionic rival. Gradually he suspects that his antagonist is not only God and the devil, but that he and everyone else is an aspect of Eldritch. The material world becomes optional. What is real? Can Eldritch be resisted? Are our souls our own? It is to Dick's credit that as his hasty standard English and cardboard characters disintegrate in his wake, we are still left with sturdy philosophical questions.
Dick's speed-enhanced gift was to capture the illusion sometimes encountered by the deadline-conscious hack, hyped on adrenaline, playing with transcen- dental notions that creator and creations, illusions and reality are one. As with hallucinogens, the condition can cause obsession and psychosis, a distinct sense that the book is writing you. You become merely a medium. Common sense usually brings you back to shared reality. But in the case of Dick or L Ron Hubbard, inventor of Scientology, the experience formed the basis of a rough and ready belief system resembling Buddhism or Manichaeism. Does the mind control reality? Do good and evil emanate from the same source? What do we worship and why?
As he followed these themes, Dick's novels became increasingly incoherent and, for me, scarcely readable. Hacking out book after book, he gave himself no time to discover a more idiosyncratic structure or style, the search for which characterised the so-called SF New Wave and gave us sophisticated American visionaries such as Thomas M Disch, John Sladek and Samuel R Delany.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch ends with a question about identity. Unfortunately, I had to leaf back through the book before I could understand the question because the characters involved were so hard to tell apart. It could be true, as Dick so frequently suggested, that we are all actors playing out the dream of a great director in the sky. In this case, given the illusion of free will, I think I'd rather be in the movie.
· Michael Moorcock's most recent book is London Bone (Scribner). To order The Three Stigmata for £6.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979.