Since I read the book over a week and a half ago and have now returned it to the library, I really want to at least write something about it before it slips from my memory. Within a 24-hour timespan, I read Philip K Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch from start to finish. That's one hell of a headtrip. (Warning: If you're going to read the book, and don't want any plot details spoiled, don't read any further. I won't give away the ending, but some people might enjoy letting the whole thing be revealed in the narrative.)

The setting, as was the case with much of the scifi of the 60's era, is a near-future scenario in which humanity is colonizing other planets in the solar system. In this vision, nobody really wants to leave earth, despite harshened domestic weather conditions which make venturing outside during the day a potentally fatal experience due to excessive heat. People are drafted for lifelong assignments to Mars or other planets, where they are forced to live out dreary existences in the long pursuit of making the other planets more hosptiable. But that's all just window dressing.

With such a hopeless life, the colonists find greatest fulfillment in using an illegal drug ("Can-D") in combination with miniature figures placed in accessorized dollhouses to achieve "transubstantiation" into a human form that they imagine once existed on their home -- earth -- before it became inhospitable to human life. The drug allows them to "get inside" the bodies of the two dolls (one male, one female) as a communal experience of remembering and re-experiencing this lost perfection. But it only lasts for about an hour at a time, after which their minds must regain consciousness and return to the dull life on Mars.

Things really start to get interesting a man who took a journey to another star system is rumored to have returned, and brought with him a newer, better drug ("Chew-Z") to be released on the market. This one doesn't require the use of action figures, but more importantly, it allows each user to enter their own private ideal world for a subjectively indefinite period of time, even as their "real" bodies are only out for a second. But who, or what, really controls what happens inside these illusions? And are they really illusions, or a heretofore unknown method of time travel? A way to pierce the boundries of the space-time continuum, and see into the minds of others, as well as the future.

In this novel, Dick ventures into some truly deep and wacky concepts, with some not-so-subtle allegories to religious rituals and ideas. Also, as is so often the case in his work, he throws the reader through several mind-bending twists and turns, so you're never quite sure if you're on stable footing in the reality of the universe he's built, but the conclusion is still strangely satisfying.

Yet another reason that Philip K Dick is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. More reviews to come.