The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldtritch

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch makes for strange bedtime reading. It's addictive, much like the illegal drug for collective hallucination, Can-D, of the novel. Like other Dick novels, the obsession with metaphysics, drugs, religious themes, and dystopic futures are explored in a rather engaging tale on reality and unreality, instigated by the return of Palmer Eldtritch from the Proxima Centaurus system. Palmer, once human, disappeared for ten years in that alien star system, returning with a new drug, CHEW-Z, cultivated from lichen he returns with. Unlike the Can-D drug, illegally manufactured by Leo Bulero's P.P. Layouts company, which sells the drugs and "mins" of dollhouse layouts for the desperate colonists of the solar system, CHEW-Z and the god-like Palmer Eldritch break apart reality at the seams in such a way that time travel is possible, along with Palmer Eldritch, despite a future predicted death by the precogs employed by Bulero's company, manages to reassert himself and attain some measure of immortality. Palmer Eldritch, knowing his physical death at the hands of Bulero is down the road, is, at the novel's conclusion, perhaps successful in reaching immortality through movement of the 'unreal' world and phantasms which proliferate throughout the realities. 

If the above makes any sense, clearly there is a lot going on in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, yet, like Maze of Death, Mayerson, one of precogs now toiling as a settler on Mars, expresses interest in Neo-Christianity and the hope embodied in the faith. Belief in some higher hope, higher being of which Palmer is only a smaller part of, can lead to salvation or escape from the world of forms in which the characters are ensnared. Thus, there are Gnostic elements in this work, as well as some parallels with Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan, since both novels feature god-like beings and deal with themes of fate and divinity. Of course, whether or not Mayerson finds salvation through the ancient faith of Christianity or if Leo succeeds in ending Palmer is purposely ambiguous, as is the future of human "evolution" or Palmer Eldritch himself as "god."