The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is a science fiction novel by the American writer Philip K. Dick, published by Doubleday in 1965 and nominated for the Nebula Award for best novel.

The novel is set in 2016, when the habitable planets have been colonised under United Nations authority and life on Mars is hard enough that the colonists depend on a drug called Can-D, which allows them to share in the fantasy world of the Perky Pat layouts. Into that arrangement comes Palmer Eldritch, a powerful industrialist who has returned from the outer system with a new drug called Chew-Z, which offers something the older one does not. Around him the novel follows two men whose work is tied to the market in these substances: Leo Bulero, who runs the company that makes the layouts, and Barney Mayerson, a precognitive who works for him and has been drafted to Mars. The book is one of Dick's novels about worlds that turn out to have been manufactured.

Dick wrote a great deal in the middle of the 1960s, and this is among the books in which his interest in false reality, religion and the nature of evil is most concentrated.