The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

A 1965 novel, published by Doubleday and nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel, about colonists who survive an unliveable solar system by taking a drug that drops them into a shared hallucination — and about the industrialist who returns from an interstellar trip selling a better one, which he appears to inhabit from the inside. It is the most openly theological of the Dick books on this list, with a marketed product in the position usually occupied by a god.

Context: a16z’s case for reading Dick is that each work contains at least one genuinely new idea told fast; this is the one where the idea is a commercial product that colonises its users’ reality. Read alongside Ubik it makes a pair: two novels four years apart about consumer goods that determine what is real.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• a16z — the firm whose infrastructure team curates it.
• Philip K. Dick — the author.
• Ubik — the companion novel, same problem and a different product.
• Historical Futurism — the research lens.
• Science Fiction — the genre page.