ED101: The Three Stigmata of Philip K. Dick

What would Philip K. Dick have to say about the strange state of current affairs? Erik Davis has been thinking and writing about the visionary Californian science fiction writer Philip K. Dick since he graduated Yale in the 1980s. In this five-part series on Weirdosphere, Davis will take on one of Dick’s most mind-bending and harrowing books, 1964’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and read it as a prophetic precog flash on our present metacrisis and an oracle to provide a possible answer.

According to Davis, Dick “prophesied what it feels like to be alive right now,” and there’s no better example than his novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch in which transhuman, space-faring billionaires preside over an immiserated population mollified by consumer virtual realities and hallucinogenic drugs. Dick explores with precognitive awareness what a breakdown of consensus reality does to our psychologies and our capacity to organize the world.

Citing Dick’s ability to generate a peculiar sense of verisimilitude, Davis invites this prophetic reading to “allow us to see our own time under a more apocalyptic frame,” which he notes, “we don’t need to work very hard to develop.”

The course consists of five pre-recorded, audio-only lectures, available for self-paced listening, plus one live Q&A with Davis, hosted over Zoom, as a capstone.

The first lecture serves as an introduction to Dick, his personal and psychological trials, and the religious experiences and concerns that started to emerge around the time he wrote this wild, biting, and creepy novel. Subsequent lectures work through the book in 50–60-page increments per week (read Penguin’s Vintage edition if you can). Topics include virtual reality, consumer psychedelics, Barbie dolls, space-faring billionaires, transhuman augmentation, global warming, Mars colonization, the Eucharist, the cosmic “Outside” (H. P. Lovecraft and Olaf Stapledon), the Gnostic demiurge, the bardo, the nature of evil, the genre of horror, and the breakdown of consensus reality.