Man what an awesome book! The only Philip K Dick book that I have read. I am going to read Man In The High Castle Next.
What I liked so much about this book was how compulsively I wanted to read and how it kept going deeper and deeper and deeper into levels of “reality just changed” but it still caught me completely by surprise each time. What a great adventure this book was to read. The skill to be able to write that way and convince people, surprise them, and keep them hooked is amazing. I also liked how throught the story it kept changing from character to character to character. That in itself was a ride.
I agree; it’s a great novel. I’d rank it among the top 5 PKD novels, maybe top three (Ubik and The Man in the High Castle are his best books, in my opinion).
You might want to track down Dick’s short story “The Days of Perky Pat,” which was incorporated into Three Stigmata. In the short story, Perky Pat is essentially just a board game that the colonists take a little too seriously. What Dick did with the story in Three Stigmata (adding the drugs and the shared-hallucination concept) is genius.
I’ve seen a couple biographies/documentaries about him, about how due to possible Schizo or epileptic influences, combined with hallucinogenic drugs, his mind took him to some extreme places, trying to figure out what was real and what was not. one of my favorite quotes ever is one of his:
reality is that which when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away