Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch ("Stig") is probably PKD's least read and least appraised five star novel. Man in the High Castle is always mentioned, but in my opinion, "Man..." is the least of his great novels.
There is little need to rank the top PKD novels, yes. However, Three Stigmata had the greatest effect on me. And I was in a peculiar circumstance, reading one PKD novel after another. In total I think I read eight or nine one after the other, over two months.
The circumstances began with my contracting a fatal brain illness. While in Prague, I had contracted Bacterial Meningitis...though I did not know it. It felt like a flu, and I was bedridden for about two weeks. I went out a couple of times, to again wander the streets, and came across a bookstore. The only english copy of PKD available (I had read Man in the High Castle back in 1978, but was a serious fan of Blade Runner) was Ubik. I took it home and read it, though it seemed like my head was full of cotton.
Well, that was a mind-bending book. The night the disease finally overtook my immune system and began to squeeze my brain to death with puss, I was struggling through "Alice through the looking glass".
Well, I got to hospital and all that, came back to the United States and promptly slept for a month...waking only to read PKD novels, or write about my multi channel theory of narrative.
After that month I moved to Houston (into a small 8 apartment complex, which I did not know at the time, was otherwise all heroin addicts...it was 1994), got work and continued to read PKD novels.
The novels that affected me most (perhaps PKD is not the best thing to read when you recovering from Brain damage!) were Now Wait for Last Year, Flow my Tears, and Three Stigmata. I re-read Man in the High Castle.
Through a Scanner Darkly, Do Androids Dream, Radio Free Albemuth, Valis, The Divine Invasion, the Transmigration of Timothy Archer...and then the Bio: Divine Invasions.
Only Three Stigmata and Now Wait qualified as influential as Ubik, though I had to struggle through Ubik. Interesting read while you are dying.
Referring back to my other review of "Zen and the Art...", is the insight regarding a dominant theme in the plot of almost all serious novels; the psychological breakdown...or the disenchantment, rejection, or the alienation from Western "reality" or values.
I was making the point that "Zen and the Art.." had taken this theme, from other novels published over the 20th century, and normalized it, not only by including a rational discussion of how Classicism re-integrates (a theme also developed by Vernant in the great book "Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece"), but by depicting it terms, perhaps at this point, as less the point of the plot.
Well, PKD seems to have taken this idea, this breakaway or breakdown of Western identity and sustained it over entire novels.
In other words, while books like "Portrait of the Artist..." and "Catcher in the Rye", and "Brave New World" and of course, most of the novels of Hermann Hesse, and many others, use this theme to pose the narrator as original and worthy of reading (listening) because their experience provides a outside view.
PKD seems to have taken that "moment", and turned it into an anti-epiphany.
These anti-epiphanies are sustained, indeed, the entire plot, and not just a moment leading up to and then moving away from.
In going so deep and long into this modern literary notion, PKD probably found other elements inside or during the extended anti-epiphany, to then explore further.
Three Stigmata, in particular, seems to be anticipating the "false world" that actually was not such a worry as it has emerged as online games. Of course, I read Three Stigmata before online games, in 1994...and in the text it is mentioned that participants in the disassociation toy, called Perky Pat (a half hearted attempt to mock Barbies perhaps), could be played as if a Massive Multiplayer Online game, via drugs.
"Three Stigmata..." had the edge over "Now Wait..." and "Ubik" due to the stronger narrative foreshadowing of a coming anti Christ. This Anti Christ used drugs to delude and destroy, although, the power enabled by the drug could be used against the monster as he flew from the outer solar system, heading toward Earth.
This was stronger though not unsimilar to "Ubik's" plot element of escaping from some hallucination...or is a hallucination?
This theme is termed a "false reality" in the wiki article. Yet, I have found, and PKD would probably be more affirmative, that the old German myth of "the double" or doppleganger, is he best measure of all of PKD's work.
For rather than "false realities" Dick seems to be making the point that there is a fundamental reality and from that we can only grasp tokens, or that Reality is a Mint from which each of us only gets one coin.
This has a hyper-Individual, anarchic disreality, disapation of community and obfuscation of interpersonal communication...which is terming seems to fit many of the dramas throughout PKD's novels.
One can almost dismiss them as overwritten episodes of Three's Company, but then so many dramas are subsumed into Three's Company theme of miscommunication!
"Three Stigmata..." emerges as the most memorable (I think it was the fifth novel I read in that series) to me, because it depicts the "Monster", and really a brilliant elaboration of the Doppleganger into a anti-epiphany.
There is much similar, in exclusion (as far as I have read) between "Now Wait...", "Three Stimata..." and "Ubi".
All three propose a non real space as a real place.
After reading these most demented yes insightful books, I then turned to Charles Bukowski! As I was living among the low, Bukowski is quite a difference in tone. PKD could be described as contrasting colors of Orange and Blue, Yellow and Purple, Red and Green, while Bukowski is a series of shades of Brown and Grey.
Indeed, the book covers match this sense.
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