Unlike most of PKD’s work, this was my first time reading The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. I wonder what my thoughts would have been a few decades ago had I gotten to it at the same time as the rest of his novels, but now I cannot help but admire what Dick achieved and how prescient he was, yet again.
The first achievement was to do with words what Satoshi Kon did with images in all of his works, Paprika most of all. Perspectives change and timelines shift mid-sentence, delirious hallucinations become matter-of-fact reality, all without losing the reader. This is only ocassionaly done for comedy; more often, the result is horror of the Lovecraftian kind — Eldritch is right there in the title. One can only imagine what Kon would have done with this book, or with Dick’s similarly reality-bending Ubik. I am, of course, not the first person to have made this observation.
The second was to see what the religion of conumerism will bring, decades before it become obvious to everyone else: alienation, blurred reality, despair. Their physical manifestations — (a metal hand, artifical eyes, deformed jaw — are the titular three stigmata. The Man in the High Castle had religious undertones; fitting for a book of its title, The Three Stigmata… brandishes a religious foghorn.
The third, unintentional achievement, was to bring into focus what I find particularly pernicious about LLMs: I get a visceral reaction, revulsion, to its common turns of phrase. Is this not a good thing, you ask? After all, it kept me off Xitter and most of Substack, which are now inundated with computer-generated text. But no, the revulsion is there even in texts written years ago: this has to be AI, I say to myself, only to see that the article was from 2018. Much like Dick’s protagonists who keep questioning their reality and see the Eldritch stigmata in everyone and everyhing, even themselves, long after exposure to the transcendental drug which is the book’s McGuffin, I have overcalibratted my bullshit detector to find fault in the most innocuous turns of phrase.
Worst of all: am I myself now writing things that someone will mistake for AI — instead of human — slop?