Stigmata is Dick at the height of his powers, in the early Sixties, when he was knocking out books at the rate of at least two a year. It appeared a year or two after The Man in the High Castle, which I reviewed here a couple of months ago.
The setting is the late 21st century. The world has become an uncomfortable place to live, with temperatures fatal by lunchtime. Capitalism has progressed to the inevitable stage, where a few monopolies control the world. The elite pacify the plebs with the drug Can-D and the miniature world of Perky Pat, a Barbie-type doll with every conceivable accessory to collect, forming a perfect self-contained picture of the world as society's romantics would like it to be - essentially, smalltown America circa 1968. Indeed, Perky Pat (and Can-D) is the only thing that keeps conscripted colonists sane on the dust-bowl that is Mars.
Can-D is a social drug; it allows users to enter the Perky Pat world as a group. But then the renegade capitalist entrepreneur Palmer Eldritch returns from exploring the outer reaches of the solar system. He brings with him a new drug, Chew-Z, which threatens the monopoly of Can-D. Any threat to Can-D is a threat to P P Layouts, miniaturists of Perky Pat and her world.
P P is where our keys characters work - the pre-cog Barney Mayerson, who assesses the viability of objects offered to be 'minned', and Chairman of the Board Leo Bulero. The story begins when Richard Hnatt, current husband of Mayerson's ex-wife Emily brings in a selection of her hand-made ceramics for minning. Mayerson cravenly rejects them. His fellow pre-cog and current squeeze Roni Fulgate disagrees and tells Bulero. Bulero fires Mayerson and, with no real alternative employer to take him on, Mayerson volunteers for Mars.
Actually there is another option, a rival for P P. A strange example of humanity called Icholtz strikes a deal with Hnatt and offers Mayerson a job. Bulero responds by offering Mayerson his old job back. But Mayerson is determined to go to Mars and the best Bulero can do is persuade him to become his eyes and ears in the colonists' hovels.
Bulero is a bubblehead, one of the elite who pay Dr Denkmal (of the Eichenwald Clinic) to artificially evolve their frontal cortex. Hnatt, suddenly in possession of a wodge of truffle skins (the only acceptable cash in the late 21st century) signs himself and Emily up for the full programme, although she is reluctant and fearful of the occasional glitch which is accidental regression. For the proles, like Mayerson, who are not so low in the pecking order that they have to subsist on drugs and dreams, but who can never put together a sizeable stash of liquid funds, there is Dr Smile, the pyschoanalyst in box, who is probably a simulation because he never gets your name quite right.
Palmer Eldritch, too, might be a simulation or simalcrum. Many times when we encounter him, he turns out to be a projection. He is known everywhere that mankind lives by his three stigmata: the artificial mechanical arm, stainless steel teeth and wide-vision artificial eyes. The downside of his challenger drug Chew-Z is that people who appear in your visions often display the three stigmata, as do people who are themselves under the influence. Chew-Z is antisocial drug; you go into your inner self, a world which consists of you and simulcra of Palmer Eldritch.
Mayerson figures this out:
It's an illusory world in which Eldritch holds all the key positions as god; he gives you a chance to do what you can't really ever do - reconstruct the past as it ought to have been. [SF Masterworks edition, p. 176]It is not so much a question of which reality is real as which reality does the least harm? Yes, it's a genre work but The Three Stigmata is also a novel of serious intent and genuine insight. On the one hand it forecasts the future we now have - are Can-D and Chew-Z Facebook and Twitter? is Palmer Eldritch a simalcrum of Richard Branson? On the other hand, it is a vision of its time and a mirror of our time. I highly recommend it.
