Review of 'FIVE GREAT NOVELS: THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH/ MARTIAN TIME-SLIP....ET AL.' on 'Goodreads'
1 star
I've decided that while I'm a fan of PDK's short stories, I'm not at all a fan of his longer works, which are mostly grab-bag collections of futurism ideas held together in a disjointed psychedelic mindscape to hide the fact that there's little substance and no cohesion to the plot.
This book is a particularly unhinged fever dream, and deeply mired in the overt teen-aged sexism of SF before the impact of the New Wave, both of which equally turned me off. A large portion of it seems to be Dick wrestling with his own scattered, ever-evolving view of religion and transhumanism at the time, in a bridge from his early work to the more-coherent A Scanner Darkly, and thus characters are mere mouthpieces or audience. The writing also did it no favors, always pedestrian to the point of boredom. Every time something interesting started to happen, another dull …
I've decided that while I'm a fan of PDK's short stories, I'm not at all a fan of his longer works, which are mostly grab-bag collections of futurism ideas held together in a disjointed psychedelic mindscape to hide the fact that there's little substance and no cohesion to the plot.
This book is a particularly unhinged fever dream, and deeply mired in the overt teen-aged sexism of SF before the impact of the New Wave, both of which equally turned me off. A large portion of it seems to be Dick wrestling with his own scattered, ever-evolving view of religion and transhumanism at the time, in a bridge from his early work to the more-coherent A Scanner Darkly, and thus characters are mere mouthpieces or audience. The writing also did it no favors, always pedestrian to the point of boredom. Every time something interesting started to happen, another dull monologue would commence.
Multiple times, I fell asleep reading the book, and each time the dreams it induced were far more interesting than what I came back to. Savage review, but it did less than nothing for me.