"He offered to sell them the secret of eternal life. All he asked in return was their souls"
I don't know if it's worth me doing a review of this, as there are so many already on the web. This is a reasonable one:
http://www.philipkdick.com/ttsopa.htm
"Earth is ceasing to become our natural world, and certainly this will never be."
Earth is searing under the heat of the Sun. Colonists on the other planets live a meagre existence in hovels. They escape using the drug Can-D and become the teenager Perky Pat and her boyfriend Walt.
I read it because I wanted to read more about the idea of mass hallucinations. Firstly, I'm currently in a Star Trek role-playing game simulation where the whole ship has had one, and secondly, I wanted to see how it compared with the ideas in 'The Matrix', which everyone believes, is groundbreaking, but in fact, it just took interesting ideas and reused them.
I can see why it was thought to be blasphemous. It is. They find God by taking a drug called Chew-Z.
I realised after a chapter or two into this story that I had read it before, but I couldn't remember the ending. Maybe I only read the short story before, 'The Days of Perky Pat', from which the 'The Three Stigmata of Eldritch Palmer' was expanded.
There is a good essay by PKD about how he came to write them here:
http://www.philipkdick.com/pkdweb/The Days Of Perky Pat.htm
I was interested in the Precogs, because they could see a murder committed in the future, an idea he used in 'The Minority Report', although here they see different alternative futures, each with it's own probability of occurring. The picture he paints of Earth is very like that of 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep'.
I found the idea of forced evolution bad science, but if they called it something else then the genetic engineering that could make it work would probably be possible in the near future.
Weird.
I don't know if it's worth me doing a review of this, as there are so many already on the web. This is a reasonable one:
http://www.philipkdick.com/ttsopa.htm
"Earth is ceasing to become our natural world, and certainly this will never be."
Earth is searing under the heat of the Sun. Colonists on the other planets live a meagre existence in hovels. They escape using the drug Can-D and become the teenager Perky Pat and her boyfriend Walt.
I read it because I wanted to read more about the idea of mass hallucinations. Firstly, I'm currently in a Star Trek role-playing game simulation where the whole ship has had one, and secondly, I wanted to see how it compared with the ideas in 'The Matrix', which everyone believes, is groundbreaking, but in fact, it just took interesting ideas and reused them.
I can see why it was thought to be blasphemous. It is. They find God by taking a drug called Chew-Z.
I realised after a chapter or two into this story that I had read it before, but I couldn't remember the ending. Maybe I only read the short story before, 'The Days of Perky Pat', from which the 'The Three Stigmata of Eldritch Palmer' was expanded.
There is a good essay by PKD about how he came to write them here:
http://www.philipkdick.com/pkdweb/The Days Of Perky Pat.htm
I was interested in the Precogs, because they could see a murder committed in the future, an idea he used in 'The Minority Report', although here they see different alternative futures, each with it's own probability of occurring. The picture he paints of Earth is very like that of 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep'.
I found the idea of forced evolution bad science, but if they called it something else then the genetic engineering that could make it work would probably be possible in the near future.
Weird.
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